The follow feature is wonderful but very hidden and very difficult to share with people. If I direct people to follow me on Patreon, which in my mind is a good way to get them acquainted with the idea of what it is all about, they hit the Patreon home page and the first thing they see is pledges - usually thy think they have been tricked into paying to follow my news. Most people miss the follow button even when I sent a pic with it circled in red! Also follow should be one click add email like a mailchimp email address. I would love to discontinue my mailing list and replace it with a Patreon mailing list - but it can’t do this if people need to create an account just to follow. Many are not keen to give details to a third party.
Scheduling posts to be available to specific tiers. Fine if you only want one tier to see it (and then everyone). But if you want to have a post available to one tier, and then also another tier a few days later you have to do it manually, which is a pain. Let me schedule posts for multiple tiers to be available at multiple times.
As everyone is saying, notifications are horrible. I want to know who left. I don’t want you to decide ignorance is bliss.
Better control over the look of posts and messages. Easier UI, more functionality, more pages I can use to split up different projects.
I would also say every single hyped up “we’ve got a new partner/app/integration and you’re going to love it” so far has been completely useless to me. Telling me what’s great rather than asking is very annoying PR/marketing, especially when it isn’t great and I don’t love it.
That the pledges I have to other creators are deducted from my Patreon payout, instead of charged from my selected payment option. I get that this probably is to minimize fees on your end, but it’s a honest hassle as a non-US creator when it comes to my bookkeeping and need to start converting currencies, and generally just feels like I can’t separate my business as a creator from my private patronage of other creators that I enjoy. If that makes sense?
Notifications, as everyone else have said.
Lack of ability to browse creators outside of the front page. Those listed there are already mostly popular creators. What if I want to look for new creators who might now have a super huge internet following already?
(The blanket hiding of NSFW marked creator pages are also a bit unfortunate, but I guess there’s not much one can do about that without getting into the murky waters of ‘what is artistic nudity and what is porn’, nevermind Paypal’s draconic rules on the matter)
Seemingly little to no customer support for Patrons. Have to answer endless questions about payment issues and the like because their emails to support don’t get answered. Again, waste of time (and makes me look bad).
Agree about anonymous exit interviews. When they complain about something fixable, I would like to be able to let them know.
Oh, yeah, that would be a huge help!! We put up audio files and have no idea how many people are listening to them. It would be a huge help to know that certain types get listened to more than others, as it takes some work to make them.
Where would you like us to <3 the issues important to us? Many of the posts in this thread list multiple issues, so I’ve only been hearting them if I agree with all the issues.
Being singled out for offering something that was apparently against TOS.
Yet, I sent the support guy who emailed me a list of 8 other pages doing the same.
And here I am complaining, because I’m the only guy in my category that can’t do this anymore.
Patreon, if you’re going to enforce a rule, get everyone on the same page.
It’s been two weeks since I sent support the list of pages that were offering a raffle, and I’m the only one who has been forced to comply with this request. What really gets me is that two of these pages I sent to support are front page ‘darlings’ making 3 or 4x (one of them is more than 15x the Patrons I have) what I do. All I did was emulate what others were doing in my category.
If that is against the TOS, then I shouldn’t be able to go through 10 Patreon pages and find 8 of them offering raffles and breaking the TOS.
The support team leaves a lot to be desired, especially when it comes to speed or problem resolution.
I’d like to see some action on this front. A double standard is not a good thing to have when it comes to these things, or customer support.
The five tag limit. Makes it that a number of my posts are missing tags.
The still unfinished gallery mode that would make browsing through some patreon accounts so much more nicer than the current feed style.
The very ugly automatically added rising shadow that is forced onto our banner images. I recommended making that removable or even not being the default a very long time ago and I’m sad to see that it’s still there. Especially for graphic artists it’s very annoying since it’s our job to be producing stuff like that so to be limited by having to work around that automation has bugged me.
Oh, I see. You had said that a number of your posts are missing tags, so I thought you meant you had posts you hadn’t put any tags on. I see what you mean now.
My biggest paint point is my benefits. I send rewards out. They are sort of complex and I have to create my purchase inventory by hand. As is I can’t use the benefits features in a meaningful or helpful way yet. Even if I sent one item, because that item is attached to different tiers I have to tally up my inventory by hand.
