I have seen so many content creators go full time and create awesome work because Patreon gives them a format to incentivize their followers to pay them. The economics are beautiful — turns out just 1,000 people (a pittance on internet mass media websites) donating $5 a month will totally change the way you run your life. And even better, these artists are independent in a way no artist has ever been before. You’re not beholden to advertizers. You’re not beholden to the whims of a few patrons (church or people). You only need the loyalty of people who value your work.
Before Patreon, internet content creators (from the BBC to a little indie band) were in a dangerous place. Paygates couldn't sustain growth but ad-supported free media couldn't sustain revenue (now more than ever with ad-blockers). Now there is an answer.
I am totally convinced Patreon (or the patreon model) is the future of content creation. Ethical, decentralized, economically viable flourishing of the arts.
If anyone at Patreon reads this, I would love to come work for you, please contact me sparrowmaxx at google’s email service. :)
I've seen Patreon kicking people off their platform for political reasons, so it is not decentralized, though certainly more so than alternatives existing before Patreon.
The evolution will converge towards content creators being funded through decentralized crypto currency platforms so that the money cannot be prevented from getting to creators if someone wants to pay them.
Something more along the lines of https://lbry.io/ and similar..
Currently BTC and the like are push vs pull payment systems, so until smart contracts are widely used to enable subscription payments, this will be a blocker.
They kicked off 8chan but kept The Sarkeesian Effect so in my opinion they've got it exactly right. They keep up pretty nasty stuff in the name of free speech, but don't let you cross the line into doxing and the like.
I much prefer having sensible humans at the helm than have something purely anonymous.
There is no "getting it right" in free speech. Either you allow free speech or you don't, if you are keeping one controversial thing but kick out the other you gave up on free speech. You can't kick someone out because you think its right and claim allowing free spech.
That is a very US-centric view of free speech. In many other (developed, democratic) countries, a lot of the shit 8chan does would be viewed as incitement to violence, hate speech, and/or invasion of privacy. The absolutist conception of free speech in the US is an outlier.
It's not even a US-centric view of speech; it's just absolutist internet nonsense. The US, like other countries, has a very complex set of case laws that govern speech. Though hate speech is basically protected, incitement is illegal. Doxing in and of itself is not usually illegal, but on the Internet doxing is usually done as a part of some scheme to blackmail, threaten, or harass someone, all of which are criminal. US speech laws are less restrictive than the laws in many European countries, but to paint them as just some sort of carte-blanche is not correct.
Even in the U.S. most corporate-run platforms are fairly restrictive, many more restrictive than Patreon. Speech on commercial platforms has a completely different set of norms in the U.S. than speech in government-controlled or public spaces. This has actually caused Patreon trouble in the past, because on some axes they're less restrictive than U.S. corporate norms, which has caused friction with other companies they deal with who want them to restrict their userbase more. For example they've had trouble with Paypal over allowing not-porn-but-still-NSFW Patreons on the platform, which violates Paypal's no adult content policy. I believe they worked around that by allowing those users to stay on Patreon but restricting them to take only CC payments and not Paypal payments.
If those activities are crimes in a country, then prosecute the crime. It shouldn't be up to a random middle-man like Patreon to be judge and jury and make those (sometimes very difficult) decisions. It's akin to my grocery deciding to not sell me an apple because I'm a suspected murderer. There are better and more formalized methods to deal with violations of social norms.
If a someone shows up and orders 5 tons of ammonium nitrate in December and want's it shipped to Washington DC that's very much a reason to decline and possibly contact law enforcement even as a private citizen. Similarly, free speech has never been an invitation to say anything in any way at any time.
In some ways, US cultural norms over sex, or nudity are incredibly restrictive. To some US corps, nazi apologism is OK and a defending it a vital part of free speech. But female nipples are the worst thing ever and must be banned.
It's a very libertarian (puerile) view of free speech. The rest of us understand principles like civility, that your rights stop where mine begin, don't yell "fire!" in a crowded theater, balancing rights and responsibilities, and that hatespeech is a form of assault.
"Government" in this context is not some well-defined cohesive autocratic whole.
The liberal democratic nations have separation of powers: legislature, courts, law enforcement, civil society.
Through these institutions we attempt to develop laws, regulations, and codes of conduct, that attempt to define acceptable behaviour, rights and responsibilities, protections, and punishments.
This is all in a constant state of flux, there is no end-point, no "this is how it is, for all time and places and circumstances".
We should probably, at a minimum, be vocal about what we believe and support.
There is no right answer here, only opinions, and attempts at persuasive argument. That's all we have.
>>Through these institutions we attempt to develop laws, regulations, and codes of conduct, that attempt to define acceptable behaviour, rights and responsibilities, protections, and punishments.
This is where I disagree. I am proponent of Lockean natural or self evident rights. Government's sole purpose it is protect my individual rights that I have simply because I exist. These rights are an extension of my Self Agency or Self Ownership.
Government is not to define what is "accptable behaviour" or to define what my rights are, or what codes of conduct is to be.
Law should simply be the collective organization of the individual right to lawful defense. This common force is to only protect persons, liberty and property.
There's no point in me repeating the most hateful things that have ever been directed at me, but they certainly were hurtful and made me feel bad.
With that being said, having been the victim of assault multiple times in my life, once needing extensive hospitalization due to the injuries sustained, I can comfortably say that I don't view these two things as being remotely analogous and wholly reject the notion that speech, even speech that I find hurtful or distasteful, is assault.
Well I think this illustrates how difficult it is to come to any consensus on these kinds of issues. Even people that have had similar experiences can come to wildly different conclusions.
