Feedback on "Responding to Your Feedback, etc. (October 2021)"

Patreon Feedback
21

I told me so.

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22

Fortunately, Iā€™ve had a lot of follow through on shifting people to a different platform, so you go ahead and do whatever you are going to do, Patreon. Youā€™ve made it more than clear that, for creators like me, you arenā€™t really interested. Thatā€™s cool. Iā€™m sure you have your reasons whether they are as stated or not. It doesnā€™t really matter, youā€™re now more of an annoyance than a service to me.

Toodle pip.

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23

There are just too many channels on the Discord. My brain short circuits any time I try to browse through them. I had to mute all of them just to avoid tens of unread count badges with numbers in the hundreds or thousands each, and I still have to skip over thousands of posts and walk back a bit to see what people are talking about at any given time.

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24

Yeah, same here, unfortunately. Iā€™m not sure what the problem was with something more ā€œpermanentā€ and slower paced, like a good old fashioned traditional forum.

Oh well. See yā€™all on the other side. Good luck out there!

Brian

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25

Very disappointing to hear this. Discord is great for social interactions and general community building. But I donā€™t have the time to scour through discord channels clogged with misc info for what bit of information that I might need, or to get full context on one out of two conversations that might be going on to try and make my own voice heard. A forum lets me easily get a grasp on what conversation goes on just from glancing at the thread titles. And I canā€™t imagine itā€™s particularly easy for the community managers to scroll back and forth on Discord to reply to people for one conversation while another one is going on? Itā€™s super chaotic to read at least, with no red thread half of the time.

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26

Feedback on Forums Shutdown

+1 / Agree with what others have said about the usefulness of threaded conversations.

Sometimes Patreon employees on particular features would pop into threads to see what was going on when there were bugs (which is doable, but much harder in discord). Plus, an issue having lots of replies to something showed it was important to the community. Maybe the forums arenā€™t so vital for creator<->creator communication, but they did seem helpful for creator<->patreon communication (I got at least one major bug solved through them, and even on this topic, I was able to read through Patreonā€™s perspective which helped).

Our Customer Happiness team offers a robust help center, 1:1 email support

Oh god, just try asking any API related question to support, lol. Though I am grateful that at least the API forum isnā€™t going away (that would be really problematic given the lack of useful discord search), even if it would be much better for Patreon engineers to be active in there again. Similarly, there are some API threads here on this board, so it would be best to make sure the forums at least stays in read-only mode since thereā€™s some knowledge here that isnā€™t anywhere else.

Anyway, the main reasons I have been inactive in the forums is:

  1. I stopped getting weekly e-mail digests at some point (maybe I toggled them off since they werenā€™t always relevant? Or maybe my settings werenā€™t ported over when it started using Patreonā€™s account system. Not sure), and
  2. I just havenā€™t had any new problems with Patreon lately to complain about (which is a good thing! :wink: ).

Regarding the new feedback system

Iā€™ve resubmitted my old issues via the new system.

  • I had to disable uBlock Origin in order to do it. Patreon in particular seems to have a metric ton of trackers, so I donā€™t really like this =\ I had to get cookies/JS trackers from doubleclick, twitter ads, reddit, tiktok (wtf, lol), etc just to submit a text form. Not thrilled even tiktok is now tracking me, ugh.
  • As a user experience, it definitely feels like itā€™s submitting feedback into the void. Thereā€™s no visible tracking of issues, or other people being able to +1 them, or add their own thoughts. With a lack of human responsiveness, it is difficult for me to imagine me using this system frequently.

I guess to summarize, I am open to trying new methods and I sympathize with the problems the forum did have (mainly inactivity), but this solution seems a marked step down IMO. FWIW, I do appreciate Patreon staff trying to solve it and improve things. Just donā€™t think this is the solution in this case. :slight_smile:

Suggestion on suggestions

Stuff like uservoice is an option, but it doesnā€™t allow for much robust discussion on suggestions. In particular, it has the problem where it seems kinda fixed to the original post instead of allowing more people to weigh in and give feedback (staff has to make one official reply to all posts in a uservoice thread). The current forum is really good at that, letting staff hop in at various points in a discussion.

So rather than ditching the current forum, Iā€™d prefer to see it reframed as primarily a creator<->patreon feedback platform. The other discussion sections are fine, but feedback is really what people are here for. Helping to drive this would be better integrating/linking it into the main site so people know it exists. Mostly this would help reset expectations on activity, since if thereā€™s low amounts of feedback, that isnā€™t a problem.

Thanks for reading!