[token_throwaway]

This letter reflects very poorly on the writer(s). You would think Patreon is the difference between life and death for them (they basically say as much). You would think that without Patreon, nobody would be interested in their creations. I'm sorry but -wow-. You've got other ways to collect payments from people who support your work... and if you have a fanbase already, I'm not sure where the problem lies in moving off the platform. In fact, that would send a much stronger message to Patreon, at which point the financial and traffic hit would probably cause someone up the line to reconsider their position. And if not, better for both parties anyway.

At the end of the day, Patreon is a private company that owes nothing to anybody except its shareholders. And I don't blame them for implementing subjective NSFW filters, that is their prerogative, and they didn't set out to create a camshow site at the end of the day.

Adults whinging is becoming the white noise of the internet.

[Certhas]

What are the other ways to collect payments? Paypal? Nope [1]. Stripe? Nope [2].

See the quote I posted here about someone who tried:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15551817

Generally it's not rare to see websites restrict their content not because its illegal, but because it's impossible to collect payment for any of your content, if some of your content is deemed unacceptable by VISA/Mastercard, etc...

And patreon marketed itself to content producers specifically as not following the paypal/stripe example.

[1] https://www.paypal.com/us/selfhelp/article/what-is-paypal%E2...

[2] https://stripe.com/us/prohibited-businesses

[token_throwaway]

Sage? GoCardless? Coinbase? Etsy? A platform that pays out specifically for nsfw content (like pornhub)? Hatreon, as many have mentioned?

If no available alternatives suit, and there is a big demand for something different, someone passionate should go build it and get rich! And if there isn't a big demand for it, so be it! Not everyone gets to have a liveable salary from writing furry fanfic porn, c'est la vie. The entitlement in the letter really bothers me.

[angus-prune]

The problem is taking payment. The credit card companies don't allow most of this content and have been known to pressure payment processors to drop specific clients, with the threat of shutting down the entire company.

Visa/Mastercard have a de facto monopoly on online payments, and if they block you from taking payment online then you are out of luck.

I've known multiple people who have run adult websites or even tried to launch the adult-specific KS-clone suggested and taking payment is the constant issue.

[arkem]

I'm pretty sure Stripe and Paypal are Patreon's two payment processors, so I'm not surprised that they're having the same issues.

[gwern]

> You would think that without Patreon, nobody would be interested in their creations. I'm sorry but -wow-. You've got other ways to collect payments from people who support your work... and if you have a fanbase already, I'm not sure where the problem lies in moving off the platform.

I am going to go out on a limb here and guess that you are not a creator on Patreon...

Patreon kicking people off is a serious issue because Patreon works so much better than all of the competition, from Flattr to Gratipay to Paypal to Bitcoin. As it happens, I'm a creator on Patreon myself (https://www.patreon.com/gwern), at ~$600 a month. I wouldn't go homeless or anything if I was kicked off Patreon (thanks, Bitcoin), but it would hurt me a lot. When I started using Patreon in July 2015, it immediately roughly quadrupled my monthly earnings from donations as compared to anything I'd ever gotten from Flattr, Gratipay, Paypal, Google AdSense, or Amazon Affiliates, Bitcoin either with or without Coinbase (and much more than that comparing to May/June but that's a little unfair since they tended to be spiky). That is, incidentally, despite Patreon having net fees of 2-5x what the others do. And the total amount has since tripled.

I hardly even advertised it! (Heck, I hardly even advertise it now or provide any rewards or anything.) Now that is a network effect.

Could people have given me money other ways? Sure. Heck, some of my readers invented or worked at the payment methods in question, and were fully capable of it. And they did, a little. And yet, I finally get around to signing up for Patreon and boom. There were people who were willing to give me substantial amounts of money... but only via Patreon. They were set up for Patreon, and that made donating easy and convenient for them, and this makes all the difference in the world. One website, one account, one payment.

Saying Patreon has no real network effects or can easily be replicated or that being kicked off of it would be trivial is the strict contemporary equivalent of the HN discussion of Dropbox where everyone writes it off because 'you can simply rsync your files to your personal server'. It sounds reasonable; and yet it is profoundly wrong in every way that matters to real people.

Is being kicked off Patreon going to hurt those creators? Oh yes. Quite aside from the porn-specific issues with the alternatives, just leaving Patreon is costly - they'll be lucky if they can scratch together even half what they were getting before. Call that 'other ways' if you wish, but I say it's spinach and I say to hell with it.

[794CD01]

Adults whinged constantly before the internet too. The only difference is that you used to not be able to hear them unless you were at the same water cooler/bar at the same time.