9 ms·

Not to mention the fact that the product is objectively terrible. It’s unbelievable how slow Patreon is, given that “website that shows images” is a well-solve

by irq11 8y ago

Not to mention the fact that the product is objectively terrible. It’s unbelievable how slow Patreon is, given that “website that shows images” is a well-solved problem. Couple that with the all-dynamic-all-the-time, continuous-scroll-all-the-things UX, and it’s one of the worst websites I use. There must be serious network effects, if nobody has risen to eat their lunch.

seanieb 8y ago
Complaining that their service is terrible while also complaining that they are trying to generate more money to further invest in that service....riiiighhht!
- sitkack 8y ago
  It isn't linear, they could have spent less to have a more usable service. Just look at the self inflicted mess that is AirBNB, the front end basically crashes if you type too fast on a slow connection. The complaint is about forced inefficiencies that Patreon then foists onto its customers. They are balancing their books by upping their fees, not streamlining their business and they can only do this (in the short term) because they have a fairly captive audience. We are about to see a whole sea of Patreon competitors.
  - stcredzero 8y ago
    We are about to see a whole sea of Patreon competitors. I really hope so! I had been using Patreon as a "poor man's microtransactions" with $1 subscriptions (contingent on actually producing content, if possible) on something like 40 creators. I moved over to SubscribeStar, but they don't have the default $1 option.
    - tedmcory77 8y ago
      The default cost of a transaction is typically ~$.30 cents. Thats just payment processing. Not alot of margin there.
      - stcredzero 8y ago
        The default cost of a transaction is typically ~$.30 cents. Thats just payment processing. Not alot of margin there. A web app could aggregate charges to me, and aggregate payments out to content creators. Obviously. That's what Patreon was doing. Others could do it too. (If the allegations of collusion with payment processing are true, this would explain why this isn't done more.)
      - stefan_ 8y ago
        He has $40 subscriptions and presumably none of the creators only have his $1 subscription. At no point are they actually eating the fixed cost on a $1 transaction.
        stcredzero 8y ago
        Actually, while Patreon did such aggregation, SubscribeStar seems to do each transaction individually. I wonder if they aren't over a barrel because insiders in the payment processing industry are locking them out.
- manigandham 8y ago
  Poorly spending money is not a good justification for getting more money.
- Kye 8y ago
  They actually make it worse with every revision. This isn't a matter of not having enough money. Even their badge to put on websites blasts megabytes of analytics script at you to display a tiny image.
- trowawee 8y ago
  They have a staff of 90 engineers already out of an overall headcount of ~300. Performantly serving text and images to a userbase of 2 million users/month is not a wild expectation. it's barely even table stakes. And if you fail at that, despite employing 90 engineers, why should anyone trust you when you claim that taking more money out of their pockets will somehow turn that around?
rjbwork 8y ago
There are a couple, but they've been squeezed out by those who see them as dealing with undesirable content creators. I forget the name, but one of them just got some alternate payment processor that steps around the whole credit card company/stripe/paypal monopoly somehow.
stcredzero 8y ago
There must be serious network effects, if nobody has risen to eat their lunch. YouTuberLaw was working on a complaint to the FTC. There was allegedly some sort of collusion against their competitor SubscribeStar during a recent controversy, where SubscribeStar suddenly lost their payment processing. During that event, people were trying to unsubscribe so they could delete their accounts, but Patreon was removing the pages with the unsubscribe control! (Looked like incompetence, not malice to me.) Based on what I've seen Jack Conte and other Patreon people say online, I don't think the officers of the company have very good control over what employees are actually doing. They actively contradict each other at times.
- josteink 8y ago
  > There was allegedly some sort of collusion against their competitor SubscribeStar during a recent controversy A “controversial” Patreon-account was banned over content not posted on Patreon. A Patreon-representative leaked in a tweet that this was done on the request of MasterCard and that there was nothing they could do. As a result he moved to SubscribeStar and asked his followers to move over (which seemed to work). Now this is where things get interesting... SubscribeStar uses PayPal for payment processing. A former paypaler moved to patreon. This person may have called some contacts/favors, because SubscribeStar suddenly found their entire PayPal account locked down and no longer received any payments from or for any accounts. Their business was effectively dead. It’s not a smoking gun, but certainly enough to cause warranted speculation. At best it’s PayPal not having good routines (and we know that already, right?), at worst it’s companies like MasterCard now policing what kind of internet-business or internet-content they will allow to be profitable, globally, unchallenged. Either way, the situation leaves a lot to be desired. Edit: This was actually discussed on HN until flagged (like too many interesting discussions). All I can find now is this link: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2018/08/patreon-and-mastercard-ban-robert-spencer-without-explanation https://www.jihadwatch.org/2018/08/patreon-and-mastercard-ba...