Edit: I'll also add that while I personally disagree with your premise that speech can be categorized as assault, I don't think that your position is necessarily unreasonable. Again, I'm not in agreement but it isn't so outrageous a view that I think well meaning and thoughtful people couldn't hold those same views. However, when you start off your argument by stating that anyone holding a contrary opinion must be puerile(I'm not very smart so I had to make sure I remembered the correct definition) it doesn't lend itself to any meaningful discussion.
"Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me". This old cliche is underappreciated in our day and age.
Individuals are free to choose the way they process the information and commentary they receive. When someone physically assaults you, there is no choice involved, and your life is legitimately and immediately threatened by such activity in the real, physical, and non-abstract sense.
It is great that we are all thinking about what we say, but speech is unequivocally not the same as physical assault, and it's farcical to suggest it should be.
If only this were in any way true. There is a such thing as mental abuse, after all. Some folks lived through this growing up. Gaslighting is just words too. Folks kill themselves due to harassment. That harassment? Yeah, it can be nothing more than daily messages and/or phone calls and/or letters. Widespread, open racist speech generally signals an environment where racist actions are well-tolerated, I'm assuming (I have no links to back it up at the time). Oh, and this mental distress from words can produce physiological symptoms. But hey, they are nothing more than words, right?
The old cliche you speak of only works in a few situations. Someone calling you names or saying mean things on the street don't really hurt you if they are isolated incidents. This is the usual context when this is used. But in a broader sense? It simply doesn't pan out. It isn't the same thing, no, but I'm not sure why that matters. A slap on the rear someone should be able to get over, a punch maybe not. I'm pretty sure both can be prosecuted as physical assult in some situations yet in others, be perfectly acceptable courses of action. Same with words, it depends on how you use them to how much damage it will do.
I used to be a Chomsky-esque defender of free speech. Believing the correct response to Holocaust denial was refuting it, not banning it.
But now we know better. How you talk changes how you think. Violent rhetoric normalizes that behavior. Refuting misbeliefs cements the falsehood. Propaganda works.
Worse, the hate speech has become a virtue signal, a tribal identifier. It's become overtly political, a bludgeon.
I now prefer to think of free speech as a form of hygiene. Sure, feel free to poop on the sidewalk, but don't expect me to accept that as permissible behavior.
I see this trend as deeply disturbing where only those official journalist are allowed to write satirical essays online and common persons are banned because they become labeled as racists, mysogenists etc. Heck even PewDiePie was kicked from youtube red because some journalists blatantly mislabeled his satire as racism.
This debate, like most, has a bell curve distribution of positions. Two tails of snowflakes on either side, throwing tantrums, yelling at each other, and the majority in the middle who are tired of their shit.
Who's right? Who's wrong? I don't care. I'm fresh out of goodwill.
My only desire is that society stop enabling the bickering. Which will continue as long as clickbaiting (selling advertisement) makes money.
Exactly. The link from thinking about doing something and actually doing it is much less if one can openly talk about doing it. Oddly enough, much like the act of pooping.
It's true in the ways that are pertinent to this discussion. Another poster equated speech with assault. I would guess most with that worldview haven't spent much time being assaulted in the physical sense.
No one is saying that words don't have significance or power. The point is that, in a very literal way, words can never hurt, physically hurt, those who hear them. The listener has time to collect their thoughts, understand the circumstances, and choose an interpretation and a reaction. We hope they will choose healthy interpretations and reactions, even if the original speaker did not.
Meanwhile, a victim of a true violent crime like a mugging, carjacking, or politically-motivated beating doesn't have time to think down the road about how badly someone's words hurt their psyche, because they're busy bleeding and dying, in the literal sense that their body may permanently cease to function, if they aren't treated within minutes or hours. They were attacked without choice or option, and their body is reacting to the physical realities thrust upon it, and all the victim can really do is try to remain optimistic about things.
Yes, it is sad when someone is bullied or otherwise made to feel bad about themselves. But it isn't anywhere near the same thing as a person who has undergone an actual assault.
The saying really is not really hard to grasp, and it's widely applicable. That's why it's a tired old cliche. :)
How far do you want to take this? Criticizing someones religion might hurt their feelings but greatly benefit the society and democracy. Does it mean that critique of a religion or religious sects should be banned or should we just prohibit the critique or those which proponents are most vocal, intolerant or justifying to literally turn to violence about their religion?
I think that one should be clear here and distinguish between slander/defamation of a person and speech that "hurts someones feelings". If I criticize the ideas that you hold and it hurts your feelings it's is not a mental abuse if you start to interpret it that way it's your fault and should seek the psychiatrist. There is a real danger that we keep redefining words: hateful speech, mental abuse. Ideas are not people, religion is not an ethnicity, your beliefs are not sacred. What is a form of mental abuse btw is indoctrinating your (or someones) children, meaning religious schools are a form of mental abuse, sending your kids to a political party camp or enforcing your particular ideology on them is a form of mental abuse etc. But somehow everyone keeps ignoring it, it's not my kids so why should I care; I regard it as deeply hurtful for society.
To clarify, I am not saying that words cannot be hurtful. I am saying that they are not equivalent to physical assault, as someone else in the thread asserted. Physical assault presents a much more immediate personal danger, and deserves to be distinguished from verbal exchange.
>Individuals are free to choose the way they process the information and commentary they receive.
Some individuals fight tooth and nail to silence this idea because they're threatened by the implication that their own choices have any role to play in their misery. Life requires a lot less effort when everything bad is somebody else's fault.
That's a very (puerile) characterization of the libertarian view of freedom of speech. It's entirely possible believe both that one should be civil to others and that a centralized body should not actively punish speech.
The problem is deciding who gets to define those concepts in edge cases. Otherwise motivated parties try to push everything they don't like into those categories. "Hate speech" is a common example.
