[Traster]

I'm not really sure what Patreon is to be honest. It's not payment processing - they're literally passing those costs to you. It's not a community, there's no cross-patron promotion or discoverability. It seems like it's essentially just a bad version of square space that wants to charge you a percentage of your revenue instead of $20 a month. It had this exciting opportunity to build a platform, but I think that time has passed, they've chosen not to do it, so all they have left is some rather poor CMS with an exploitative pricing model.

[eythian]

It's a centralised (not great) publishing platform where the main feature is that it supports "micro" payments.

As a user (rather than a creator) I like it because I don't have to faff around with separate payments across multiple sites, just once a month my credit card is billed the sum of all the sponsorships I want to make and I get an email to tell me where it all went to. I will tend to think twice before setting up a recurring donation to something that's not on patreon, simply because it's something new for me to keep track of.

TBH I almost never use it to get to the actual content, it's usually for sponsoring podcasts etc. that I was already listening to.

[Traster]

What throws me off about it being a platform is that ther'es basically no discoverability - you search for what you want, but it's never going to say "Hey, yo liked X, what do you think of Y"

[eythian]

Yeah. Kickstarter, for example, is good at that. I've backed a number of things because their recommendation system thought they might be interesting, and they were.