I’m not sure I understand that. I mean that Patreon works as a paywall-service in a large portion of cases, and that has been the case since their founding. I honestly think that then choosing something that was “most harmful to everyone including themselves” was pure fuckup but a fuckup that was motivated by thinking about their paywall-service perspective (thought not in those words).
I don’t think pledge fraud was widespread or a real problem. I think the sort of people who like paywalls freak out about it.
It’s similar to how the traditional big media companies freaked out (in some ways hurting themselves) over “piracy”. The RIAA had a PR disaster suing random people for sharing a few songs. This is Patreon and the creators who use it as a paywall having that type of moment.
The paywall-focused creators are hypersensitive to freeriding instead of just accepting that some people will freeride. They demanded that Patreon stop the freeriders and didn’t make rational calculations about it. Patreon caved to the stop-the-freeriders paranoia, being willing to drastically increase payment processing fees over this, oblivious to how stupid that would be.
Gratipay actually was an illegal money transmitter, enabled by Balanced Payments, who then shut down rather than admit it, and while Gratipay pivoted after that, they’ve since shut down. Patreon definitely does want to avoid that, so they were aiming to get away from cyclical money flowing around the system. But I suspect it was more just trying to deal with oddities that came up once they started doing some charges off from the 1st of the month, which, again, was a change they made first specifically to address the anti-freerider paranoia from some creators.
