Hope so, Angela! Let us know how you get on.
— Jack
They did at one time have a thumbnail view in beta a few months back. I had the ability to view my posts that way for a few days. I’m really hoping this is something still on their to-do list because it looked much better than the endless scrolling we have now and, as you said, there were more than just 12 things loaded at one time. It had more of a gallery look to it and was considerably sleeker.
Personally, I’m not a fan of how Tumblr works at all. I have limited data and I have to keep an eye on how much I’ve used before I get on that site partially because of that autoload feature at the bottom. I don’t mind a click to see more if we have that thumbnail gallery view and are already viewing a good chunk of posts at one time.
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As a bit of follow-up feedback I decided to go through the effort of trying to find new creators to watch and… I couldn’t reasonably find anyone. It’s weird that the best place to find new creators is somewhere other than Patreon. Even graphtreon is better at discovering new accounts that might interest me.
Better “discovery” options on site would be really appreciated, “people who follow you also follow,” “other people who follow [person you follow] also follow,” “creators you follow also follow” - stuff like that would be really helpful. Also, allowing us to add keywords to our Patreon accounts would be a huge help - so if we’re looking for a specific type of content we can easily find it but searching creator keywords, sometimes “digital art” or “artist” aren’t specific enough to find the audiences we’re looking for.
Top 50’s lists are great, but also a “recently trending” might be nice, maybe someone has been going up a lot in the last day, week, or month - maybe a creator has record growth for the day or hour, maybe there’s a highly praised creator (or highly valued) who is hitting their yearly/monthly patreon anniversary and I share a lot of follows in common with them and I would probably follow/pledge to them if I even knew they existed!
Sometimes I follow someone I really enjoy the content of on Patreon that is outside of my normal Patreon browsing experience (like I normally follow artists, but I do follow a couple youtube creators) and I won’t even know that there are similar creators of similar popularity that I might also like, because I would have to find them through Youtube, which I might not watch enough to figure out they have a Patreon I should be watching
I can see lots of ways you could improve the system of interconnectivity on the site, which I think is the key element to growing smaller channels. The biggest issue is… I just don’t think much effort at all has been done in this respect and really anything would be better than it currently is.
Also a secondary issue, I understand you don’t like to parade your nsfw Patreon accounts around but you can’t even find them when you’re specifically searching for them. There’s no option to enable viewing nsfw accounts, there’s no way to search for them, there’s no way to find adult games, art, or anything without going off-site and finding them.
I feel like the discovery system is really lacking for both nsfw and sfw creators in that regard. Sites designed to sell products like steam and itch.io (which has an adult discovery section) really push products that trend a bit so people know how to find these up and coming creators that could produce stuff they’d be interested in. They use tags, sales, discovery mechanisms that link similar favorited products between the site so that if you are looking for something, you have a breadth of things to find, and I know there are people out there looking because it also has analytic that let me know that at least 30% of our sales have come from those in-site discovery options.
I follow almost exclusively artists that like to dabble in both sfw and nsfw art and it’s weird that I can’t actually find new people to follow through mutual follow/pledges because my mutual follow/pledges are nsfw artists and their mutuals are also nsfw creators - so it’s just a dead end that could have been a way for discovering new interests. I respect that Patreon has an image to maintain but some form of verification and manual toggle for adult suggestions and searches would probably lead to a lot more inter-site connectivity and increase the social aspects of Patreon. Right now Patreon is basically interchangeable with any other site I could host content on because Patreon itself isn’t helping me connect with people - as an account flagged nsfw, I have to do all the social networking and audience finding entirely on my own, on other social sites like twitter and tumblr.
As a side note, using all of the links to try and find/browse through creators I might like (there doesn’t really seem to be a real way to do this other than looking at top creators) - I discovered the “Sitemap” button seems to be entirely broken and leading to a weird database listing folder, which might also be a security issue? Might want to remove/disable that link.
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Another reason for a browse option is so patrons aren’t lost to Patreon in general when a creator leaves. I think every one of us with any patrons at all can say we brought people into patronage who had never heard of Patreon or wouldn’t have otherwise found the site. Some of them are exclusively only our patrons. Creators, just take a moment to think about how hard you worked to get the people for your campaign that are first time patrons and/or most likely exclusively your patrons and what percentage of your patronage falls into those categories. For me, that’s more than half of my patrons. Think about how many of your patrons will no longer be patrons at all if you were to end your Patreon campaign.
With that number in mind, look at this Graphtreon stat of Ended Patreon Campaigns. Look at the number of patrons and imagine your percentage of exclusive patrons that you brought to Patreon being applied to those numbers. It’s easy to conclude that many of these closed Patreons’ patrons are now no longer supporting anyone. (If I apply my percentages to them that’s over 10,000 patrons lost to Patreon in the top ten alone.) If there had been a way for them to find creators within Patreon they might have reallocated their pledges to others. These are people who already know the value of patronage and don’t have to be convinced or converted.
Conversion takes a lot of energy and resources from creators. If a creator is spending more time creating content, that is a better experience not just for the creator, but patrons and potential patrons. More stuff to see, hear, and experience is more reason to pledge. There is such diverse and spectacular creations happening on Patreon and if you don’t know about it, it’s lost to so many. People tend to stay within the circle of their own interests, so they may never find that really cool musician or woodcarving artist or cutting edge indie scientist or the photographer who is trying to save sea creatures on the other side of the world. How does a person know a creator like this exists to begin to know how to find them? And why should it be so difficult to find things of interest outside our usual realm of interest?
