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https://twitter.com/juliedillon/status/939210129261473792 https://twitter.com/kalanyy/status/939292714432004096 Desiden posted:
gradenko_2000 fucked around with this message at 15:29 on Dec 9, 2017 |
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Dec 9, 2017 14:59
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The quoted passage doesn’t support the assertion in the tweet, though. It’s not about doing anything to their userbase at all.
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Dec 9, 2017 15:56
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They want to see the 1-5 dollar donation levels go away, because those are the levels at which they make no profit, or actually lose money. Rather than taking a bigger cut out of the lower donation levels they're just making the 1-5 dollar donation level too fiscally untenable for the users and telling creators that they need to start creating and supporting more expensive tiers. But users don't want that, and creators don't want that.
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Dec 9, 2017 16:03
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Desiden posted:
The greatest terror of the alt-right rear end in a top hat demographic isn't that they're wrong. It's that they're irrelevant. If companies in 'their' hobby can tell them to gently caress off and prosper without their business, it blows a gaping hole in their self-image.
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Dec 9, 2017 16:06
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Desiden posted:(Though to be honest, Twitter's whole model of business is such a stumbling shitshow they may well need to humor the manbabies to keep the thing staggering on) Twitter is living proof that the market is not efficient, rational actors are a fantasy, and that Capitalism does not produce the best of anything.
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Dec 9, 2017 16:12
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God willing it will die as it's the worst thing to happen to non-Chinese, non-Iranian civilization
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Dec 9, 2017 16:21
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Desiden posted:
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Dec 9, 2017 16:24
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Kurieg posted:They want to see the 1-5 dollar donation levels go away, because those are the levels at which they make no profit, or actually lose money. Rather than taking a bigger cut out of the lower donation levels they're just making the 1-5 dollar donation level too fiscally untenable for the users and telling creators that they need to start creating and supporting more expensive tiers. But users don't want that, and creators don't want that. They're basically saying 'whoops, to meet the valuation we have, we need to have been the middleman for Netflix subscriptions.'
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Dec 9, 2017 16:43
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Liquid Communism posted:They're basically saying 'whoops, to meet the valuation we have, we need to have been the middleman for Netflix subscriptions.' That sounds more like a problem with the way they presented their business model than an end-user problem.
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Dec 9, 2017 16:48
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Liquid Communism posted:It mostly looks like it's a big deal to people who have per item schemes. One of the authors I support is hosed on this, they have a ton of people doing $1-$3 per chapter, and this ads 25-30% to those pledges' costs to the patrons. It's crippling for per-post people but it's been a big deal to monthlies too. A lot of patrons spread small dollar amounts across a larger number of creators and those donations are being pulled like crazy. I do not know a single creator on Patreon that has not been hemorrhaging patrons. The bigger creators can weather that, but a lot of people can't. I run a monthly and in the last three days I have lost over 20% of my Patreon income to give you an idea of how bad it is.
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Dec 9, 2017 17:24
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If you're in the UK, pledging $5 to a Patreon already costs you $6 because they're idiots and apply VAT charges indiscriminately. That is now going up to $6.50 with the proposed fee changes. This is on top of them forcing you to use Paypal since they still don't deal in currencies other than USD, otherwise you eat another $1.50-$2 in bank charges. All this is going to do is get me to drop my $5 pledges entirely (that's every single one of my loving pledges).
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Dec 9, 2017 17:33
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I hope this poo poo doesn't hit System Mastery too hard. 
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Dec 9, 2017 17:36
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Terrible Opinions posted:Twitter's only hope at this point is being bought out by someone else who can figure out how to make money off it. The problem with this hope is that those potential buyers may already be turned off by how toxic the owners have allowed the platform to become. Even before the most recent presidential election and the flood of alt-right shitheads Twitter lost out on some buy-out opportunities, including one from Disney if I recall correctly, because it had become infamous as the platform for things like celebrity harassment. These days? Who wants to spend a bunch of money for the privilege of cleaning that mess up?
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Dec 9, 2017 17:48
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Yup. I hope they all end up in prison somehow.
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Dec 9, 2017 17:49
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Everyone in the Drip office stopped updating their resumes and high fived each other this week. The thing with this Patreon debacle is it speaks to a consistent problem the platform has - they can't communicate for poo poo and really can't seem to comprehend that they're a major source of income for many of the creators on the site. I do believe that the high volume, low value transaction thing is a real issue for a Patreon-type service. It's not even about profit; you can easily end up in the red that way. But there a ways to mitigate those issues in your payment model, which they clearly haven't done, and have picked the "solution" most likely to shoot themselves in the foot. They also clearly have a backwards understanding of their market. The big money creators who use the site do so out of convenience. If Patreon shrinks, they'll leave and set up their own payment solutions, which they have the wherewithal to do, or in many cases were already doing before. The only way for Patreon to work is to have that larger base of smaller creators, even if they're a loss or break-even prospect. It's a classic "whale" model - 80% of your customer base is neutral in terms of earnings, and you make your money on the other 20%. But the 20%, the whales, don't show up if you don't have the rest of the customer base. They can't seem to understand that. So they keep alienating their customers. Either Patreon thinks they have a captive market - which is moronic - or they think they'll be able to pick and choose who they service - which is also moronic.