The same problem accompanies definitions of "free speech." People may be interested in broadening the concept of free speech so that it shelters harassment, abuse, hate speech, and generally toxic behavior, and allows communities compatible with those behaviors to drive out communities incompatible with them, and effectively take over communication platforms. Some people even use "free speech" to mean creating automated twitter bots to intentionally push false news stories or reddit bots to manipulate vote totals for stories (this is admittedly an extreme view, but I have seen it expressed first hand by people who don't think it's extreme at all.)
Who gets to decide draw the line between the sincere desire for free speech, and extending the line to include disingenuous calls for "free speech" which are designed to shelter forms of toxic and manipulative behavior that people are just using as a tool to push their preferred ideology?
Consider the speech the US founding fathers used leading up to the American Revolutionary War. Some of that speech wouldn't be allowed under any government, including the US. Yet it is by no means immoral or wrong (at least I don't think so). This is an interesting case where the law not only isn't moral, but cannot be moral (unless we take an almost anarchist view that even libertarians would be wary of).
As to focusing on hate speech in particular, I see two major issues at play. What exactly counts as hate speech and who is protected from it. Disagreements on these lead to some people saying hate speech should because they are viewing a definition of hate speech they don't agree with.
Are there any legal precedents upholding this? Being the inciting ring-leader of a violent mob is one thing, but if someone called me a mick for spilling their Guinness, I wouldn't call that an assault
"Hate speech is speech which attacks a person or group on the basis of attributes such as race, religion, ethnic origin, sexual orientation, disability, or gender. In the law of some countries, hate speech is described as speech, gesture or conduct, writing, or display which is forbidden because it incites violence or prejudicial action against or by a protected group, or individual on the basis of their membership of the group, or because it disparages or intimidates a protected group, or individual on the basis of their membership of the group."
It times past, I'd just use LMGTFY. But now? I dunno. Maybe I've lost the will to live.
Except the entire founding of the US was based on violent "free speech" advocating the overthrow of an oppressive government. So up until fairly recently it was the norm to view speech, even violent speech, as aligning with the US Constitution.
An example of speech that is actually illegal in the U.S. -- saying "[The President] ought to be killed. It is a wonder some one has not done it already. If I had an opportunity, I would do it myself." [1]
Sending a few messages along the lines of
"Hang yourself, jump off a building, stab yourself I don't know there's a lot of ways"
and
"All you have to do is turn the generator on and you will be free and happy"
"fire" in a crowded theater when there's no fire is not the controversial scenario.
It's when you yell "fire" in a crowded theater when there is a fire, and that is outlawed.
"Hate speech" is a hecklers veto on telling the truth. On speaking truth to power. On criticizing, mocking, disagreeing, debating about ideas, people, groups, political policies, governments, special interests, religions etc.. that are off limits from scrutiny and insult.
It has no limiting principle, is not well defined, is subjective to an absurd degree, and essentially nullifies the 1st amendment.. because almost anything controversial can be labeled hate speech. As if hurt feelings or even deplorable points of view are the ultimate crimes to be legislated against.
Throughout human history, when totalitarian regimes have oppressed millions of people, there was no limit to what could have been labeled hate speech when professing views against the government.
Free exchange and debate in a free marketplace of ideas should allow anyones stupid point of view to be presented and defeated / opposed, supported, agreed with, or not.
Why people should be outlawed from hating things that they want to hate is beyond me. Professing an opinion or belief about something or someone in and of itself should not be restricted, as long as their actions or presentation of said ideas is consistent with allowing others to do the same. So bullying and intimidation and other forms of such...no.
Freedom above all else. Give me liberty or death..
Patreon is not a government body. If you host a bake sale open to everyone in your house, you can and should kick out the screaming lunatics that keep making a mess.
The screaming lunatics are free to host their own bake sale at their house.
Ok, and. Do you believe only governments are a threat to free speech?
Free Speech is a concept that every person, every company, every government should work to up hold.
While governments can and have been the source of censorship, that is not the only source.
Today free speech is under massive assault not by Government but by Society at large, society it seems have lost all respect for the concept, instead of holding the position of "I disagree with what you say but I will fight for your right to say it" people instead hold the idea "I disagree with what you say so I will boycott companies that hire you, or allow you to speak, or do anything to even tangentially associate themselves with you" and increasingly people have the position of "I disagree with you so I will punch you in the face"
This is very very scary and is direct assault on free speech.
No it isn't, it's an exercise in property rights and a reminder that most of the "internet" as we know it, including this very board, is private property.
Barring a legally binding contract or criminal activity, no one is under any obligation to protect the civil rights of those on their property. If I wanted to hold a "whites only" house party and turn away minorities at the door, I can do that. If I refuse to allow protesters to use my front lawn as a staging area, I can do that. If I own a website and someone says something I don't like, I can ban them. If someone doesn't like Patreon's policies then they are welcome to start Conservatreon.
I think the scarier prospect is people thinking that property holders should be forced to act as law enforcement within their domains, and to make determinations about civil rights. Sure it may seem rosy for free speech, but you're opening the flood gates with that one.
Free speech simply says that you can't be arrested for speaking. It doesn't say people have to listen, and forcing people to listen is only going to worsen the situation you describe.
Can an American business serve "whites only" ? Are you advocating that American businesses should have the right to restrict service based on skin color ?
No and no, I'm not advocating anything of the sort. My point is simply that property holders, at least in America, are under no obligation to enforce rights. They are under obligation to not commit crimes, and as a nation we've decided that a business refusing service on the basis of skin color is a crime.
