Okay so this is absolutely spot on. I have 8 patrons now, I lost a few during the early stages of the pandemic. And I have dedicated about 5 days a week to various content for my patrons, added merch, and gone above and beyond for my very small but loyal circle. I definitely need Patreon to do, and be, better for these loyal supporters who have kept me afloat when I needed it the most.
Yes! Patreon provides a boring business service for us: they make it easy for fans to bundle several small donations into one credit-card payment. They are not our friends, they are a contractor providing a service about as exciting as bookkeeping software or insurance. And being passed off again and again with polite nothings that never turn into action is not a friendly act and not a professional act.
It would be great if Patreon worked the way it represents itself to work, as a site fans visit for exclusive content.
“Friendly” words which just play for time (“the cheque is in the mail”; “that will be fixed in production”; “we think we can upgrade you to full-time in the coming fiscal year”) are not a friendly act. Encouraging Patreon’s customers (us creators) to use your site in ways which you refuse to support (but help Patreon turn our unpaid labor into Patreon’s money from investors fooled at storytime) is not a peaceful act.
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The problem for most of us, it seems, is that Patreon isn’t delivering on the features that promise to fill our needs. We came in with expectations that those specific needs would be met, so it’s not as if we were wanting more than what was given to us (necessarily, obviously new features can be added, but I’m strictly talking bare bones here), but we’re not given them in the first place.
Oh, I want to be really clear, I don’t think anybody is wrong to be angry and frustrated about how Patreon has failed to support its offerings. Patreon represented itself to support things and people took them at its corporate word, and then are being left in the lurch. I consider myself included in that, as someone who has a by-post campaign, and just lost the basic user interface we had for that for knowing what is going on with our money. I figure the by-post model’s days are numbered, and I have no idea what I will do if Patreon kills it.
I understand how you feel, but I don’t know if it’s fair to point directly at her. It’s definitely a site-wide problem among the staff, and we have no idea what goes behind the scenes.
I am actually talking specifically about how @Reyna communicates, not what she communicates. For instance, responding to creators complaining that they’re unheard with “look at this thing that Jack just did where he spent time talking to creators on Discord and then made a powerpoint! see! there’s listening going on” was… oh god no. First of all, I clearly wasn’t the only one who was part of that Discord convo, personally, and took away a very different impression of the experience than “got listened to”; second, arguing with people reporting that they’re not feeling listened to is generally a terrible move to begin with, that pisses them off further, which is what, “but look, here’s an example of you being listened to” is: an argument as to why people shouldn’t feel the way they do; third, for a variety of specific reasons that was a very bad example of being “listened to” to point to.
Look, this isn’t even my fight, but even I am pissed off about the gallery thing now. Over and over again, users have requested a gallery view thing, here on PatreonCommunity and through other channels. And I was present in that discord chat with Jack, and even asked him some questions of my own, and someone brought up the gallery issue with a link to here and mention it’s been 2.5 years that visual artists have been asking for this, and – here’s the infuriating part – it was clearly the first Jack was hearing about it. And he was like, “Oh, hey, that sounds like a good idea!”
Everything about this is terrible: clearly, this forum is the place where user suggestions go to die. Apparently nobody within Patreon reads them or maybe the staff who do read them have no way to get the ideas in front of anybody with authority in the org? And that “CEO bungies into the Discord, and if you happen to be available during that two hour window you, too, could have a chance to be heard, if you can express your idea super concisely and are willing to fight for the mic.” Nothing about this is an example of something good, and pointing to is as an example of “look how listened to you you are” is not something that pours oil on the waters.
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And this disconnect between patreon’s speech to creators and the policies they enact goes back a long time: remember when PT was turning against sexy content, threatened creators chose Liara Roux as their representative and sent her to SF for a scheduled meeting with the CEO, and it was cancelled the evening before? She released her briefing for the meeting in response Patreon Reference Sheet - Google Docs That saw low-level people at Patreon promising that “nothing has changed” while creators were being hidden or kicked off too.
I loved the idea of Patreon in 2013, and am happy to have them as a tip jar, but they don’t impress me as an honest and competent business. Taking four big loans for the straightforward business of hosting text and photos and processing payments sure feels like “investor storytime” rather than a business focused on customers.
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Hi all - just want to reiterate that this thread and the overall sentiment of the community is not going ignored. Like I said, we are working to improve the communication with you all about product updates and changes. The thread below is a start, with a glimpse into our 2021 priorities that we want our community to see first before the post is shared publicly.
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I can’t help but notice that the things we’ve been asking for are notably absent from this ‘update’.
Where is the gallery view?
Where is the improved API usage?
Where is the improved site navigation?
Where is the ‘next chapter’ function?
