You can connect more things to Patreon - your website, custom apps, even software and provide patron-only features from all of those thanks to Patreon. To compete with Patreon, Discord needs to provide all of that.
discord is easily the most common integration with Patreon, in fact it's often a strict superset of the value of being a patron (i.e. discord contains all of the content which then gets posted to patreon shortly afterwards). Discord can easily replace patreon for a lot of creators with this.
> Not really, the Discord API will probably supply some sort of status per user in a given discord channel.
They definitely could. But their rate-limiting schemes cripple any large-size integration. When you have up to a few hundred users, that may work. But if you have thousands of users triggering calls to the Discord API through all the apps that you can connect if Discord even allows it, then you will hit their brick-like rate limits way too fast.
Patreon is much better with that - people can connect all their apps, websites, Vimeo, Discord, Discourse, even desktop software that they distribute, and get them work with their membership at Patreon. There are even GTA servers, GTA mods that distribute member-only benefits to their users via Patreon. I'd even say that its a very good way for desktop software makers to monetize their apps too. Like the PC benchmark software maker OCCT does. (https://www.patreon.com/occt)
Yeah but Discord's complicated and stringent rate-limiting cripples all integrations. Especially when you try to update guild members' roles en masse - which is critical to any membership based integration.