Scrolling down the stream of a large creator brings down my i7 Macbook Pro to its knees. That should not be happening at all.
Finally, Patreon's 'no refund whatsoever' policy is acceptable for donation jars, but with the growth of creators offering $100-$250+ tiers, it is only going to hurt Patreon and its brand, and possibly in contravention of consumer protection laws in many countries (including Australia). When there is an explicit promise to provide XYZ in exchange for $$$, you need to fulfil that promise.
Yes, sellers hate PayPal disputes and chargebacks, but there's a reason why buyers overwhelmingly prefer PayPal and most businesses see a substantial uplift when integrating it: customers feel more confident!
The reality is that small artists and creators are often unreliable, and if patrons feel like they're scammed or unreliable (e.g. pledge $50 for a t-shirt, do not get t-shirt, patreon support tells them there's nothing they can do), that's only going turn away patrons for life.
It says a lot about the universe of web sites, sellers and payment processors that offering that put them well above every one else.
The problem for Patreon is that they're trying to provide something useful -- a service for transactions which are more likely to be dominated by buyer fraud -- but are stuck building it on top of credit card infrastructure that the law requires to default to defending against seller fraud. Then they get stuck in the middle, because buyers can still commit fraud by purchasing thousands of dollars worth of material and then disputing the charge with their credit card company after they already have it.
What's needed is a version of credit cards that themselves do what Patreon is trying to do (no chargebacks) with relatively low monthly charge limits (limiting the buyer's exposure to card theft risk), so that this use case can be met with a system that isn't a garbage fire.
They do. There's a popular website I won't name (----.-----) that has users provide their Patreon logins, and it goes and auto-scrapes all post content from people that login supports and mirrors it for free. Almost every artist with more than 100 subscribers is illegally shared there. It's really quite sleazy when you consider most of the artists let you see their entire catalog for a $1 or even $5 tier. Cheating someone out of thousands of hours of labor for $1 is particularly low.
I know it's the internet and you can't really stop piracy, but I'd like to see Patreon being proactive against a service that hurts both itself and its creators like that.
Imagine a nicely formatted table of Netflix movies and shows available in your country. New, potential users can quickly find out if it's worth signing up. Existing users can quickly realize that maybe the service is not worth it.
I also have a theory that if you're stuck looking for something to watch and you've already spent enough time on their platform, you might just settle on something.
They're trying to stay as the "first stop" of when you want to watch something, and the only way they can keep that position is purposefully being murky with their offerings because, yes, it's a 90% shitty collection.
Search is a binary proposition. Netflix either has the content you're searching for, or it does not. Because Netflix is optimizing for total time spent on platform, this is a bad proposition, from their perspective.
That's why the Netflix home screen has become a circus of autoplaying videos, "recommended for you" queues, and "watch it again." The goal, from a UX perspective, is to stimulate you into watching something you didn't come there wanting to watch.
One consideration, maybe your TV app is the problem. Personally, this is why I don't use TV apps.
Some of the people I support make videos, and while they release them early on Patreon itself, they always eventually make it to YouTube. No matter what investment Patreon makes, it will never be as good as YouTube for watching videos. I could watch these videos early on Patreon, but I don't. Not because Patreon's video watching is bad (although it is), but because YouTube is the best platform for watching these kinds of videos. The same thing applies to podcasts (but with different apps, of course).
That email was tied to a transaction in paypal, making it highly traceable back to myself. In 30 seconds, one could easily remove that from the PDF in Acrobat, but that doesn't mean there aren't other hidden watermarks in the file.
If there are zero hacked accounts ever, sure.
But charging someone $500 for actions a hacker took with their account would be.... very unusual.
Also a sizeable portion of creators from Twitch to Patreon produce adult content and much of that has now shifted to other niche sites.
1) A new payment platform is started, small enough to be fly under the radar
2) It attracts more and more adult content producers who've been turned away by the bigger players
3) It grows big enough to attract attention
4) The Nazgûl lawyers ride from Mastercard / VISA to shut the adult business down
5) Lather, rince, repeat
There would also, presumably, be a fear of censorship targeting your entire company for over a subset of content. Back in 2018 Tumblr was blocked from Apple's app store [1] and responded by banning all adult content on the service [2] - and I'm sure there's a similar risk from school/workplace/ISP NSFW blocking services which are of course famous for over-reach.