With all due respect, unless you can demonstrate some example of progress towards the things we, the creators, your actual customers, are requesting, maybe stop with the platitudes. They’re condescending and insulting.
I sure hope your new CPO looks at this thread and gets scared, because when a user base is this angry, it often leads to a mass die-off of usership. Patreon has competition, and that competition is starting to look very appealing.
We are your clients, not our patrons. If we leave, so do our patrons.
Stop worrying about them, and start worrying about what happens if we, the creators, declare no confidence in Patreon and find somewhere else to take our fans.
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heads up for those of you looking for a patreon alternative after all the shit they’ve ignored, there’s a new platform getting it’s feet off the ground right now called comradery. i’m not affiliated with it, and i’m just learning about it as well but figured you’d all want to know.
especially since it’s looking more and more like a lot of us will be jumping ship due to them ignoring our pleas and forcing anniversary billing on us 
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@Momobeda I’m building my own subscription site myself. Will be leaving in a month or so once it’s built. I hadn’t realised that even though I’m in the UK, since Patreon isn’t, they have been charging my UK patrons VAT which is unfortunate!
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Subscribestar is awful from my experience. Both in trying to use the platform itself, even more so if you’re a smaller creator, and I refuse to support companies that allow n*zi’s on their platform. Look into why they were created and why both Paypal and Stripe refuse to work with them.
Ko-Fi also does not allow adult content so a lot of creators can’t use that as an alternative.
Patreon is the only option for a lot of creators and it seems like very 6 months they’re doing something to make my life harder. I dont know any creators who like the things they implement and all of them complain about things Creators ask for that never happen. They’re far from great but alternatives for adult creators or creators with standards don’t exist.
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i’m not sure what kind of nsfw content you make, but i’ve been enjoying my time on onlyfans so far. to be fair, it doesn’t work for everyone and has its own share of problems but it’s a pro-nsfw option.
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That’s super unfortunate and I’m sorry you’ve had to deal with that! I’m admittedly curious what you’re using to creator your own subscription site if I may ask! I’ve only been aware of woocommerce subscription model implementing onto a personal website. Are you going through a different one / what’s your choice!
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Hello, I posted this in the Discord and was asked to also post it here in this thread, re: anniversary billing —
Could a viable option be to force the Patron to select between:
- getting charged now and also the start of next month (explain they get access to this month’s items as well)
- delay getting charged at all until the start of next month (explain they don’t get access to this month’s items)
- anniversary renewal
And allow the creator to select if/which options are available?
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Hi there! I’m building a Wordpress site but not using woo memberships as it isn’t as good as memberpress which is the plug-in I have chosen. There are LOADS of plugins for Wordpress and there is one for square space too.
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To those knocking kofi bc they don’t allow NSFW- it’s not Kofi fault, it’s Paypal. Since kofi uses paypal as the way to pay, it’s PAYPAL that doesn’t allow NSFW. So legally kofi can’t.
If you ever hear about how NSFW creators paypal get taken down bc of NSFW content or how if you commission NSFW stuff to NOT say it is NSFW in the notes of the invoice, it’s bc of paypal.
So… if you DO use kofi for NSFW you just cant… SAY it…
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Holy shit this is a poorly aged thread, lol, considering what dropped a few days ago.
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What dropped a few days ago?
Having just spent about twice as much time editing my about section than I should have due to how horrible the editor is (sentences that I wrote were mysteriously getting deleted as I used crazy feature like the bullet list maker…), I had a new idea:
Patreon, maybe stop developing this platform, and depecrate your most costly features and lower fees, then market Patreon as simply a tip collection service.
You’ve clearly been languishing for years under the weight of this unwieldy platform, seeming to spend most of your time and resources on updates to payments, while ignoring years upon years of basic feature requests like gallery functions and a readable ‘about’ page, it probably makes sense to just stop trying to promise these things and focus just on the payment services. Lower our fees since we’re clearly not funding actual tools and features we need, and just focus on being a payment processor. We can use Discord or other more functional services to gate our content as we need.
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Less than two weeks since their massive promise to “do better”, they announced a complete change in the billing system without any warning. After an uproar about it, they walked it back saying “oh jk”.
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Nothing actually dropped, patreon just made a shittily worded update that sent people into an uproar because they want to make anniversary monthly billing (instead of payments on the 1st) a thing again to fix a problem that has so many better and easier fixes to try first but sounded like they for sure are already doing it without considering a large portion of creators whom it will screw over.
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at this point I’m considering moving to Buy Me a Coffee. It looks like it’s way easier to manage, considering all I create is writing. I’m tired of dealing with declined patrons, high taxes, and poor site updates that ultimately make my patrons angry and cause them to leave.
There’s supposedly an “import from patreon” feature but I haven’t figured out how it works. If anyone knows, I’m open to tips!
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