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There's one root cause for most, if not all of the things mentioned about Patreon in this post: Jack Conte took VC money. Neophilia is a progressive and incura
by kmeisthax 3y ago
There's one root cause for most, if not all of the things mentioned about Patreon in this post: Jack Conte took VC money.
Neophilia is a progressive and incurable disease of venture capital. VCs aren't looking to build sustainable, profitable businesses. They are looking to buy entire market segments for later enshittification. Your job as a founder of a company asking for VC money is to construct a parallel state around your target market so that you can charge taxes on everyone in that market and that the VCs can sell the entire market to someone else for a huge profit (the "exit").
Jack Conte is very firmly an artist, and not a walking pile of technofeudalist money, so I can't help but look at this as a deal-with-the-devil scenario. Or at the very least, someone desperately trying and failing to keep the money on track. The VCs bought a payment bundler and want to turn it into a merch vendor, website host, etc.
- hbarka 3y agoI wonder when Varoufakis’ introduction of the word technofeudalist got into the techie vernacular.
- notabennett 3y agoYes, and: Patreon is, at its core, a professional services provider for large YouTube artists. That's the segment it's best at supporting and the segment that needs it the most. But its valuation is based on the idea that it's going to capture some percentage of the entire creator economy. I do think there are some specific details about Patreon's history and leadership that make it unusually bad at running an engineering organization, even for a VC-backed startup. It has some deceptively hard engineering problems and has struggled to attract, retain, and use technical leadership equal to those problems.
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