  - stcredzero 8y ago
    A “controversial” Patreon-account was banned over content not posted on Patreon. To be fair, he does try to be controversial, and he says some hair-raising things. Basically, imagine that you went into a den of literal neo-Nazis, and you were trying your best to say things to shock and insult them. I don't think that's very smart of him to do. Edit: This was actually discussed on HN until flagged (like too many interesting discussions). This does seem to be a pattern around here of late. There's a lot of pushing of narratives all across the Internet, which amount to "this person is [something horrible] don't even read their material." Much of that is false. At the same time there are genuine [something horrible] going around in much larger numbers in the past few years than the decades before. I think the real target is rational discourse itself.
Applejinx 8y ago
That's not the product, and you're not the customer. If you ever have to go to the Patreon website after having become a patron to your desired creator, you're doing something wrong or they are. There is no reason in the world you should be leaning on patreon to serve content. You're the patron, your creator is your content maker who should be using other means to communicate the content to you (youtube? other web hosting? soundcloud? There are many ways, I use all of those) and your pledge is the product: the creator is the customer, not you. I truly don't care how silly the website is when they pay me my revenue like clockwork without issue. Patreon is not a web hosting service. Patreon collects subscriptions from patrons and manages that stuff, as well as anything else I've used.
- manigandham 8y ago
  The people paying the money are always the customers. Creators get to use Patreon as a tool for showcasing and delivering content and reward. This is a core part of the platform and why both sides use Patreon in the first place. In fact this whole story is about them raising rates to provide more "services" on top like selling merchandise. If all they're doing is collecting and forwarding money then they're one of the most poorly run businesses and massively overbuilt even with their subpar product.
- irq11 8y ago
  Patreon is the gateway for content. It has to be, or it doesn’t work. If I subscribe to a creator, then one of the first things I want to do is go through that creator’s content. Patreon makes this exceedingly painful. Sending you the money is the niche use-case. Viewing the content is core to the UX of most Patreon users.
  - Applejinx 8y ago
    You've got it completely backwards. You would never, ever subscribe to a creator unless you're already completely familiar with their content. I'm one of the top-paid creators on Patreon and every pledge is like pulling teeth, just as demanding as selling people stuff out there in the 'real world' in the traditional sell-content model. The difference is, on Patreon I can also give the content away to all and sundry, open-source it, and spend zero time or attention trying to police the digital copying of it. People only being interested in Patreon as a mechanism to send me the money is 99% of my entire userbase, and everybody else's that has a significant revenue from Patreon. That mechanism is NOT as easy or trivial as people make it out to be on Hacker News, and I value it. But you've got it totally backwards, and your type of expectation is what's damaging Patreon and getting them to have dozens of managers and marketing staff. A lot of that headcount is about getting them to do the unwanted, unneccesary and unhelpful.
danShumway 8y ago
> There must be serious network effects, if nobody has risen to eat their lunch. Anecdotally, I agree with this. Getting people to donate to stuff is hard. If they have to sign up for a brand new service and share payment information with them to do it, they won't do it. So as a creator, you're incentivized to put proportional amounts of work into proportional platforms. As a user, part of the point of Patreon is to more efficiently distribute micro-payments. There really aren't any good ways to do micro-payments online. Pretty much everything either has fixed fees that make donations of <1$ incredibly inefficient, or it's just a pain to support. So as a user, you're highly incentivized to group as much of your donations as possible onto a single platform so they can be batch processed. If there was a universal, protocol-based way to send someone micro-payments online that didn't come with any fees, I don't believe Patreon would be able to continue existing. It would be so easy for anyone to outcompete them on everything else. But I dunno how close we are to something like that. Even in a magic world where bitcoin becomes stable, cryptocurrency still wouldn't solve that problem -- you still have fees associated with payments that make it advantageous to group payments together. Zelle? Maybe? There was an article a while back about cities starting to ban cashless stores, and while I'm normally fairly libertarian, I looked at that and thought, "wow, we should probably have at least one nationalized digital payment system."