Refusing to rebroadcast or support the opinions of someone you don't like is at present not a crime, and I sincerely hope it stays that way. Because otherwise you have to apply the same logic to other rights. And that sort of extremism leads to some crazy outcomes.
For example, in the US the 2nd amendment is, under the law, of equal importance as the 1st. So should I, as a gun owner, demand that I should be allowed to carry my firearm anywhere, on anyone's property; and claim that for them to deny me that right is a violation of my 2nd amendment rights? I'm pro-gun and even to me that sounds crazy, as it would to many pro-gunners who are usually big on personal property rights. There's a reason Full30.com exists.
Or how about the right to freedom of assembly (also part of the first amendment)? Should I be forced to allow protesters to use my property, as disallowing them violates their first amendment rights?
>> as it would to many pro-gunners who are usually big on personal property rights.
You do know there are many gun owners that advocate for passing laws that make signs stating a property is "gun free" to be unenforceable as a matter of law right?
And view "gun free" government buildings to be unconstitutional
I've heard of opposition to those signs for businesses and public areas, with an argument that carrying a gun in public is a civil right. I've never heard of any serious opposition for forcing guns on personal property, like homes. I'm sure some wingnuts are out there on the ultra-libertarian fringe, but I've yet to meet one in real life.
For my part I see the signs as useful. If I see a "gun free" sign on a business that just tells me to spend my money elsewhere if possible.
> So should I, as a gun owner, demand that I should be allowed to carry my firearm anywhere, on anyone's property; and claim that for them to deny me that right is a violation of my 2nd amendment rights? I'm pro-gun and even to me that sounds crazy, as it would to many pro-gunners who are usually big on personal property rights.
There are many, many gun owners who argue exactly that. That "gun free zones" are anti-Constitutional, be those zones publicly owned, or privately owned.
It isn't. However those arguments are against PUBLIC gun free zones, with an extension to businesses; and there is a debate to be had there that will probably need a supreme court case to decide. However I've yet to hear anyone say that you should be allowed to carry a gun into someone else's home against their will. In fact most gun owners would say you'd be well within your rights to shoot an armed intruder on your property.
It's directly analogous to my previous example. It is illegal for businesses to deny service on the basis of skin color. It isn't, however, illegal for a private residence to do so.
Sigh... Such a predictable response I should have address this in my original comment
Sure the Right of association, and I suppose property rights give them the legal ability to this.
However most of these platform publicly and loudly proclaim themselves as "Free Speech Platform", open to all points of view, open to all. Even in the public responses to the outcry over the bannings on Patreon their first statement was "See support free speech but...."
Once they add the but, they show themselves to not be supporters of free speech, instead they show themselves to be supporters of limited speech as defined by theit terms of that is acceptable speech.
Saying "We Support limited acceptable speech" however does not make for a good sound bite.
Claiming to support free speech while imposing speech codes, rules and terms is Fraud IMO.
So if platforms want to censor, want to limit speech fine, they need to stop claiming they support free speech when they do not. To do otherwise should be considered fraud
Most of these platform get to be very very large to the point of more or less monopolistic due to their claims of supporting free speech, then once they are the market dominate force they bait and switch their users and become a limited speech platform. That is a classic old as time form of fraud.
>>I think the scarier prospect is people thinking that property holders should be forced to act as law enforcement within their domains, and to make determinations about civil rights.
I am not even sure what that means or the point you are attempting to convey here, Nothing I stated indicated that property holders should be forced to act as law enforcement.....
>>Free speech simply says that you can't be arrested for speaking.
No, that is not what "free speech simply says" Free Speech is a ethical axiom. Even wikipedia does not have such a limited view of the concept, the first line in the Wikipedia entry on Freedom of Speech is "Freedom of speech is the right to articulate one's opinions and ideas without fear of government retaliation or censorship, or societal sanction" See the "or societal sanction" part.
Well fine, sue them for false advertising. Or if that's untenable than let's get a law passed that says if a business claims, as part of its marketing, to support a right then they have a legal obligation to civilly enforce said right at their place(s) of business. I'd be on board with that.
As for the rest, it would appear I'm thinking more from an (American) legal perspective and the implications of various measures that might be taken, whereas you're thinking from a more philosophical perspective. If you have a way to prevent "societal sanction" without violating other rights in the process then I suggest you find a way to get nominated for a Nobel.
It's all well and good to state that everyone should listen to everyone else and that not to do so is a violation of free speech. I'm just not sure how that goes beyond theory. Even in the most benign case, that of time, people have to sleep. Am I violating someone's right to free speech if I refuse to listen on account of exhaustion? Would my old college dormitory's "quiet hours" be considered "societal sanction"?
>As for the rest, it would appear I'm thinking more from an (American) legal perspective and the implications of various measures that might be taken,
No you are seeing me state that is a violation of Freedom of Speech and jump the erroneous conclusion that I desire some kind of law, or legal penalty for that violation. I do not.
I merely want to people recognize that it is infact a violation of the concept and stop defending companies when they violate the concept or at least stop saying that is "not a free speech violation" when it clearly is.
If you support the censorious actions have the balls to call them censorious and stand by them.
> Am I violating someone's right to free speech if I refuse to listen on account of exhaustion? Would my old college dormitory's "quiet hours" be considered "societal sanction"?
Aside from the fact this is strawman lets address it anyone
Inaction on your personal part of not listening would not violating the other persons right to express themselves.
You showing up where the person is speaking with a bull horn to suppress their speech is, setting fire to a building to shut down speech is, blocking the entrances to building where speech is taking place is, boycotting advertisers is, calling employers and getting people fired is.
See all of the examples I give are POSITIVE actions people use to SUPPRESS the speech of others.
