Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2017/12/13/patreon-decides-not-to-change.html
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It seems like this should 100% go without saying and shouldn’t have to be learned this way, but it’s nice that they figured it out.
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If they’d responded to the backlash quicker by saying they were at least reconsidering, creators wouldn’t have lost as many supporters they now have to work to get back because of Patreon’s hamfisted decisions.
Better than nothing though.
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“Everything will stay the way it is” except for thousands of lost patrons and income for existing site users.
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Although their initial responses weren’t great, it’s nice to see an actual apology and them taking the blame for lost business. So many posts here are about fake apologies.
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Hopefully they will roll out a tool to let creators easily contact recent unsubscribers. As long as they didn’t delete their accounts it shouldn’t be that hard.
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This is the money quote. Literally. Creators should be able to decide (within reason) how they want to collect pledges.
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well, i was disappointed when i saw their proposed changes, but heartened by this full and genuine sounding backtrack. one wonder’s how they didn’t realise the folly from the start, perhaps greed just got to be such a strong motivator, but i wish all companies could recede from damaging plans after public discussion like this, credit where credit’s due.
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I agree. It does suck that they have done financial damage to creators on the site, but i hope it’s not irreversible given enough time. They owned up to their bad decision on the matter, i don’t know whether to take that at face value or not, but at the very least we can celebrate that things will go back to how they were and i hope if they were to do a change in the future they will explore their options more thoughtfully and carefully.
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I have no inside information, but I suspect they lost way more low level pledges than they ever expected, and that they received more backlash from really big Patreon uses who they didn’t realize loved ALL their patrons equally no matter how much they pledged.
If any system should take actual human feelings into account, it’s Patreon!
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Man, what business school did they flunk out of? They’re supposed to stick to their guns. At a bare minimum, change the fees back when nobody is looking, and then deny it ever happened. But an apology?
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I only pledge small amounts to half a dozen creators via patreon, so I wasn’t as negatively impacted as someone who had 100 pledges for $1-2 each. That being said, I will keep a watchful eye on them to see if they truly intend to walk the walk; I’d much rather donate directly to a maker, rather than have to deal with someone scraping off the top. Patreon’s main attraction was being able to give small amounts on a regular basis.
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Troubled as I was by the news, I couldn’t really be bothered to go digging into my Patreon account to unsubscribe (especially as I anticipated such a reversal was likely).
It seems to me the whole operation is surely reliant on those who set up a monthly pledge and then can’t be bothered to keep track of exactly who they’re supporting.
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I’m only supporting a single person, and i was very tempted to bail on the platform but i also figured they’d reverse course considering how vocal the community was about the changes. Still i got pretty close to giving up on the platform… for the time being i will continue to make my monthly donations but i’m still undecided if i want to stay on board or not.
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It sucks that a bunch of creators lost some revenue. But the apology and rolling back the planned change do account for something. I have really liked patreon in the past. I like the flexibility and control it gives you over your money. However, this change did blow away a lot of my trust. Over time, I hope they can win it back, because I want to like them.
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Ohhhh you.
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Too late. I closed my Patreon supporter account, switched to http://liberapay.com, and I’m not looking back. Patreon has shown that using a middleman without a contract in the biz world is just too dangerous for both creators and supporter. I’m switching to a middleman that’s open source, because at least then if the contract goes sour, both sides have a recourse.
Patreon betrayed trust, and this apology doesn’t really restore it because there’s no new plan. There’s just the admission of a mistake and a new plan to do something else…which may or may not be any good, either.
No thanks, Patreon.
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I hope things don’t stay the same. I hope this moves people to alternatives like librepay. It’s total BS that this is against their core values. Rather they’re scrambling to keep or regain people. Mark my words, they are not sorry for this decision or how it was made. They’re sorry it didn’t work. I’ll concede they might spend more time in the future guessing the reaction but that’s what will change.
This “incident” made a lots of creators realise they maybe don’t need a middleman like paetron.
This thread is interesting :
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Thanks, I didn’t knew Liberapay, I will look it up later.
