They “had to” do nothing of the sort, frankly. There were and are plenty of solutions to “people are confused about first-month billing” and “people are pledging and stealing content by canceling before the first month is up” that don’t involve fucking over small donors or pissing off literally every single person who uses the platform. They chose to address this issue in the most ham-fisted way by increasing the overall complexity and cost of the payment for patrons (because now not only are you getting charged transaction fees for every pledge, but your pledges are billed whenever the heck you happened to initiate one, rather than all at the same time in an easily-manageable block) while expecting creators to happily spew corporate-approved bullshit about how great it is that people are going to be charged a hell of a lot more for providing the same amount of support.
Patreon approached their “solution” with a critical misunderstanding of the fragility of people’s trust in their platform and the tight-knit community nature of the vast majority of small-time creators and their supporters. Patreon assumed that creators saw their supporters as little more than a revenue stream, when in fact creators are overwhelmingly protective of their patrons because they know how hard it is to get them and how easy it is to lose them. Patreon was further supremely misinformed by their own flawed surveying tools about how both patrons and creators view the application of fees, and whose responsibility it is to pay them. They went out of their way to expressly state that there is no way for creators to choose to shoulder these increased fees. Creators, meanwhile, seem to widely recognize that 95% of $0.67 (a $1 pledge less transaction fee) is still better than 95% of $0, and they have been openly demanding an explanation for why they can’t do so if it would mean keeping supporters (understandably) turned off by a huge increase in the overhead of their pledge - particularly one that they have to subsidize.
I’m not sure how long it takes for anecdotes to become data, but my timeline and every single tweet on Patreon’s announcement has been full of people saying they’re going to have to cut back their $5, $10, or $20 small donations because the fees will destroy their budget. Crawling through patronage chains just from the five people I pledge to, those who indicate that they support anyone else overwhelmingly support at least 3 people. I would be extremely surprised if the majority of people pledging more than $5 or $10 to a creator are supporting more than a couple at a time, but $1 donors? Based on everything I’ve seen both before and after this shitstorm, they absolutely do.
I’m not going to argue that point, because you’re right, merchant fees are fairly ridiculous. But every “we need microtransactions to fund online content” bandwagon in the history of the internet has focused on how to get around the fact that merchant fees for tiny transactions make such a business model impossible, and Patreon fixed that problem by allowing people to bundle a bunch of small donations into a single payment. Now they’re hell-bent on re-breaking it because they can’t figure out how to explain to someone that they get billed at the start of the god damn month!
Their new fee and billing structure disincentivizes spreading money around to the widest possibly number of people, and instead encourages larger donations to a smaller pool of recipients. This will almost certainly have the result of increasing the amount of money Patreon makes from their 5% cut of pledges because it’s easy to swamp out the exodus of $1 donors, but it comes at the expense of the creator community as a whole as current patrons have to pick and choose who to cut off in order to stay within their budget. Over the past 24 hours there has been a massive exodus of pledges from both small and large operations alike - literally hundreds of dollars overnight in some cases. Patreon may think that this will eventually balance out in the long term and we’ll all wonder why there was ever any fuss to begin with, but in the meantime small creators who rely on their patreon accounts to buy food are suddenly having to take a long hard look at whether they’ll be able to do so in January.