As to your college dorm "quit hours", this likely would not be a free speech violation either provided the dorms where not promoted or advertised a public space where people free to express themselves and that the hours where clearly known , established and enforced uniformly. How if there were not published quite hours, and tue night there was a vegan rally that was allowed to occur, but then on wed night there was gun rights rally that was shut down because of "quite hours" then yes I would consider that to be free speech violation.
It seems like you're claiming the success of Patreon is due to its support of the concept of "Free Speech", and by not allowing certain groups to use their website as a platform to spread their message (for example, hate speech), they're in violation of their founding principles.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it up to them who they want to do business with? What is the obligation this non-governmental entity has to act as host?
In a sense, wouldn't forcing Patreon to be open to all (again including groups with a message of hate and inciting violence) be a violation of their rights?
"No you are seeing me state that is a violation of Freedom of Speech and jump the erroneous conclusion that I desire some kind of law, or legal penalty for that violation. I do not."
" forcing people to listen is only going to worsen the situation you describe."
Personally I don't think these companies should be legally forced to support freedom of discourse on their platforms by the government.
I think that consumers should force the companies to support free speech, and they should punish companies that support censorship by boycotting those companies into bankruptcy.
The world is a better place when it is free from censorship. Censorship is still bad, even if it is legal and done by private parties. Censorship supporting people and companies should be bankrupted by the market.
I love censorship! Without moderation once a site gets big enough it devolves into the least common denominator - spam, shit posts, abuse, and trolling. See YouTube comments for one example.
This site itself is highly censored (in the form of rules and moderation) so you aren't even upholding your own ideals by commenting here.
Not sure what you mean by highly censored, I've seen plenty of unpopular opinions on HN and people that were expressing them were never banned, in fact those users were fairly rude without being personal.
Not allowing personal attacks on HN is not just a common courtesy, it protects it users from defamation, falsehoods about their life and kidnapping of topics; those are all reasons that are perfectly compatible with freedom of speech. Detaching a tread is not censoring, I never seen it happen because of uncomfortable opinions but when it becomes hugely off topic it's clearly a valid thing to do.
I'm not the one censoring people on Hacker News, and I don't have the ability to unilaterally boycott a site and have it matter.
That's not how boycotts work.
If I were able to convince millions of people to my side, THEN I would start doing the boycott stuff.
That is the only way to have boycotts work. You have to get millions of people to be on your side and everyone has to do it all at once.
But if I had a magic wand that I could wave that would make this happen, then I'd absolutely do so.
It'd be like if I criticized a dictator and you responded by saying "well, if you hate our Supreme leader so much, then why don't you form a revolutionary movement and see how THAT works for you".
no one is saying you can't say things, they are just saying you can't say things in certain places. there have ALWAYS been regulations, both legal and market, on what you can say on tv, radio, in newspapers. 50 years ago you could write your pro-nazi holocaust denying op ed but it isnt a violation of free speech when the new york times refused to publish it.
now we have large mainstream internet communities like reddit that also put justifiable limits on what can be said. no one is saying you cant start a racist irc channel or bbs board, they are saying that horrible things shouldn't be said on a massive platform that millions of people see
> 50 years ago you could write your pro-nazi holocaust denying op ed but it isnt a violation of free speech when the new york times refused to publish it.
The New York times also never publicly advertised themselves as a "Free Speech Platform" that was "open to all persons and views"
>they are saying that horrible things shouldn't be said on a massive platform that millions of people see
Well one, it is clear you yourself are not a supporter of Freedom of Speech.
Two, so do you believe that a massive platform with millions of people should be forced to sensor speech you find to be "horrible"
One of the things I always question when people start classify speech as "horrible" is who subjective it is. For example I think it is "horrible" that the christian region is given prominent placement in society. I believe the views of the Christian Region to be "horrible" and I consider indoctrinating children into said religion to be abuse. Would you support a massive platform banning all references to Christianity? And if they did would support them calling themselves "Supporters of Free Speech" while doing so?
//and before the Christians get all butt hurt, I oppose any and all organized religions, I think they are all bullshit. Christianity however is the most popular religion in America so I use it to highlight my point
if you think that calling racism or nazism horrible is "subjective" then you clearly have no solid principles and this conversation is over
i think you're wrong about christianity, and we can debate whether or not advocacy of it should be allowed on a public platform. i think comparing it to nazism, targeted harassment, child porn/revenge porn, and hate speech (really the only things banned on reddit for example) is delusional
Mostly, society at large has - finally! - lost all respect for the screeching lunatics who try to incite violence and destroy democracy, and we're starting to kick them out of places.
Maybe Free Speech wouldn't be under such an assault if people weren't saying that you have to allow everything, including harassment and doxxing, to not be "assaulting free speech".
Not to mention that doxxing and harassment are not free speech in the first place.
The issue is that those rules are enforced energetically and stringently against dissidents, but are often not enforced or enforced in a lax way for orthodox activists.
E.g. Anita Sarkeesian publicly calling one of her online political opponents a shithead and garbage human from the stage at a conference. He was sitting in the audience quietly. Result: he (not she) gets barred from returning on the grounds that his presence was somehow threatening, while her open vicious insults are passed over.
E.g. Zoe Quinn's crash override network had a chat log leaked where they were organizing harassment and doxing. No consequence.
Double standards everywhere.
This is why they like super vague terms like harassment and hate speech. If the term has huge flexibility, the people with power have huge arbitrary power to apply it.
I'm sorry, but your examples are quite out of context. Read the story about Sarkeesian's thing. Those people were there specifically for harassment. I cannot be upset at her for calling him out, and I cannot be upset that he was banned.
As for the other one, you're gonna have to provide proof.
Not that it's worth wading too far into this, but there is no good reason to believe those people were there specifically for harassment.