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Dec 9, 2017 18:14
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Liquid Communism posted:I see the nerd engine is whining because they didn't let him sell out his MTG Online collection before banning him. He's also trying to spin this as "people offended by my memeing!", so it's been a funny reaction all around
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Dec 9, 2017 18:18
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Well, Patreon is right in that there is no good alternative for people at the moment. They also don't seem to realize that that's about to change really, really fast. Drip isn't due to get released until 2018 though, leaving creators in a very vulnerable place until they or Gumroad pick up Patreon's slack. But even if those companies do come through, migrating people to a new platform is incredibly difficult and pretty much everyone is going to lose some income from it. Best case scenario, small and large creators alike migrate to a new platform & manage to bring maybe ~80% of their patrons with them within the next month or so and Patreon goes out of business by having alienated the majority of their content producers. gently caress Jack Conte at least though, couldn't have happened to a "nicer" guy. Reene fucked around with this message at 18:32 on Dec 9, 2017 |
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Dec 9, 2017 18:19
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Liquid Communism posted:I see the nerd engine is whining because they didn't let him sell out his MTG Online collection before banning him.
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Dec 9, 2017 18:25
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Comrade Gorbash posted:Everyone in the Drip office stopped updating their resumes and high fived each other this week. Yeah, they are in effect a platform that supports a ton of small businesses, and they effectively said 'gently caress you, you're too small to matter' to a lot of them with this.
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Dec 9, 2017 19:06
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Reene posted:Well, Patreon is right in that there is no good alternative for people at the moment. They also don't seem to realize that that's about to change really, really fast. Hopefully those smarter people also end up being better people.
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Dec 9, 2017 19:07
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I mean, it'd be more apt if MySpace actively devoured a previous incarnation of their own service and then completely missed the lesson there before plummeting into irrelevancy. Then again, Subbable was never positioned to be what Patreon became, even if absorbing CrashCourse and SciShow's supporter base was probably vital in ~growing the brand~.
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Dec 9, 2017 20:27
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Wait didn't MySpace actively destroy old features? I vaguely remember people complaining about that in high school.
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Dec 9, 2017 20:29
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Reene posted:gently caress Jack Conte at least though, couldn't have happened to a "nicer" guy. Why? What's he done?
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Dec 9, 2017 21:33
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Comrade Gorbash posted:I do believe that the high volume, low value transaction thing is a real issue for a Patreon-type service. It's not even about profit; you can easily end up in the red that way. But there a ways to mitigate those issues in your payment model, which they clearly haven't done, and have picked the "solution" most likely to shoot themselves in the foot.
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Dec 9, 2017 23:35
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clockworkjoe posted:Why? What's he done? Look at the Pomplamoose discography
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Dec 9, 2017 23:37
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Zereth posted:Well, one of the things they did, but that they are explicitly changing away from, was the run one transaction a month, so if you back 20 creators for $1 each, they run one $20 transaction on your card instead of 20 $1 transactions. They did do things to mitigate that problem, and are explicitly stopping doing so. Part of the problem may be that their options as far as payment model goes are limited for legal reasons. It's been suggested that a major reason they're switching to making every pledge an individual payment is that they realized their current model of aggregating a patron's pledges over a month and charging them all at once could get them in trouble, since they were effectively performing the function of a financial services company without complying with the regulations that apply to those. Obviously they're not likely to say that in public, though, since openly stating "we've probably been breaking the law for as long as we've existed" isn't good for one's legal position.
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Dec 9, 2017 23:43
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Reene posted:It's crippling for per-post people but it's been a big deal to monthlies too. A lot of patrons spread small dollar amounts across a larger number of creators and those donations are being pulled like crazy. I do not know a single creator on Patreon that has not been hemorrhaging patrons. The bigger creators can weather that, but a lot of people can't. I run a monthly and in the last three days I have lost over 20% of my Patreon income to give you an idea of how bad it is. It's me, I'm the one creator who hasn't been hemhorrhaging patrons. Of course, I have a very small number of high rollers all of whom are die-hards and the total goes directly into an art budget. This is not a feasible use-case for basically anyone using the platform at all. In the first day or so before it became clear just how badly Patreon in general is throwing small creators under the bus, intentionally, I might add, I was pretty solidly in the 'yeesh this is a bad decision but probably not as bad as people are saying' camp. It's me, I'm the one who was wrong. This is as bad as people are saying.
