You’re right, and I addressed that towards the end of my post, but here’s the thing. The really big thing that I think has been an issue forever on Patreon.
When the money has exchanged hands, people do not care about in depth introductions. They do not want to be explained to. They want whatever the heck it is you’re making, and to date all they have is chronological scrolling, tags, and date/tier filters…and those things only work exclusively from one another to my understanding (just trying to test it right now was a bit of a mindfuck).
The issue is that we’ve HAD to create these sections that direct traffic because Patreon’s design and infrastructure is extremely limited and at times actively works against us. I have people who can’t scroll through my heavily populated tags on the app because it simply STOPS LOADING, for example.
Right now getting content is an obstacle course that is only made easier by organizational gymnastics on the part of the creators. The sort of gymnastics that the team is clearly trying to eliminate because you can see in their effort to handle the FAQ side of things themselves, they’d like to refine that process and handle things that should be handled on Patreon’s end.
I feel like there is a massive need for that type of direction and effort on the browsing and content side of things. Creating navigation posts littered with hyperlinks, more walls of texts, more clicking, more thinking, it turns being a patron into a hassle. Rewards are supposed to be rewarding, and easily attainable. Right now there are lots of us who are successful in spite of these shortcomings because we’ve learned to work within the restrictions, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t push for more, push for improvements, and push for a design that is intuitive, user friendly, and effective.
I think fundamentally that putting another fill in the blank text box at the forefront of the Patron “landing page” is a significantly lesser option than coming up with something that interacts more like a content hub. A gallery, maybe boxes that work a lot like the tiers do, that have an image, a brief description and link that takes you to the tag or “page”. Things that let you retain creative control but also serve as much better ways to get the people paying you for content to that content.
It might be a lot to ask for, but there are so many ways that a content suite could be dreamed up and implemented that would blow a “here’s a guide to my content, good luck!” wall of text/images out of the water and would help so many creators. Not everyone has the talent and skill to turn a blank page into an intuitive guide to their content, and having that be a functional part of the foundation of a creator’s page would be extremely helpful to many creators.
Seeing these proposed changed to the Landing Page and how the entire experience functions for non-patrons makes me thing that maybe the team is ready to tackle some big ideas on the Content Page side of things for the patron view. There’s certainly a lot of room for those big ideas, and I’m hopeful for the future.
tldr: if you’ve given me money, how much more ABOUT me or my content do you need to know?
Thank You!
I’m happy to dispense with that as soon as you like.