For one, if they were there to harass, you would expect them to have done some harassing. I have seen no examples of that. The only possible thing that could be construed as harassing behaviour was them being there in the first place - and I don't think that's a very high bar to set for harassment.
I mean, you can watch the videos[0] of the event yourself. None of it looked particularly harassing to me, until Sarkeesian started attacking the audience.
Not sure what exactly you're referring to when you say 'the story' but the articles I've seen don't seem to paint the same picture ([1] for example).
[0] First video I found, shows the whole talk. The point in question comes about 2:30 into the video.
"Not that it's worth wading too far into this, but there is no good reason to believe those people were there specifically for harassment."
Yes, their is. Their behavior, both at the event and their prior behavior online towards her both suggest that is the entire reason for them being there.
>> Read the story about Sarkeesian's thing. Those people were there specifically for harassment.
Maybe you need to read unbiased news because they were not, nor did they do anything that could even remotely considered harassment. Attending a talk of your political opposite is not harassment
Though I do think they went WAY over board on the reaction to being called "Garbage Human" but I understand why as they are correct if the roles where reversed the SJW reaction would have been FAR FAR more dramatic...
It is very much not a lie. They sat in the first three rows, and they were all pointing cameras at her. Hell, some of those people even went on youtube after to brag about what they did.
That's technically true, but the Patreon CEO has claimed that they're committed to free speech, which is false if they're going to kick out screaming lunatics who are protected under the definition of free speech. If so they shouldn't get credit for it.
Even though it's not a governing body, consumers and content creators both might still value free speech in any kind of marketplace/middleman regardless.
Government is a sufficient but not necessary condition for upholding free speech.
But Twitter has stayed relevant by allowing a screaming lunatic become President. In multiple countries. The platforms don't know what the fuck they are doing imho.
The 1st Amendment is only an acknowledgment that the government can't infringe on a natural right that pre-existed. If a company wants to proclaim an open platform but selectively enforce speech restrictions, then in a sense it is diminishing natural rights.
If it's an online platform dedicated to bake sales, then it's fine to limit it to that. But things like Youtube aren't -- they are a dominant platform and it's at least immoral or an affront to Enlightenment ideals to selectively limit from speech they disagree with based on political views.
thats the nature of the free market - if you don't like patreon, start your own more nazi-friendly site and see how it goes (hint: poorly). the state is unique in that it has a monopoly on regulating speech - a state should have very very little power in regulating what can be said, because you can't avoid the state. you can always find an internet community that will allow you to say something truly vile.
If we reduce free speech to a binary yes/no, then almost no where has free speech because everywhere has limits on what it will allow. They might have as free of speech as legally possible. They may even allow some illegal content (stuff that is technically illegal but three letter agencies won't spend time hunting you down for hosting). But if we have it as a binary option, then no where has free speech.
Also, to somewhat contradict what I just said, most places don't even have 'as allowed to the maximum extent of the law' free speech. A really good test, would a website support nude non-pornographic images that aren't illegal (at least by federal US statute) but which most everyone will assume are illegal at first glance? I'm willing to bet they won't.
You can find a happy medium, allowing all but the most egregious things. Human judgement isn't perfect, but it's good enough, because ban-worthy content is relatively rare. Freedom of speech is like personal liberty: Do what you want without harming others.
Want to talk politics from a moderate, conservative, liberal, socialist, or libertarian perspective? Sure. But advocating violent revolution is something different.
There's a lot of room between a totalitarian Ministry of Thought and enabling actively harmful extremism.
even the most insane libertarian couldn't defend that position. by your definition doxing, targeted harassment and child pornagraphy is "free speech"
free speech means everyone can participate in a marketplace of ideas, where competing perspectives challenge each other to expose the truth. i don't think you could defend targeted harassment and advocacy of violence by that measure.
Free speech doesn't mean without consequence, you said nasty things people don't agree, they can choose to not offer you service, just like how restaurants do, and it is entirely within their freedom of speech.
That's not the point... the point is, these platforms get large & controlling, and become the only game in town (by their nature, network effects and all), and people will get sick of playing the game.
Decentralized uncensorable platforms will take their place, funded by currency that cannot by blocked.
I don't think Patreon or any similar company would take the inevitable PR blows to satisfy a few free speech purists, and those few lack the numbers to support an ungoverned alternative. It's unfortunate that digital infrastructure that relies on a critical mass often has to come to fruition in the form of a business.
"People have indeed falsely shouted "Fire!" in crowded public venues and caused panics on numerous occasions, such as at the Royal Surrey Gardens Music Hall of London in 1856, a theater in New York's Harlem neighborhood in 1884,[1] and in the Italian Hall disaster of 1913, which left 73 dead. In the Shiloh Baptist Church disaster of 1902, over 100 people died when "fight" was misheard as "fire" in a crowded church causing a panic and stampede."
The classic example of shouting "Fire!" is in fact not a matter of free speech at all. It's an intentional attempt at physical harm, which falls entirely outside the realm of free of speech.
It's identical conceptually to walking up to someone and blasting an airhorn in their ear. That too is an act of physical violence, not free speech, and you're responsible for the consequences (such as hearing damage) just as with the act of shouting "Fire!".
The interesting point to think about is not restrictions on telling lies to incite panic & possible injury...
but rather, restrictions on telling the truth, such as outlawing shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater when there's actually a fire.
This is what defining "right think" means, where you have to confine your discourse to what is socially acceptable, whether or not what you're saying is true.
This is the real problem, and vague corporate or government policies outlawing "hate speech" are vague, subjective, Orwellian, and don't event attempt to assess truthiness or falsiness.. they appeal to hurt feelings. Which are always and forever in the eye of the beholder. A hecklers veto to ideas one disagrees with.
