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> Look to Patreon God, this one baffles me. I feel like you could write that website and app with 5-10 skilled employees and a handful more for support and adm

> Look to Patreon God, this one baffles me. I feel like you could write that website and app with 5-10 skilled employees and a handful more for support and administrative overhead, skim your 10% of a good chunk of all Internet microtransactions, and retire early. Then they go and nuke all their goodwill trying to milk every cent they can out of the process[1]. What the fuck? Just make a product people want to use and charge a fair price for it; payment processing with a small blog platform is not rocket science. No part of this requires 60 million dollars and 100+ employees[2]. [1] https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2017/12/08/patreon-fees-controversy/ https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2017/12/08/patreon-fees-con... [2] https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/58231-45 https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/58231-45

arkades 7y ago
There are an awful lot of Patreon users waiting for an alternative. If it’s so easy...
- coldpie 7y ago
  I tried one, called GameWisp, when a creator I support moved over there, but they skipped the "skilled employee" part. My subscription start date was rendered in their web app as "(null)", which doesn't inspire confidence in a payment processor. The creator shortly moved back to Patreon. Sigh.
  - conradfr 7y ago
    Well https://blog.gamewisp.com/gamewisp-is-saying-goodbye-2933df9842af https://blog.gamewisp.com/gamewisp-is-saying-goodbye-2933df9...
- q3k 7y ago
  Unfortunately this suffers from the 'Effective Target Audience: Assholes' effect. It's basically impossible to start a YT or Patreon or Twitter alternative without either accidentally or actively pandering to people who have been kicked out of the main competitor, which mostly happen to be neonazis and/or fascists. As such, most alternatives will immediately have their main pages full of hate speech and nazi propaganda. Even if there is a part of the user base that just wants an alternative to the Big Thing for other reasons, it quickly gets taken over and drowned out. Finally, after some time, the site just gets labeled as 'The Nazi {Patreon, Twitter, ..}' and every member becomes guilty by association, the community is just pure fash, and sometimes even gets dropped by advertisers/payment processors after public outcry. See: voat (full of hate speech, basically a shelter for all banned reddit communities), gab (actively pandering to alt-right), subscribestar (paypal dropped them after public outrage), ... I think the only 'alternative' I've seen not evolve into this is Mastodon, and that's probably because of how openly anti-fascist the first adopters (and developers) were, and because they didn't need to turn any profit.
  - s1artibartfast 7y ago
    I wonder if the same company could silo content to address this effect. Essentially have the same staff support multiple sites with identical backends. One which is child friendly, one racists, one for porn, ect. If creators get flagged too much, they just get bumped to a different silo, but you still take their money.
    - icebraining 7y ago
      People who despise the assholes will still not want to be associated with companies that take their money.
- Kye 7y ago
  Gumroad's CEO showed a demo of their planned membership site feature. https://twitter.com/shl/status/1160923132984623106 https://twitter.com/shl/status/1160923132984623106 You can already do subscription products, but it's not quite enough to replace Patreon. That's about all I need to start nudging my handful of patrons over.
- icebraining 7y ago
  There's https://en.liberapay.com/ https://en.liberapay.com/, https://ko-fi.com/ https://ko-fi.com/ and https://www.buymeacoffee.com/ https://www.buymeacoffee.com/, just from the top of my head. And https://en.tipeee.com/ https://en.tipeee.com/, which I just found.
CydeWeys 7y ago
You're underestimating the abuse, moderation, support, and fraud burden that results from doing so much sheer volume. So that's a lot of support people right there, and those support people will need a fair number of engineers writing the tools they use to do their job.
- egypturnash 7y ago
  YEP. Every site that allows user-generated content has to deal with people who want to make stuff near, or past, the boundaries of what is legal and/or moral. If you move money around then you have to start worrying about people scamming each other, using you as a tax dodge or a laundry, and you have a whole bunch of fun new regulations to comply with regarding that sort of stuff as well. The typical Silicon Valley Disruptor approach is to just wave away all responsibility except the absolute minimum the law compels you to do.

arkades 7y ago

There are an awful lot of Patreon users waiting for an alternative. If it’s so easy...

coldpie 7y ago
I tried one, called GameWisp, when a creator I support moved over there, but they skipped the "skilled employee" part. My subscription start date was rendered in their web app as "(null)", which doesn't inspire confidence in a payment processor. The creator shortly moved back to Patreon. Sigh.
- conradfr 7y ago
  Well https://blog.gamewisp.com/gamewisp-is-saying-goodbye-2933df9842af https://blog.gamewisp.com/gamewisp-is-saying-goodbye-2933df9...
q3k 7y ago
Unfortunately this suffers from the 'Effective Target Audience: Assholes' effect. It's basically impossible to start a YT or Patreon or Twitter alternative without either accidentally or actively pandering to people who have been kicked out of the main competitor, which mostly happen to be neonazis and/or fascists. As such, most alternatives will immediately have their main pages full of hate speech and nazi propaganda. Even if there is a part of the user base that just wants an alternative to the Big Thing for other reasons, it quickly gets taken over and drowned out. Finally, after some time, the site just gets labeled as 'The Nazi {Patreon, Twitter, ..}' and every member becomes guilty by association, the community is just pure fash, and sometimes even gets dropped by advertisers/payment processors after public outcry. See: voat (full of hate speech, basically a shelter for all banned reddit communities), gab (actively pandering to alt-right), subscribestar (paypal dropped them after public outrage), ... I think the only 'alternative' I've seen not evolve into this is Mastodon, and that's probably because of how openly anti-fascist the first adopters (and developers) were, and because they didn't need to turn any profit.
- s1artibartfast 7y ago
  I wonder if the same company could silo content to address this effect. Essentially have the same staff support multiple sites with identical backends. One which is child friendly, one racists, one for porn, ect. If creators get flagged too much, they just get bumped to a different silo, but you still take their money.
  - icebraining 7y ago
    People who despise the assholes will still not want to be associated with companies that take their money.
Kye 7y ago
Gumroad's CEO showed a demo of their planned membership site feature. https://twitter.com/shl/status/1160923132984623106 https://twitter.com/shl/status/1160923132984623106 You can already do subscription products, but it's not quite enough to replace Patreon. That's about all I need to start nudging my handful of patrons over.
icebraining 7y ago
There's https://en.liberapay.com/ https://en.liberapay.com/, https://ko-fi.com/ https://ko-fi.com/ and https://www.buymeacoffee.com/ https://www.buymeacoffee.com/, just from the top of my head. And https://en.tipeee.com/ https://en.tipeee.com/, which I just found.

CydeWeys 7y ago

You're underestimating the abuse, moderation, support, and fraud burden that results from doing so much sheer volume. So that's a lot of support people right there, and those support people will need a fair number of engineers writing the tools they use to do their job.

egypturnash 7y ago
YEP. Every site that allows user-generated content has to deal with people who want to make stuff near, or past, the boundaries of what is legal and/or moral. If you move money around then you have to start worrying about people scamming each other, using you as a tax dodge or a laundry, and you have a whole bunch of fun new regulations to comply with regarding that sort of stuff as well. The typical Silicon Valley Disruptor approach is to just wave away all responsibility except the absolute minimum the law compels you to do.