After that is the address in the patron manager. i really wish i could just choose to show all and have them stay that way. currently using the manager is the fastest way to copy/paste with Endicia. An excel file is just more work that I don’t need. i love that i can tick a box for a patron and know i’ve sent them their reward.
No options for alt-text on images, no captions for Lens videos, and lack of keyboard command support. It’s intensely frustrating, as a creator with a disability, and who’s creating accessible media, to have to do cumbersome work-arounds that only sort-of work, and to not be able to use some of Patreon’s features because of lack of accessibility.
It’s a real challenge to keep my Patreon Page accessible as possible, and I know there are some spots where it isn’t. Since I’m marketing in part to the disability community, this is a real frustration.
notifications are garbage. i need to know when a patron deletes their pledge. I have off-patreon rewards that require an active pledge. (to discourage those who pledge and immediately delete their pledge)
Make notifications chronological, i don’t need separate boxes for pledges/ comments/ likes. just 1 box, organized by most recent thing on top.
i would love to have image gallery posts. my content is usually 20 - 30 photos. At the moment i use smugmug to host galleries, they have great image protection, right click disabled, etc. But, it would be nice to have a beautiful gallery option built into patreon.
I have patrons in my patreon manager who’s charges have been declined for almost a year. i can’t remove their pledge without banning them.
You asked for 3, i could list 25. #1 is the absolute most painful. i need to know who deleted their pledge when.
The ability to batch edit tags would be VERY useful. I’ve got collections of art posted with certain tags, which is great, but when I started using Patreon nearly two years ago, I was tagging my posts willy nilly. Now I’d like to put order in the tags so people can find certain collections and not have to wade through 100 tags…
As already mentioned, being able to connect to a bigger variety of social media would be helpful too. Though I’m not the biggest Instagram fan, lots of people are so I guess it would be a good thing to reach out to.
This is literally a big point for me: I deal with images every single day and I’m very able to adjust image sizes. However, many times when I post with an image up front, it is HUGE in the inbox not matter how big or small I prep the image beforehand. I always make sure I send myself a copy of the post so I know how it looks in my Patrons’ inbox, and sometimes it’s grotesquely large, even if I size it small in Photoshop first. Other times it’s ok. The ability to edit image size directly in the Patreon post to have a last say in how it will look to Patrons would be very nice. I know from experience that people (including myself) do not like gigantic images filling up their screens. You can’t see anything for the image.
Last word: the Lens feature is turning out to be a really good tool! I almost always get a response after post a lens clip (as long as I don’t overdo it… lol…). A few more neat ideas like this would be awesome!
I have never been able to get Lens to work on my phone. (iPhone 6) I’ve gone through the set up and The instructions list options which are never present for me to use.
1. SIGN UP PROCESS IS CONFUSING & CONVOLUTED: There are several non-intuitive things about the sign up process. While you’re doing it, you don’t know how many steps it is. It doesn’t “auto-scroll” to the next thing. There are no arrows or red text that show you haven’t done something correctly–a little fox pops up to tell you something is wrong. That doesn’t help. It needs to be simple, straightforward, and streamlined. A potential patron should know, at all times, how many steps, what they are, and where they are in the process. If they make a mistake, it should auto-scroll with an error and red text explaining clearly how to fix it. I’ve lost several potential patrons due to the current confusing process.
2. EMAIL ACTION STEPS are unclear. For example, when I send out an email with a song attached to it, like I did today, the song appears as an image. I’d have to hover over it to even know there is a link. There is not “triangle” that appears on the image and it doesn’t look like an audio player. There should be an action button “Listen Here” or “Watch Here” and they should be routed directly to that post.
Currently someone clicks the link to hear it (presuming they’ve found it), they have to SIGN IN all over again… and when they finally do sign in (because by then, I’ve lost most people because it’s too many steps and they can’t just stay signed in). Once the person signs in, they are NOT AUTOMATICALLY ROUTED TO THE POST. I’ve had several complaints from people who said, “I bothered to sign in, but then I couldn’t find your post.”
3. APP FUNCTIONS ARE SO LIMITED FOR CREATORS. I can’t attach more than one picture unless I do it through Lens (which I don’t want to). The app feels mostly for fans–if it was for Creators, we’d have access to all the same things we do on the full web page. There are several apps (like Task Rabbit) that have a customer app and a professional user app. I’d love to see something like that for Patreon.
