1. Censorship which caused a market reaction for more competition, and the first mass exit of the platform
2. Changes in the Fee Structure and billing policies, this caused the 2nd mass exit from the platform
3. Platforms getting better at internal monetization (i.e YT SuperChat and memberships)
There has been little advancement of of the patreon platform, and with more and more competition from other direct compeitors (subscribestar, etc) and different monetization avenues (TeeSpring,etc) there is little reason for creators to use patreon outside of the network effect, and since they are not growing that effect is smaller every day
It's not actually that unusual to absorb security into engineering; if engineering is already doing most of software security, and engineering/ops is already handling IT security, then the rest of security might in fact be duplicative of stuff third parties can do just as well.
I have no inside knowledge as to whether this was the case at Patreon; no opinions about Patreon whatsoever. But re-orging security into and out of engineering is not unprecedented.
1. Censorship which caused a market reaction for more competition, and the first mass exit of the platform
2. Changes in the Fee Structure and billing policies, this caused the 2nd mass exit from the platform
3. Platforms getting better at internal monetization (i.e YT SuperChat and memberships)
There has been little advancement of of the patreon platform, and with more and more competition from other direct compeitors (subscribestar, etc) and different monetization avenues (TeeSpring,etc) there is little reason for creators to use patreon outside of the network effect, and since they are not growing that effect is smaller every day