It's beyond scary that so many smart people here and around the country & world are perfectly fine to go down this road...
This has nothing to do with free speech, which is protection from government prosecution only (and even then it's tempered by certain situations like threatening attacks against others).
Private organizations or communities can do whatever they want. It's frustrating to constantly see the same argument as if everyone must be allowed on every platform - that's simply not the case.
This question applies to every organization in the history of the world. It's logically impossible to design any kind of social system that can't be ruined by people.
I don't think AI really solves the problem. The question "What happens when sensible humans are no longer at the helm?" really means "What happens when people with different priorities are at the helm?" It's totally possible for a sane being, artificial or not, to take over Patreon and prioritize profit, or enforce their own values, or even shut down the site.
The core problem is that you're interacting with entities you can't control. It's almost tautological; if you can't control them, by definition they can do things you don't like.
I've only read the first Culture book, but I'm pretty sure the Idirans didn't feel like the Culture AIs were "sensible".
An AI would need to live a human life in a human body in order to understand what "benevolence to humans" means, and such an experience would make it functionally equivalent to a human with a cloud prosthesis.
I see how empathy can help, but I disagree its required.
We could choose to be benevolent to octupi in a number of ways. We know killing them is bad from their perspective. We know that some like making homes and all like eating certain eating food and we know many other things. We could get very far by acting in accordance with their apparent desires and simply not exploiting them or their environment.
There's no way to understand anything you can't map on to your embodied experience of the world.
You can only even perceive their apparent desires to the extent you can map them onto your own experiences.
You could offer them language for controlling you, and they could learn to use it according to their desires, through trial and error, but without shared bodily experience you cant understand those desires.
And them being able to control you doesn't solve the benevolence problem. Because benevolence is understanding without ceding control. For you to be benevolent you need to actually understand them, which requires shared experience.
This is why I think consent is a much better basis for social coordination than benevolence.
In the case of AIs it is somewhat moot, because the first general/hard AIs will be clones of humans in humanoid bodies.
I mean, probably, right? It's impossible to know. We can only be benevolent by our own standards. For example, the entire premise of the Matrix was AIs treating humans as benevolently as possible (in their minds) without inconveniencing themselves.
Actually I think the matrix example perfectly fits into the op dog example.
The machines invented the matrix because humans would riot if the simulation was too perfect or too shitty, so instead it was made perfectly normal. The machines didn't care either way, they just wanted to prevent more random "wakeup" events that were caused when the world was unrealistic.
So we can't know what is good for a dog other than what they tell us. Dog is biting us or whining, we're probably doing the right thing. Sure, you can throw in a bit of human empathy to account for the fact that we cuddle and pet our dogs, but we still know what they like based on what they're telling us.
Unless you want to take into account their reaction. An upset dog will growl and bite. A happy dog has certain behaviors. It is not robust communication, but it does exist.
In the beginning perhaps humans used dogs in an exploitative way, but many of the relationships now are mutual. Most dogs owners I know treat their dog as if it were "man's best friend", and they generally seem to reciprocate. The machines in the matrix wanted us for our value as a resource not for companionship and they certainly didn't respect us.
I think exploitation and benevolence are opposed if not mutually exclusive.
Sarkeesian uses Mortal Kombat as example of a game that 'promotes violence against women' (despite being known and marketed as a brutal fighting game) so one would have to wonder if she is such a noble venture to support..
The Sarkeesian Effect is a (terrible) documentary that is critical of her, but anyway, do you have a link to her criticism of MK? To my knowledge her beef was with the sexualization of the female combatants.
I am not a fan of Sarkeesian by any means (to be honest, I just try and avoid that entire part of the internet, on both sides), but there's a difference between "noble venture" and "inciting violence or other harmful behavior".
Sorry, but "we don't need evidence, our imagination is enough" is not anywhere near "very reasonable".
The free speech is not necessary for the speech you agree with. It is for the speech, you don't agree with. Just because Patreon guys are fans of Antifa does not mean, they should bring their ideology to the business.
Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately depending on your viewpoint, it won't matter for much longer. Once Patreon demonstrates the viability of the business, which I think it pretty much has, making a clone won't be that difficult. There's not a lot of technical moat here. (Having to deal with real money means it's certainly more than the HN-mythical "I could do that in a weekend!", but, still, it's definitely in the range of "hobby programmer in under a year with enough dedication" to get a fully functional site up and running to start.)
Speaking as a decently-large Patreon user and one that has advocated for it to the point of probably sounding almost like a shill on HN despite not being connected to them other than as customer... I don't use Patreon to use Patreon qua Patreon, nor do I do use any of their site discovery mechanisms to discover anyone. YMMV. I support the artists. If and when the artists I follow move around, I will follow them; I've already got a couple of recurring Paypal payments for people who work that way.
Ultimately Patreon's political preferences won't matter for much. It may superficially resemble the debate about Facebook/Google news filtering algorithms, but the situation is actually entirely different and the question isn't all that relevant in the long term. I think the fact that we're not talking about "free" here helps a lot.
> Sorry, but "we don't need evidence, our imagination is enough" is not anywhere near "very reasonable".
The video literally shows clips of behavior. The common theme of the video is “manifest observable behavior”. The video explains how actions, not speech, are what broke the terms of service. I really recommend you watch it. (Odd use of quotation marks – you directly quoted me, but completely made up what Patreon said.)
> Just because the Patreon guys are fans of Antifa […]
If they were such fans, I'm not sure they'd have removed IGD.
I see you are new to the game of presenting video clips out of context and manipulating the audience.
