or is that whole ‘we promise to communicate better’ thing that they kept talking about total bullshit?
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Reyna has moved on to another job and is no longer at Patreon. I believe Danya has been away (?) but I’ve seen rarely any interactions from anyone else during this time outside of a couple messages from Molly on the discord. It’s really sad and disappointing. Not that I had all that much hope since this is a reoccurring trend. (I realize that there’s been some staff churn but things can’t go silent for ages just because of that, every dang time.)
sighs
I want to be hopeful but the well is dry.
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I mean the company recently laid off like 30-40 people, soooo
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They want everyone to use Discord. I believe that’s a cynical attempt to make discovery of problems reported by other creators as difficult as possible. On Discord, comments quickly vanish into the stream history; here they are easily found and reviewed.
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That was April, 2020, if I recall correctly.
Oh, hmm. I watched a video talking about it that I thought was super recent. I’ll have to find it and double check.
From The Verge on April 21, 2020 (Patreon lays off 13 percent of its staff)
That seems so bizarre, considering more people than ever are using Patreon and money should just been flooding into their coffers. My game alone, small though it may be, nets them about $400/month after I get paid, and there are other adult games on Patreon which bring in ungodly sums; I’m talking like 50,000+ a month. That’s just the adult side of Patreon, which isn’t allowed to be advertised or searched for on the Patreon homepage.
But as for support, yes, it’s few and far between here, and Discord is not ideal at all for a support community. You know, everyone has a browser, but not everyone uses or wants to use Discord, and as already mentioned, it’s a pain to find any information and there’s no way to build on past conversations.
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there have also been issues with the discord mods in the past, so why would we want to join that community? why can’t they actually stick to the forum that patreon themselves made in order to communicate with patreon staff???
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Discord works in their favor to basically hide all evidence and records of complaints. They basically admitted they made an error creating the forum because it exposed Patreon’s failings in a way that was public and permanent.
The fact that they don’t respond, here or to problem reports, is a strong indiction of trouble. They’re tryig to please their venture capitalists, and nobody else.
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Hey everyone -
Thanks for checking in. Yes, we are still here!
I’m sorry that it’s been more quiet than usual on the staff side. That should be temporary! @Temrin is right - Reyna has moved onto a new role, so we are doing our best to fill her responsive, thoughtful, helpful shoes while we look for a new Head of Online Community (lmk if you’re interested or have someone to refer!).
I check the forum and our Discord server regularly and aim to direct folks to our support team when relevant, tag in other teammates when that makes the most sense, and answer directly when I’m the best resource. If there’s a specific issue or thread you want to point me to that needs some love, please do.
Bigger picture, I’m excited by recent efforts from my Patreon teammates to communicate more collaboratively and openly with creators, especially the new Creator Policy Engagement Program. This is just one example, with more to come.
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H Dayna,
Glad this forum hasn’t been entirely abandoned, considering that discord (a good chatting area) but is a subpar service specifically for patreon feature requests, issues, and discussions. (edit: and where the mods simply delete messages from members they disagree with)
There are quite a few threads that deserve some love. Any sort of response.
Deleting inactive patrons, a feature we’ve been asking for since 2018.
Additional payout options so people aren’t charged for multiple transfer fees.
Features wishlist, including many repeats over the past THREE years.
The growing list of pain points.
The landing page we’ve been criticizing since its inception with zero updates.
Are we ever getting galleries?
So many of us are so SO tired of broken empty promises from the patreon staff to “communicate and do better” when it’s either radio silence or patronizing platitudes over and over again .
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They let go of 36 employees at the end of April 2021
Thanks!
@simrell , not abandoned! I’m working hard to find an experienced, thoughtful, creative, organized (I can keep going with my dream attributes…) Head of Online Community who can reignite this community space and facilitate meaningful, purposeful participation here and on Discord. On that note, I agree that Discord is a more natural fit for conversation and collaboration vs. customer support or product feedback - if you’re up for it, I’d love to learn more about your experience in our community spaces and hear any suggestions you’ve got for how to evolve them. No pressure, but if you’re interested, just send me a message here, on Discord, or email me at dshults@patreon.com.
I appreciate you collecting those threads in one place. I’m sorry it’s felt like radio silence in terms of updates. There’s nothing to share just yet, which is why it’s been quiet on our end.
For context: we have a new Chief Product Officer, Julian Gutman, who started recently. He’s been taking in feedback from creators (including the specific threads here), as well as other data like support tickets that come in from both creators and patrons, plus what is happening on the website and in the apps, and using all of that insight to inform a plan for improvements and a long term vision of where Patreon is going. There are no next steps yet, but we’ll start to communicate updates soon (in a month or so).
In the meantime, we’ll continue to host regular meet ‘n’ greets and Q&As with Patreon staff (like the one with the Policy team last month / linked above in my last post), share important news directly and openly with creators (like the video @forest.aeon posted above), and keep trying to walk the walk on consistently, transparently, collaboratively communicating and building with y’all.
I don’t think we’re upset just due to lack of updates, I think we’re upset due to lack of everything. There have been zero replies, zero acknowledgements, zero anything. There have been bug reports or questions that could’ve easily been responded to, but there’s been nothing. Other creators aren’t getting paid to respond to these threads, yet we’re the ones addressing other creator’s issues. (A two second look on the Discord shows the same thing. Loads of other unpaid non-employee creators doing free customer support work on behalf of Patreon. Come on.)
I understand that lay offs make things more difficult for sure, I’m not faulting y’all there, but it does add another layer of aggravation that I once again have to find out information about Patreon’s company from other people, aka the video about the layoffs in this thread. (The video shared was on one of Jack’s channels, I don’t care to follow Jack for news about Patreon. I shouldn’t have to.)
Just still really disappointed. I’m glad you addressed this thread, but from where I’m sitting, it’s honestly just been more of the same. 
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Meanwhile, Buy Me A Coffee now has tiers… just sayin.
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my issue with Buy Me a Coffee is 6+ years of content on Patreon that would need to be moved over and the real chance of patrons not switching platform - most of my patrons are silent and do not interact with content so are unlikely toswitch over. 
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Yeah, my situation is very similar to yours - not much interaction from many of my patrons, but a decent size back catalog. For my patrons, I don’t think many of them would care about accessing my old stuff, and those who did could easily find it on YouTube or contact me to request it. (My main patreon benefits involve early access to new content and behind-the-scenes stuff like rough drafts and works in progress.)
I am running my BMC in parallel with Patreon. Also working on building subscriptions directly into my website (hosted by Bandzoogle). It’s a bit of extra work duplicating my posts, but I feel that it may be worth it. I’m more focused on giving potential new patrons a choice than migrating existing ones anywhere (which I agree is unlikely). I might encourage my patrons to check it out though. I’ve already had one existing patron donate via BMC, and they’re not extremely tech savvy. One of the main complaints I have from patrons is that Patreon seems designed by and for tech-savvy people, which my patrons mostly are not. That is the main reason I am looking for other options - I want to make it easier for people to support me. Sadly Patreon seems to be getting less usable for both me and my patrons as time goes by. My experience in this thread was the stimulus for me to start seriously looking at other options.
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I follow an artist who does this as well. She uses Patreon and Subscribestar now.
To Patreon’s credit, both of my grandparents, one of whom is absolutely not tech-savvy, managed to sign up and pledge on their own. I have no idea if they can navigate the site otherwise. I did end up making a pinned post explaining how to find anything, since I’ve had issues in general before.
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