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> 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. |