4 ms·

> In what way specifically? Patreon said disputes had to go through arbitration, and couldn't go through class action law suit. Patreon removed a creator. Tha

by DanBC 6y ago

> In what way specifically? Patreon said disputes had to go through arbitration, and couldn't go through class action law suit. Patreon removed a creator. That person's patreons all went to arbitration. Patreon declined the arbitration, and went to court to convert all those individual arbitration cases into one big class action. The court said they couldn't do that, and the reason the court said that was because of the ToS drawn up by Patreon. So now Patreon has to go to arbitration on thousands of cases, and has to pay the fees. The fees bill is a couple of million dollars.

paulcole 6y ago
Facebook paid the Winklevoss twins like $50 million. Had they gone to a lawyer on day 1 and asked what to do the advice would've likely been, "don't steal their idea." Get big enough and then use somebody else's money to pay off your multimillion dollar mistakes. Or go out of business and it won't matter anyway.
- strgcmc 6y ago
  The trick is getting big enough and keeping the mistakes small enough. What if $50 million was enough to bankrupt/kill Facebook? A risk that has a 1% chance of wiping out 100% of your company, vs a risk that a 10% of chance of costing you 10% of your company, are not the same even though the net "expected value" is nominally 1% for both.
  - paulcole 6y ago
    > What if $50 million was enough to bankrupt/kill Facebook? If if's and but's were candy and nuts then we'd all have a merry christmas. If $50 million could bankrupt FB then the Winklevoss twins would have never got that much.
blahbhthrow3748 6y ago
Drowning companies with mandatory binding arbitration claims is a relatively new tactic - when the ToS was written arbitration was favored because it had better outcomes for the companies writing the ToS. It's unlikely Patreon's lawyers could have predicted this very common contract provision would backfire.

by DanBC 6y ago

paulcole 6y ago

Facebook paid the Winklevoss twins like $50 million. Had they gone to a lawyer on day 1 and asked what to do the advice would've likely been, "don't steal their idea." Get big enough and then use somebody else's money to pay off your multimillion dollar mistakes. Or go out of business and it won't matter anyway.

strgcmc 6y ago
The trick is getting big enough and keeping the mistakes small enough. What if $50 million was enough to bankrupt/kill Facebook? A risk that has a 1% chance of wiping out 100% of your company, vs a risk that a 10% of chance of costing you 10% of your company, are not the same even though the net "expected value" is nominally 1% for both.
- paulcole 6y ago
  > What if $50 million was enough to bankrupt/kill Facebook? If if's and but's were candy and nuts then we'd all have a merry christmas. If $50 million could bankrupt FB then the Winklevoss twins would have never got that much.

blahbhthrow3748 6y ago

Drowning companies with mandatory binding arbitration claims is a relatively new tactic - when the ToS was written arbitration was favored because it had better outcomes for the companies writing the ToS. It's unlikely Patreon's lawyers could have predicted this very common contract provision would backfire.