I have had “donate” buttons on my work and I have had Patreon and I have gotten several orders of magnitude more money out of Patreon than any other method. Patreon has more than earned their 5% cut of what my fans are willing to give me for drawing weird comics that make no attempt to fit into what corporations are interested in marketing.

For me it somehow feels like my donations are being received in a more meaningful way via Patreon than anywhere else, even if the creator has no rewards set up. Like, a "Donate" button on a creator's website just feels like sending my money into a black hole. But sending it in Patreon makes me feel like a real supporter.

It's completely irrational but there it is. And I suspect a lot of people feel the same way too for some reason.

I guess on Patreon you are buying a bigger number on the creator's page. The other reason is that it gives you a consistent "workflow" so it is easy to subscribe and unsubscribe. Meanwhile if you wanted to help a youtuber who was sometimes streaming on twitch your only option would be to subscribe on twitch even though you mostly watch the youtube videos.

I'm with you on the political thing, but the middleman is great for reducing friction. I personally do not like to think about X number of expenses, which means X receipts in the email, X credit card numbers to update, etc. Patreon was one expense. What I would give to have one organization handles every charity I might donate to (and then have them hide my mailing address from them).

At very least it would be nice to have a piece of local software that acts as a "middleman" by integrating with (let's say) Stripe or Bitcoin, and I set up subscriptions that way.

Yes, I will simply not donate if my only option is Patreon. I want a dumb pipe between myself and the person or organization who receives the money. I do not want the pipe making any decisions about who gets to use it.

The idea that I am going to have to navigate the ever-changing political sensibilities of different organizations is starting to bother me, and I am seeing in it more and more places.

Small-time niche creators largely can't cut out the middleman, because consumers are (quite understandably) reluctant to give payment information to some random person with no real reputation.

Discoverability is a huge deal. Looking for new, interesting projects? You know where to go.

It's the reason Etsy is very popular. Could sellers open their own Shopify stores in order to have more control over their storefronts? Of course, but they lose out on the search feature that Etsy provides, as well as the trust that buyers associate with these larger platforms.

Is Patreon really set up for discoverability? I mean all the time I ended up on patreon was from links given by various content creators

I don't really understand pateron when I have a donate button..but I imagine people who use pateron are doing better..

Gamification?

Single place, consistent UI, my credit card details are already there. I can change my card / address for everything in one go. It removes a lot of friction.

I've got my Patreon set up to pay some folks I like monthly, and I can't even tell you who they are off the top of my head, but I decided that I wanted to budget $x towards supporting cool people and it's been charging me in the background ever since. Meanwhile, I can barely remember to pay my voice teacher every week and I go there in person (well, not anymore) and sing for an hour.

For 10 years I’ve had an automatic $2 monthly PayPal payment sent to a podcast I enjoy.

In addition to what lmm mentioned, giving to patreon usually comes with some sort of perk or special content, and it's also a subscription by default which I imagine isn't the case with a donate button.

It's the same thing that PayPal brings to the table when any website could just have a credit card form.