by irq11 8y ago

seanieb 8y ago

Complaining that their service is terrible while also complaining that they are trying to generate more money to further invest in that service....riiiighhht!

sitkack 8y ago
It isn't linear, they could have spent less to have a more usable service. Just look at the self inflicted mess that is AirBNB, the front end basically crashes if you type too fast on a slow connection. The complaint is about forced inefficiencies that Patreon then foists onto its customers. They are balancing their books by upping their fees, not streamlining their business and they can only do this (in the short term) because they have a fairly captive audience. We are about to see a whole sea of Patreon competitors.
- stcredzero 8y ago
  We are about to see a whole sea of Patreon competitors. I really hope so! I had been using Patreon as a "poor man's microtransactions" with $1 subscriptions (contingent on actually producing content, if possible) on something like 40 creators. I moved over to SubscribeStar, but they don't have the default $1 option.
  - tedmcory77 8y ago
    The default cost of a transaction is typically ~$.30 cents. Thats just payment processing. Not alot of margin there.
    - stcredzero 8y ago
      The default cost of a transaction is typically ~$.30 cents. Thats just payment processing. Not alot of margin there. A web app could aggregate charges to me, and aggregate payments out to content creators. Obviously. That's what Patreon was doing. Others could do it too. (If the allegations of collusion with payment processing are true, this would explain why this isn't done more.)
    - stefan_ 8y ago
      He has $40 subscriptions and presumably none of the creators only have his $1 subscription. At no point are they actually eating the fixed cost on a $1 transaction.
      - stcredzero 8y ago
        Actually, while Patreon did such aggregation, SubscribeStar seems to do each transaction individually. I wonder if they aren't over a barrel because insiders in the payment processing industry are locking them out.
manigandham 8y ago
Poorly spending money is not a good justification for getting more money.
Kye 8y ago
They actually make it worse with every revision. This isn't a matter of not having enough money. Even their badge to put on websites blasts megabytes of analytics script at you to display a tiny image.
trowawee 8y ago
They have a staff of 90 engineers already out of an overall headcount of ~300. Performantly serving text and images to a userbase of 2 million users/month is not a wild expectation. it's barely even table stakes. And if you fail at that, despite employing 90 engineers, why should anyone trust you when you claim that taking more money out of their pockets will somehow turn that around?

rjbwork 8y ago

There are a couple, but they've been squeezed out by those who see them as dealing with undesirable content creators. I forget the name, but one of them just got some alternate payment processor that steps around the whole credit card company/stripe/paypal monopoly somehow.

stcredzero 8y ago

There must be serious network effects, if nobody has risen to eat their lunch. YouTuberLaw was working on a complaint to the FTC. There was allegedly some sort of collusion against their competitor SubscribeStar during a recent controversy, where SubscribeStar suddenly lost their payment processing. During that event, people were trying to unsubscribe so they could delete their accounts, but Patreon was removing the pages with the unsubscribe control! (Looked like incompetence, not malice to me.) Based on what I've seen Jack Conte and other Patreon people say online, I don't think the officers of the company have very good control over what employees are actually doing. They actively contradict each other at times.

