[bmer]

Although, even Patreon has this issue, since there is no hard requirement to be showing your work regularly; just more of an expectation due to the design of the system.

Part of this seems to be due to the reality of creative work: you need to be willing to fund failures as much as successes, or you'll end up getting more-of-the-same rather than something new. E.g. existing creators with well-established patron bases can feel pressured to make more-of-the-same, rather than experimenting, leading to their burnout.

The other part of it seems to honestly be gullibility (on the part of backers) and lack of focus on realistic, achievable goals ("go small, then incrementally bigger") from those seeking funding. The normalization/glorification of advertising culture (e.g. "fake it till you make it") is a non-trivial contributor to this issue, ultimately making it difficult to distinguish between grifters and people who drank the kool-aid.

[michaelt]

> Although, even Patreon has this issue, since there is no hard requirement to be showing your work regularly

I'm sure different people use Patreon differently, but there's never really been a trust problem with Patreon for me because the sums are so small and I can stop paying whenever I like.

People on kickstarter are understandably salty when they pay $350 for a chair and it doesn't show up.

But if I pay someone $5/month for youtube videos and their output slows down or drops in quality, I can just stop paying, and keep getting the videos for free on youtube.

[CM30]

> lack of focus on realistic, achievable goals ("go small, then incrementally bigger")

This is basically the problem with stretch goals in a nutshell. Once you get a lot of money and interest, it's easy to add more and more promises to keep people adding money to the pot.

The problem is that each of these things requires more time and effort (sometimes even exponentially more), so you end up stuck in a quagmire of 'fulfil a huge laundry list of promised features before you run out of money'.

I suspect Patreon has some of this for similar reasons. The more money you make, the higher people's expectations are, and the more insane your own promises will get to try and justify the amount of money you're bringing in.

[nicwolff]

Most Patreons also offer per-episode payment, which zeroes out the risk that you'll pay a non-producing creator anything at all.

[bmer]

That also helps to zero out the probability you'll be paying someone who takes a "craftsperson's approach" to their work, versus a "production-line approach".

Neither is bad. The production-line approach is good at producing something defined by a fixed specification, reliably. Predictability in quantity produced and product quality are both important.

The craftsperson's approach is good at producing things where each thing is an incremental improvement over the last. Predictability in quantity produced is usually an anti-goal, as it is best left as another project (probably another craftperson's project). Predictability of quality produced is often sacrificed on purpose in order to get out of a local optima and better explore a larger landscape. So, while quality improves in the long term, it may not in the short term.

Patronage, historically, was aware of this. It did not demand, it trusted. It was intensely aware of the imperfection in humans, and it is questionable to what extent it considered genius as a truth, rather than merely a helpful myth (helpful only after the person was long dead, and not actually in the production of new creative works, but rather in keeping up the market value of previously created works, in order to help fund new ones).

Patreon, on the other hand, lacks such nuance.