If only we could say the same about Google or Facebook…
It did take reading your link to realize you meant dealing with the effect, not the cause. Still, I think that’s one of the less likely possibilities since there are multiple solutions to pledge fraud and the one they chose is the one most harmful to everyone including themselves; unbundling pledges eliminates the incentive to use Patreon when multiple alternatives for supporting the creator are offered. I think abandoning that natural monopoly requires a serious crisis.
Though I suppose it could be indirectly that, in that support costs due to pledge fraud could be high enough to justify the change… Somehow. Maybe combined with supporting small-dollar supporters, but how many people donating a dollar for no perk would have a reason to contact support?
There’s speculation (linked to in the other thread) that it’s an attempt to avoid falling under some financial regulations related to being a money transmitter, but I find that far fetched given that they’ve allegedly taken a year to come up with this plan. Also, while there are regulations that can be applied stupidly, I would expect that Patreon being much more than a money transmitter would shield them.
I suppose we’ll find out more eventually; so far all I’ve seen that’s specific enough is the claim that they needed this to “keep the lights on”, but that’s not very specific…
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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.
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Until I read the article, I misread “trying to deal with being actually a promoter of freemium paywall business models” as “trying to eliminate the freemium patreons” not “trying to placate the freemium patreons”.
Still, the problem for Patreon is that basically no matter which problem is the one they’re trying to solve, this was the stupidest solution. About the only way this is justified is if the Treasury had actually warned them that they were in violation and had to either give up their business model or obey the regulations… And even in that case this is the wrong way to go about it. Which means they’re incompetent and untrustworthy in the long term.
…Wait 'til people start doing chargebacks on individual pledges. Won’t that be fun for Patreon and the creators.
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Maybe you’re not familiar with “freemium” or just confusing it with my use of “freerider”.
- freemium: a monetizing model where a product is partly no-charge but has further features or content available for as a premium at a price
- freerider: someone who benefits from a resource without helping to fund it
patrons are not freeriders if they actually chip in. creators are the ones who often (but not always) use a freemium model where they could release the perks content the same as the rest of the free content but they keep it restricted specifically to entice patrons to pay.
this was the stupidest solution
Totally. But people are thinking they were stupid out of greed. Instead, they were stupid because they were blinded by serving the freemium / paywall perk model and focusing on addressing creators’ irrational fears about freeriding.
In short: these stupid decisions were because they aren’t actually embracing full public goods. None of this would have happened if they actually believed in freeing all the value to the world and asking patrons to help fund it. It all happened because they’re actually focused on selling perks.
I’m pretty sure I shouldn’t say anything more, since your explanation make perfect sense to me but that you feel the need to explain in the first place indicates I’m making no sense at all and I have no idea why. Maybe you’re misreading “patreons” as “patrons” instead of “creator’s Patreon-hosted donation-tier-controlled poor-excuse-for-a-blog”?
My only quibble is from what I’ve seen, after the first blog post update people quickly realized it wasn’t greed but stupidity. OK, I have a second quibble in the strength of your assertions, but I’m just naturally uncertain. I mean, you’re right that if there were no perks (and no way for creators to get at the list of their supporters and how much each support was donating to do it themselves), then this would not be an issue… But while I agree they’re not focused on financing public goods, this is still the worst solution to placating freemium creators for Patreon… so I think it likely there’s a completely different issue involved if not dominating their decision making. Or they’re just that stupid. Never bet against stupid.
I may have misread something, and everything you just posted makes sense to me.
I do think there’s a difference between stupid behavior and stupid people. Smart people can engage in stupid behaviors.
In this case, I think the smart folks there acted severely stupidly in part because they have confused themselves in how they talk all the time about all these creators just putting out value into the world and patrons fund them etc. while they really are about restricting some of that value and putting a paywall… well, you got my point. My point now is that when you confuse yourself because your reality and your public messaging are out of alignment, it can make it hard for you to see things clearly and leave you liable to stupidity.
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