I agree 100%! I think a “super easy” and “super obvious” follow system could lead to more people eventually making the jump to being patrons.
The #1 thing I hear from people who support my work in other ways but haven’t signed up on Patreon is that they don’t quite “get” the site. The reasons for “why” vary, but I think if I could tell them, “No worries, I felt the same way too at first, just click the FOLLOW button and you’ll get a feel for it in no time at all!” that could really help.
Especially if combined with the ability to send a message JUST to your followers, which I don’t think we can do right now?
Patreon is already fully aware that followers may convert to potential patrons. I’ve recently noticed this since I’ve received two emails suggesting I become a patron of somebody I follow, with the teaser of a patron-only post.
(However, I’m not sure if this is the approach they should take. Personally I perceived these emails as mostly spam and would be more likely to unfollow somebody than to become a patron based on such an email. But only Patreon has the statistics.)
I agree anyway that the follow feature is at the moment too hidden and could be made more prominent with the explanation of its function like “Subscribe to public posts without supporting this creator.” At least personally I would favor a direct communication like that since it may make people rather choose the patron route.
Indeed, you can’t message followers who have never been patrons, so right now that feature is limited to trying to bring back former patrons. The documentation doesn’t specify why there is this limitation. Apparently only Patreon itself is allowed to email followers to try to turn them into patrons…
I think it would be really smart for Patreon to encourage non-paying fans and supporters to at least “connect with” the creators they like via the Patreon site… doing so HAS to increase the odds someone turns into a paying supporter when they see news of something they find appealing!
And I cannot imagine it costs Patreon much if anything whether you have 10 followers or 100 followers?
I’m doing pay-per-thing, not per-month. Every so often I forget to mark a paid post as being paid.
There is no way to change the paid status of a post after the fact, so I then either have to make a quick “oops” post that I mark as paid, or delete and remake the post.
I would like to suggest one of two solutions:
let me edit the paid/unpaid status of a post after the fact
change the paid checkbox to a dropdown with three states: “Is this a paid post?” (default), “Charge my patrons for this post”, and “Do not charge my patrons for this post”. If I try to submit a post with this set to “is this a paid post?” then treat it as an error and make me try again.
I preview every post I make to my blog. Please make this possible on Patreon, especially since the post goes straight through to my patrons via email, so they get the one with the mistakes in it.
15 seconds are too short. I’d like to have at least 30 seconds.
Landscape video needs to be compatible. (Other social media have already optimized for landscape videos. Not to mention most of my official videos are in landscape, too. Having to shoot vertical videos DOUBLE our workload!.)
I hope to see those problems solved rather soon as they have been major issues for years. Thank you for your work.
Patreon Inbox does not have a search function. Cannot mark messages as unread / read.
Cannot attach photos using patreon inbox. It’s very hard to communicate with a patron especially if you need to attach photos.
Cannot easily upload photos. You literally have to upload one by one at a time. This is why my private blog had to be somewhere else (i just make a patreon post with the private blog entry link that has a password T_T) because it’s so hard to upload photos individually. It would be great if they can adopt the wordpress system of adding photos (Drag and drop)…
Hi there. I just ran into an issue because I canceled my highest-value tier and created a new one at a different amount. I really, really wish I didn’t have to go back to ALL my previous content, one post at a time, and add this new tier to permissions. I wish there was a button to simply “add X tier to all posts” or some such. I don’t know if this is already being worked on but I’m crying a little right now at all the time I’m spending going back to adjust permissions on back content so my $45 tier can have everything.
Otherwise, very happy with Patreon–this is the first big hiccup my audience and I have hit with it.
This is why I’m not changing or making any new tiers until something about this is done. I was lucky in one tier I made was early enough in the switch from posts being viewable at dollar amounts and not tiers, that there wasn’t much to fix, but now? Yikes.
Yeah Sam I have almost two years of content to go back and re-enable. The only good thing is that my high-level patrons are really patient about it and most have already downloaded the past content they wanted, so I’m just going through and adding a couple of months’ worth every day or two. Still is time I wish I was utilizing to make more content though.
Ugh, seconded!! I have literal years of content that is inaccessible to Patrons who should be able to access it for this very reason. I went back about a year to edit tier access, but it just doesn’t make sense to spend hours doing that for my entire backlog of posts, especially considering I post multiple times in the average week! Bulk tier editing and/or the ability to reassign tier permissions when you create a new tier would be an AMAZING solution to this problem.
Lack of discoverability. I do not use trending social platforms. (It would be great if I could tie in some sort of feed from my website’s blog or something, but the only channels we can link to are platforms I refuse to use for personal reasons.) So, that said, it would be really nice if there were a tool to help browsers on Patreon discover cool content and creators they might like and possibly wish to support.
Not enough customization. While I understand the upside of keeping things minimalistic, I do wish there was a way to make my page more my own outside of just choosing a primary color. While Patreon may be intended to be some sort of complimentary side package for a creator’s supporters, I think I’m one of many who uses it primarily- the only thing I use as much is my own website. Because this is the primary gathering ground for my following, I do wish it could feel a little more “cozy” when we log in, with customizations that make the space feel unique and almost…”homey.”
Agree. Lens is frustrating for me, it always warps my text and it’s way too short to show anything substantial. I feel like what we offer patrons needs to be exciting, considering they’re paying for the content. More options to make our content exciting is kind of a must.
My biggest pain point is the API, For me as a creator i use this API to load in pledges and tiers to allow users to self-serve and unlock patreon only content. With the addition of currencies this has caused issues but I worked some code around it. I had a yearly pledge come in which broke this because two fields which are heavily replied upon to work out the tier amount_cents and total_historical_amount_cents are not cents but whatever value the current pledge is, Unless I am missing something the tier wasn’t pushed though the API?
I have seen other posts around this with regards to the _cent fields and the API, for now i have disabled yearly pledges and because my tier range value is apart from each other i can catch the payment value between two values - not ideal at all I can then determine tier.
I understand it looks like the API is unmaintained and while i can get it to work in my case working around what i can only describe as hacky code having a new version of the API trimmed down to get around these currencies changes and bring it up to date would honestly save so much time. There must be others relying on this and loosing this functionality altogether, which looks like a possibility as its marked as un maintained… This would mean that I may not be able to continue to use patreon as a platform to maintain support automatically and provide users a self-serve option.
edit: Looks like im on V1 so ill go write some new integration real quick although fact does still remain, if the API goes down myself and im sure others are at a bit of a loss