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Dec 10, 2017 00:01
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Zereth posted:Well, one of the things they did, but that they are explicitly changing away from, was the run one transaction a month, so if you back 20 creators for $1 each, they run one $20 transaction on your card instead of 20 $1 transactions. They did do things to mitigate that problem, and are explicitly stopping doing so. But there are also a lot of $1-3 transactions on Patreon, between people who back only one or two creators at minimum amounts, and the "payment per item" pledge options. Those do create a very large number of small value transactions throughout the month. However, the whole reason transaction fees exist - and I do mean fees, specifically, not stuff like VAT - is that processors want to disincentivize small transactions. But not all small transactions. They specifically want to minimize low-volume, low-value transactions. They want to keep me from sending you $2 because it costs them as much to handle that as a $5000 transaction, and it has the double hit of being rare for me and you but common across the population of users. Patreon is the opposite. It's small value, but high volume. And processors routinely will work with businesses in that mold to reduce or eliminate transaction fees, because the total volume of business makes it worthwhile. There's a lot of ways to do it - putting those transactions at lower priorities, batch processing off-hours, even just changing the submission process, etc. - that minimizes the impact on the processor. Patreon SHOULD be able to get a deal going for something like that. Maybe it would require adjusting the timing of how creators receive their funds, or change the per-item pledges to process on scheduled rather than ad hoc basis, but if those are communicated clearly they aren't death strokes, just things creators can plan around. But it doesn't appear they did that. Worse, it doesn't appear that they even considered that. If Patreon couldn't secure an arrangement with their processor, that would be a bad sign. Not even trying speaks to a fundamental misunderstanding of the business they are in and staggering lack of expertise.
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Dec 10, 2017 01:15
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clockworkjoe posted:Why? What's he done? He's the dude that runs patreon https://twitter.com/jackconte/status/939623273494732800?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
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Dec 10, 2017 01:37
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So if I am understanding this correctly, in addition to me paying the fees instead of the creators I back (which is fine, if poorly rolled out) I will now have a ton of little transactions on my credit card instead of one big one? Yikes.
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Dec 10, 2017 03:42
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gradenko_2000 posted:He's the dude that runs patreon Oh I knew that. I thought you were referring to something he had done in the past.
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Dec 10, 2017 08:09
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Not too long ago he threw sex workers using Patreon under the bus and banned It's Going Down after complaining from white supremacists. He didn't have a lot of good faith from me in the first place is what I meant, and this whole thing just drove it home.
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Dec 10, 2017 12:47
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Lord_Hambrose posted:So if I am understanding this correctly, in addition to me paying the fees instead of the creators I back (which is fine, if poorly rolled out) I will now have a ton of little transactions on my credit card instead of one big one? From what I understand, they're still only gonna bill your card once...Patreon is tacking on all the fees on the back end.
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Dec 10, 2017 13:01
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jivjov posted:From what I understand, they're still only gonna bill your card once...Patreon is tacking on all the fees on the back end. No they've explicitly stated that this is a move towards de-aggregating payments. They're not doing that immediately, but.
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Dec 10, 2017 13:17
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neongrey posted:No they've explicitly stated that this is a move towards de-aggregating payments. They're not doing that immediately, but. Yeah, I saw someone mention that they are going to start charging you on the anniversary of your pledge. That will definitely make me strongly reconsider all the neat little patreons I toss a dollar or two at because I just like the idea of these projects existing. The people who use Patreon to just sell recurring things each month will be fine, but suddenly throwing a buck at all the free podcasts I listen to because more of a hassle. Will still stay on System Mastery, but the others are in danger.
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Dec 10, 2017 13:34
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clockworkjoe posted:Why? What's he done? Wrote a big post about how hard it is for a band to make money on tour wherein he detailed all the ways he thrrw away money because he's a privileged gently caress who can't imagine taking a cheaper option
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Dec 10, 2017 21:23
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LatwPIAT posted:It's 17 years old. If you started playing D&D when you were 12, you can be 27 and have played nothing but 3.x edition. If you started when you were 18, you could be in your thirties. *reads this post and disintegrates like the dude in Last Crusade*
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Dec 10, 2017 22:01
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DalaranJ posted:I’d love to know what gaming periodicals the average player was subscribed to back in the 80s and how they affected gameplay. I don't think they massively influenced how my groups played, but they did occasionally introduce neat ideas that stuck with me. Reading Sage Advice helped me believe that I could do game design.
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Dec 10, 2017 22:05
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BENGHAZI 2 posted:Wrote a big post about how hard it is for a band to make money on tour wherein he detailed all the ways he thrrw away money because he's a privileged gently caress who can't imagine taking a cheaper option Link? Sounds interesting.
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Dec 10, 2017 22:11
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rope kid posted:*reads this post and disintegrates like the dude in Last Crusade* Hell, I generally snubbed AD&D until D&D 3rd came out because AD&D was old and busted and D&D 3rd was new and fresh and everyone wore leather belts where leather belts don't even go and dragons were just fuckin' everything, and how cool was that?! ... mostly I just wanted to run Planescape after being exposed to it late, which is the irony.
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Dec 11, 2017 03:09
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