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I’ve been hearing “we know discoverability is an issue” since the day I started my Patreon. I sure would love for it to not be.
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The whole creator browse thing, I’m still flabbergasted that a creator was told it was a non issue because only creators want it. Both in this thread and elsewhere, we know this is false. And even just talking to other creators, many of us field questions regularly about how patreon works and how to find people because who else are you going to talk to but a creator you support (and whom probably convinced you to join in the first place) when the FAQ gets you nowhere. Did someone forget that many creators are Patrons too? How does us being a creator invalidate our needs as a patron? (Heck, we are probably a lot more invested in this platform than the patrons are since this is ya know, allowing a lot of us to make a living in a creative way and keeping a roof over our heads.) I’m thoroughly confused and frustrated by this. 
So, attached is a poll I gave to my patrons. Yes it is a small pool. I am a ‘small time patreon creator’ but i hope to hear back from other artists i’ve contacted (or have them contact your support teams directly because we KNOW that this isn’t just a creator issue because many creators i’ve talked to field questions from our patrons regularly on things like this.) I also took it a step further since there were previous talks about NSFW content creators being treated poorly in regards to being discovered -at all- and all voters so far agree that having an account toggle to turn on or off NSFW content/creators in the search is wanted.
Hopefully this will start getting more feedback soon and i can cross post other artist polls because hearing a creator being told that it’s only a creator issue and not actually a patron issue and thus not important is absurd. It’s archaic to not have a proper creator search function that searches more than just the “top 20 in each category”. 
Having a proper creator search/browse would actually get more money rolling around for all of us, including patreon itself. I don’t see how that isn’t wanted.
On top of this, everything @Lochy said in her post above is so accurate to this topic it hurts. 
I’m just so confused and frustrated by this.
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Thanks for sharing this, Temrin. Gonna run the same poll on my campaigns and see what the consensus is there.
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I look forward to your results! 
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I’ve shared your poll on Twitter, but I have to say:
This is -absurd-. Patreon, this is the single lone only thing I’ve ever had negative things to say about you. Why is this low priority? You were JUST accused of not giving a fig about the little guy when you implemented your payment changes; that was reversed quickly. What gives here? this is another clear example of not fighting for all your creators. I get that you want to put resources where there is money, but how difficult could this possibly be?
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Thanks for sharing it!
I would think that keeping people who have already signed up for patreon, using patreon and pledging would be something that is wanted because it keeps the money ON/in the hands of patreon when people want to support more creators or if their main artists leave the platform. 
Makes no logical sense to me at all.
I’m also receiving more votes already after my poll going public, all still 100% with the one choice voted for in the previous image example. I’ll give it a few days and report back with new numbers then.
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Thanks for sharing this. I needed the reminder to post the same poll to both of my Patreons. I imagine I’ll get much the same result on my nsfw patreon, but I have a lot more followers on the other one so it will be interesting to see if there are differences due to the different audiences.
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Here are some of the requests my patrons have shared with me:
- Better Search Within Creator Page. I can’t even find some of the content I’ve posted. My patrons have given up. Doing it by tag is not helpful if there are dozens of tags and hundreds of entries.
- Much Better Comment System. Right now the commenting system is cumbersome, doesn’t do nested replies beyond two levels (I believe it’s two), and in general fails to encourage engagement.
- Bring Back Featured Tags Images. Why did these vanish? It looks odd. If it’s a ‘the content is locked’ matter, give us the option to designate an image for it so that we can entice people to want to see what’s under the hood.
- Fix “Have to Click on Each Creator to See Updates” on app. At least six of my patrons have completely abandoned the app now that it’s gone from ‘all creator updates aggregated on single stream’ to 'click on creator to see updates… and that’s that I know of. That’s fine if you’ve got one or two low-posty creators. If you’ve got 10+ and they’re all busy bees, all the clicking gets annoying, quickly.
- More Granular Email Options. My patrons only want certain kinds of content emailed. Being able to say, check tags would be great. "Email content from Creator X with tag ‘x,’ ‘y’ or ‘z’.
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It’s not a content locked thing that is removing the featured tag images. All of my posts are public and there are no images. I thought maybe it was a patron only visible thing, but I became a patron from my nsfw account and still cannot see the images. I miss these too.
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All very interesting and an excellent post, @Watsup.
— Jack
I’ve bucked this poor search function by creating a ‘Featured Tags’ post that has a ‘Complete Content List’ for every pledge level.
I update this every month or so with all the current content.
It’s a pain and it took me a lot of time to get set up, but it’s well worth it. No one has to search through anything but a single list post with links to all content and posts available at that level.
It’s cumbersome, clunky, and took a lot of work. But, it’s certainly better than the current system.
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looks at last year’s activity of 602 posts
is already averaging 2 posts a day this year
I… don’t feel I should have to do that much work because Patreon lacks something as basic as a ‘search Creator’s archives’ tool. 
does salute your problem-solving mojo, though
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Oh I agree. But most of my content is only once per week.
Even so, I have 240 videos already and counting…
…and yeah, a better organization system is sorely needed.
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Thanks for all these examples - search and tagging of your own content is something we’ve heard a lot. I added some extra notes with these examples for the product team.
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