Obviously, tumblr could have shifted everything NSFW to nsfwtumblr.com but for various reasons, a lot of sites seem to take a deniable 'turn-a-blind-eye' approach rather than visibly embracing NSFW content.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/20/18104366/tumblr-ios-app-... [2] https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/3/18123752/tumblr-adult-con...
One thing I thought was interesting: Apple sells access to HBO & Cinemax through their TV app, but that access does not appear to include the adult content (or at least it does not display without an active subscription).
Or just kept using their web page?? I'm pretty sure that I can still access NSFW content in Safari.
I never understood what's the point of website-specific apps - like HN app or Reddit app or even Facebook & Twitter app - except of course some middle manager's quest for promotion.
Would you launch your new line of e-books on a site that is 95% porn and well known for porn?
No.
If you're a porn site, then you're pretty much going to be just that, it's its own content vertical, fairly distinguished from everything else.
Amazon is not known for porn. I didn't even know you could get porn there. Certainly, it's not 'online porn' which I would imagine would be the primary issue.
Tumblr became a place known for adult content so it was a problem. If Amazon started to do a lot of digital porn, like PornHub, it would be a problem.
If there is no 'search' on Patreon ... maybe they could keep it hidden. But it's a big risk.
They -finally- fixed this about two months ago.
Deep linking also often failed for me, i.e. I got a push notificaiton, I click the notification, and I end up on the first creator in my list's news feed rather than what I clicked. That also seems finally fixed now in the same update.
So I'm glad they fixed it but I have no idea what they were doing for the last few years...
I realise they can't/don't want new revenue on iOS due to not being able to use their own billing system for electronic goods and losing a chunk of the revenue but I'm sure they have many people who use the website but want push notifications to work and to read the news there.. it was bonkers.
For example, the Postmates driver app functions like it was programmed (automated) in a parallel dimension by toddlers in a thousand year future using an analog of Visual Basic. Then ported to iOS and ran via 480 API requests that transverse space, time and logic.
Nothing makes sense, everything’s broken.
The delivery address is the smallest possible font hidden behind screens. The endless dinging etc makes no sense. I feel like people designing apps have never actually used them. Or maybe it’s all designed to make one so frustrated as to question the nature of reality.
It has been fixed. The artist can configure an option whether the patron needs to pay up front or after. https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/210291283-How-...
Everyone but the people at the top are getting tired of all its problems and the uncertainty, but where else do you go? So far, no one has an integrated replacement. You can build a Patreon in pieces connected by APIs, but Patreon is (unfortunately) the only place you can get everything in one place for the price.
WordPress is a common alternative for membership sites, but it comes with expenses that scale up in proportion to how little you want or are able to do yourself. All the plugins for WordPress that do membership and file access control are in the $100-300/year range. Then there's the cost of hosting: cheap if you don't mind running everything yourself, more than the plugins if you get managed hosting. It's worth it, but you need the money to start, and you lose the ease of everyone already having a Patreon account.
There are lots of independent artists running Pateron accounts with 200-5000 patrons. Fans sign up to support them but also to get access to their library of content.
Patreon provides a piss-poor UX for getting to this content. There is no list of content. There just "here's the stream of posts by the artist". The stream is JavaScript driven so if you want to go 100 posts back you have to page through multiple pages of posts. If you want to do it again tomorrow, or if the site crashes which it does, you have to start over at post 1 and page through again.
It's telling that so many artists use google drive, dropbox, mediafire, or mega to distribute their works. This seems like money Pateron is leaving on the table if they'd provide for a similar service at similar prices. They do provide a way to upload media but the UX is awful compared to Mega which has arguably the superior UX of those 5 options.
Worse, because these artists are using these separate services there is no way to limit who accesses them. In other words a bad user can share the links with others where as if they did this through patreon you'd have to log in to access the media. Of course bad users can still share the media they downloaded in other ways.
Further, and I don't know if this has been fixed, but I know what one time they only billed once month so bad users would sign up in the middle of the month, download everything, then cancel their patronage and avoid having to pay at all.
I can certainly imagine a service that's significantly better Patreon for this use case.
Let me also add discoverabilty is horrible. Maybe this is mostly on the artists but the #1 way I find one is off of patreon. Compare to say youtube where the #1 way I find anyone is on youtube itself.