I noticed a little pop up for the Teaser Text window when I opened up a new post today. I don’t utilize the teaser text since it’s not really relevant to how to promote my page and who pledges to me, and I also had issues with it when it first launched with an autofill that I had to delete every time. Now it seems that it autofills without any option to delete the text, and so I must fill in some text if I don’t want it to automatically display the first part of my post? I don’t write my posts with this text in mind, and so this just adds another thing I have to think about every time I make a post, because if I don’t think about it I might end up with patron names and other things that should not be public in that spot (nor are they very interesting as a preview, anyway). Is this just a temporary bug, that I can’t opt-out of having teaser text on my posts? Or has this been a thing for awhile that I just haven’t noticed?
Edit: Or is it just auto-filling suggested text without actually displaying it? It repopulates the field whenever I update the post, so I’m not sure why it would do so without displaying it, but at least that means it’s not forcing me to either expose parts of my posts or write new text for it. Sorry if this is a useless post, the explanation and display is not very clear to me!
The first 140 characters of your post will display publicly as teasers to fans and patrons who do not have access to this post. You can customize the teaser below
It’s basically informing you of what will show up if you don’t add anything. Of course, I didn’t realize this was the case. And THAT isn’t a good thing for a small class of my posts. That’ll teach me to not pay attention!
Wait, the automated text post teaser was brought back? Was there any announcement or at least notification? If not, then Patreon, this is Totally Not Cool. Many people have patron-only codes, links and short messages in their old posts that absolutely should not have been made public just like that.
EDIT: Alright, so I see this in the Insider post:
We’ll make it clearer in the text post creation experience that the preview will use the default teaser text, unless the creator edits it. For creators who make content for an 18+ audience, image blur and text post previews will remain the same. All other creators will have this experience live to their fans in the coming days.
But there’s no mention that this will auto-“tease” old posts. Seriously not cool.
So does this mean that we have to remember to delete the auto text if we don’t want it? That’s a bit annoying, and we’ll likely forget sometimes.
It’s kinda worse.
You can’t delete it, you have to put something in to not have it teased automatically.
I also agree that it’s totally not cool if it will do this automatically to all the old posts!
Check your page in incognito mode. On mine it’s already in effect. Luckily, my code posts already had teaser text, but others have the automatic teasers.
On a slightly unrelated note, I wish our post edit tools were as good as this forum’s.
NO, NO, NO, NO! This is completely unacceptable!!! I had commented on this topic previously that for my husband’s campaign this completely gives away the information that you need to be a patron in order to see for the posts at one of the higher levels. Why would anyone sign up for that level if you get to see it for free??
THIS IS A TERRIBLE IDEA! I can’t believe we can’t turn this off. We can not possibly spend the time to come up with new not-giving-anything-away teaser text for our posts!
It looks pretty bad, to boot. On some of the posts where it’s showing up it’s running things together in a weird way that looks just terrible (it’s disregarding line breaks) and makes it impossible to correctly read.
I agree. My posts often contain links to Patreon-exclusive content so having the first part of the post visible in a preview makes it difficult for me. I don’t know how much of my post is going to be visible. I much preferred it when you could just type in what you wanted the preview to show.
This feature isn’t working as intended. The way I use text and images in my posts makes the teaser text completely nonsensical and illegible. I don’t like this at all and I would like to turn off this feature please. There is no way I can go back and edit hundreds of posts and come up with a teaser for each one. This update is a little disappointing.
How about letting us have featured images/banners for our posts so creators can make their own teasers that are branded as we like and that catered exactly to our campaigns and we actually have control over what we reveal? You can’t assume everyone runs their campaigns the same way and uses the post features the same way.
Hi all! Thanks for the feedback. As you may recall this change was ran as an A/B test, which did show very positive conversion results, meaning that more people chose to become patrons when exposed to a teaser. We obviously don’t want to force the experience, so you can customize the text however you like. We’re working to strike a good balance between doing things that benefit your growth, while still providing the option to make it yours/personal. Let us know how you’d like to see this functionality evolve.
Is this change going to retroactively apply to all old posts or only posts moving forward? It’s going to be really problematic if it’s applying to older posts, since I have hundreds of older posts with sensitive info in those first 140 characters that I’d have to edit. If it’s not, knowing that will be a big relief, even though I’m still unhappy with how the tool itself works.
I do appreciate that Patreon is working on new tools like this to help creators, but it really is a bummer that Patreon trusts us so little to grow and take care of our own audiences that they have to force us to use the tools. Like Maarika said above, not everyone runs their campaigns the same way. I really don’t see the harm in introducing new tools like this to us and then just letting us decide to opt out or not. A lot of folks would probably still happily use it! And those of us who will not be utilizing it very effectively will just have the option to not worry about it.
Also - there’s still no way to input teaser text through the mobile app. It seems really unwise to roll out this feature when it’s not even possible to add teaser text through all devices.
Make it opt in, not forced on us. Let us at least turn it off for some posts if we choose. Right now it’s just making extra work for us, more steps for every post, and one more thing we can possibly overlook or get wrong. Adding to our work burden is not really appreciated.
Also, DON’T apply it retroactively to older posts. As Maarika and I have noted, this can be nonsensical and illegible when it just grabs the first characters (with no regards for formatting and line breaks) and runs it all together. It also can give away the main piece of information that only the patrons are supposed to see. We can’t be expected to go back and re-edit all our older posts, or supply new teaser text for them.
My main concern is that Teaser Text is not available on the app. Or, at least, not that I’ve found. I use the app to make 90% of my posts and I do put links in my posts that could show up. I will happily include teaser text for those posts, but I need that functionality in the app to do so.
I must be missing something about how the teaser text operates, bcs I don’t see that on any of my posts at all when I look at my page in a logged out browser/in incognito mode. Does the teaser text only show on Text Posts? Nearly all my posts are Image Posts, so does this teaser text thing not affect those posts?
Between the blurred post images and the automatic teaser text, I feel waaay too much of my private posts get revealed to the public. I agree that it’s also a huge concern for teaser text to not be available as a function on the app, meaning we can’t edit the automatic text preview if there’s sensitive information.
Now everyone can see my patrons-only codes on posts I wrote before the teaser text feature was added.
EDIT : I removed what I wanted to hide but I definitely don’t think Patreon should decide for us and show what we planned to hide, even if it’s only the first 140 characters.
Can we make it an opt-in choice for each post? Something we can check and uncheck per post?
Or can we possibly have the option of a blanket teaser message for all posts we don’t update the teaser text in? Something that will only change if we add text instead of it grabbing from the actual post.