josteink 8y ago
> There was allegedly some sort of collusion against their competitor SubscribeStar during a recent controversy A “controversial” Patreon-account was banned over content not posted on Patreon. A Patreon-representative leaked in a tweet that this was done on the request of MasterCard and that there was nothing they could do. As a result he moved to SubscribeStar and asked his followers to move over (which seemed to work). Now this is where things get interesting... SubscribeStar uses PayPal for payment processing. A former paypaler moved to patreon. This person may have called some contacts/favors, because SubscribeStar suddenly found their entire PayPal account locked down and no longer received any payments from or for any accounts. Their business was effectively dead. It’s not a smoking gun, but certainly enough to cause warranted speculation. At best it’s PayPal not having good routines (and we know that already, right?), at worst it’s companies like MasterCard now policing what kind of internet-business or internet-content they will allow to be profitable, globally, unchallenged. Either way, the situation leaves a lot to be desired. Edit: This was actually discussed on HN until flagged (like too many interesting discussions). All I can find now is this link: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2018/08/patreon-and-mastercard-ban-robert-spencer-without-explanation https://www.jihadwatch.org/2018/08/patreon-and-mastercard-ba...
- stcredzero 8y ago
  A “controversial” Patreon-account was banned over content not posted on Patreon. To be fair, he does try to be controversial, and he says some hair-raising things. Basically, imagine that you went into a den of literal neo-Nazis, and you were trying your best to say things to shock and insult them. I don't think that's very smart of him to do. Edit: This was actually discussed on HN until flagged (like too many interesting discussions). This does seem to be a pattern around here of late. There's a lot of pushing of narratives all across the Internet, which amount to "this person is [something horrible] don't even read their material." Much of that is false. At the same time there are genuine [something horrible] going around in much larger numbers in the past few years than the decades before. I think the real target is rational discourse itself.

Applejinx 8y ago

That's not the product, and you're not the customer. If you ever have to go to the Patreon website after having become a patron to your desired creator, you're doing something wrong or they are. There is no reason in the world you should be leaning on patreon to serve content. You're the patron, your creator is your content maker who should be using other means to communicate the content to you (youtube? other web hosting? soundcloud? There are many ways, I use all of those) and your pledge is the product: the creator is the customer, not you. I truly don't care how silly the website is when they pay me my revenue like clockwork without issue. Patreon is not a web hosting service. Patreon collects subscriptions from patrons and manages that stuff, as well as anything else I've used.

manigandham 8y ago
The people paying the money are always the customers. Creators get to use Patreon as a tool for showcasing and delivering content and reward. This is a core part of the platform and why both sides use Patreon in the first place. In fact this whole story is about them raising rates to provide more "services" on top like selling merchandise. If all they're doing is collecting and forwarding money then they're one of the most poorly run businesses and massively overbuilt even with their subpar product.
irq11 8y ago
Patreon is the gateway for content. It has to be, or it doesn’t work. If I subscribe to a creator, then one of the first things I want to do is go through that creator’s content. Patreon makes this exceedingly painful. Sending you the money is the niche use-case. Viewing the content is core to the UX of most Patreon users.
- Applejinx 8y ago
  You've got it completely backwards. You would never, ever subscribe to a creator unless you're already completely familiar with their content. I'm one of the top-paid creators on Patreon and every pledge is like pulling teeth, just as demanding as selling people stuff out there in the 'real world' in the traditional sell-content model. The difference is, on Patreon I can also give the content away to all and sundry, open-source it, and spend zero time or attention trying to police the digital copying of it. People only being interested in Patreon as a mechanism to send me the money is 99% of my entire userbase, and everybody else's that has a significant revenue from Patreon. That mechanism is NOT as easy or trivial as people make it out to be on Hacker News, and I value it. But you've got it totally backwards, and your type of expectation is what's damaging Patreon and getting them to have dozens of managers and marketing staff. A lot of that headcount is about getting them to do the unwanted, unneccesary and unhelpful.

danShumway 8y ago

> There must be serious network effects, if nobody has risen to eat their lunch. Anecdotally, I agree with this. Getting people to donate to stuff is hard. If they have to sign up for a brand new service and share payment information with them to do it, they won't do it. So as a creator, you're incentivized to put proportional amounts of work into proportional platforms. As a user, part of the point of Patreon is to more efficiently distribute micro-payments. There really aren't any good ways to do micro-payments online. Pretty much everything either has fixed fees that make donations of <1$ incredibly inefficient, or it's just a pain to support. So as a user, you're highly incentivized to group as much of your donations as possible onto a single platform so they can be batch processed. If there was a universal, protocol-based way to send someone micro-payments online that didn't come with any fees, I don't believe Patreon would be able to continue existing. It would be so easy for anyone to outcompete them on everything else. But I dunno how close we are to something like that. Even in a magic world where bitcoin becomes stable, cryptocurrency still wouldn't solve that problem -- you still have fees associated with payments that make it advantageous to group payments together. Zelle? Maybe? There was an article a while back about cities starting to ban cashless stores, and while I'm normally fairly libertarian, I looked at that and thought, "wow, we should probably have at least one nationalized digital payment system."