> The common theme of the video is “manifest observable behavior”. The video explains how actions, not speech, are what broke the terms of service. I really recommend you watch it. (Odd use of quotation marks – you directly quoted me, but completely made up what Patreon said.)
> I see you are new to the game of presenting video clips out of context and manipulating the audience.
Yeah, right. Lauren Southern, complaining about being removed: "I was in no way a part of Defend Europe. I was merely an observer".
Lauren Southern, ON Defend Europe: "Go go go, get in front of them! You need to get in front, come around, block them and they'll have to stop", "And if the politicians won't stop them, then we will!"
Yeah. "Observer".
But tell us all about how our "context" is wrong, and Lauren was maligned.
I watched that response video. Basically, what he's saying is "these actions that endanger people in the immediate sense are justified". That standard is asking Patreon to make a political judgment. The creators in question were seen endangering others in their work. Period.
I hadn't heard of her, or defend Europe, or this controversy, or anything. Watched the Patreon explanation video, which seemed pretty damn convincing, objective, and evidence-based to me.
Until crypto currency can be regularly used to buy everyday essentials like food and housing, I don't see this being a reasonable way to pay creators.
And currently, Patreon can only stop you from using their platform; they can not stop you from being paid. I can see an argument eventually being able to be formed behind "people effectively only use Patreon, so not being on it is a death knell" (like YouTube), but it's nowhere near that point yet.
Bitcoin round trip fees are too high, cash to BTC back to cash probably averages 10-15%, plus the volatility risk. Patreon is not cheap, probably averaging 8-10%, but it is cheaper and obviously much more convenient.
10-15%!? Even coinbase with it's high fees is %3 + $0.50 round trip, which is pretty much equivalent to paypal. I would also think a crypto solution would probably take barely anything in management fees, unlike kickstarter and patreon. If your smart about it, you can use limit orders on something like GDAX and make it %0-%0.5.
Despite all of that, I don't think you need crypto for this. Patreon dropping people out of distaste is giving money to competitors who don't care. What would stop that is credit card companies refusing processing to these companies.
And not very likely to get significantly cheaper than Patreon. Bitcoins etc still require a backbone of infrastructure to process payments through mining. Those people still need to be paid, and the computational overhead with bitcoins/alternatives is billions of times higher than raw financial transactions. The cost will never go to zero.
Even if it was as low as patreon dollars would be superior for 99% of people. When you need dinner on the table, dollars getting direct deposited into your account > worrying about bitcoin prices and selling coins. The only people who have any reason to switch are those who are producing content that is seen as intolerable, people trying to avoid taxes or the law, and people making moral stands.
>The evolution will converge towards content creators being funded through decentralized crypto currency platforms so that the money cannot be prevented from getting to creators if someone wants to pay them.
The pressure will always be to the biggest platforms, and those are conventional ones. Creators will be easier to discover on the bigger platform- if you already support someone on patreon, you can find similar creators, incentivizing creators to join patreon. Bigger platforms also have economies of scale and head starts on making beautiful, convenient interfaces.
The pressure towards established platforms will always be greater than the pressure towards permissive, decentralized platforms. Patreon just has to not fuck up too bad and they will still have the monetary advantage on 99% of creators (well... unless they kick off all of the camgirls).
A more interesting question is whether Patreon would ever switch to bitcoin. They could take a much bigger percentage. They could leverage their size to provide more stable prices, or even just force creators to accept bitcoin's volatility. The platform would still be central and moderated, and if someone managed to create a decentralized alternative with good bitcoin pricing, Patreon would be able to outprice them. There would be basically no path towards a decentralized alternative at that point.
The risk/reward is still too low for Patreon, I think. As is, a patron decides how much money the creator gets and is basically blind to how much they pay unless they check their statements. Neither party would really see an advantage to switching to bitcoin, since Patreon and the creators would still get the same amount of money, and the Patrons mostly aren't aware of the potential extra 30 cents. They're also very unlikely to care.
Can we get a list of which sites Patreon has kicked off their platform? The only one I've seen mentioned so far is 8chan, which was posting kiddie porn and SWATting people. If that's the line, I'm 100% okay with it.
> The evolution will converge towards content creators being funded through decentralized crypto currency platforms so that the money cannot be prevented from getting to creators if someone wants to pay them.
http://steemit.com is an example of precisely this. Will check out lbry.io.
I'd love to write on Patreon. But there's no option for payouts via Bitcoin. Patrons could pay via credit/debit cards, and Patreon could payout in Bitcoin via Stripe. But they've specifically blocked Stripe's Bitcoin option. To "fight against fraud", whatever that means.
I agree the model is the future, but a for profit American company running a proprietary web service cannot be the final solution.
On one hand, patronage perfectly replaces all the draconian reasons modern IP exists as it does. Paying people to make the stuff you want them to make versus having them paid by someone looking to profit off government enforced scarcity on the produced work is much, much better for everyone involved (except the middle men).
On the other, unless Patreon itself goes non-profit / public benefit like Kickstarter / decentralizes their platform it would be insane to let a private company dictate who gets to use the platform and who gets their supporters money, on top of the cut Patreon is taking - for some parties, the 5% Patreon fee only exists to get the lowered resistance to using the platform. Users who already have Patreon accounts set up are extremely more likely to support you there than on alternatives, and they then have mindshare. But that is all you are paying for if you don't also use Patreon as a content host - the mindshare effect. All the major tech companies now, all the investors, so much effort goes into creating a captive audience / market / userbase to extort. Patreon is no exception.
But the stakes are much, much higher with Patreon than with the mindshare factor around Facebook et al. For the same reasons I'd argue the stakes are higher with github. Livelihoods depend on these platforms. Entire business models are being built for individuals to live their lives with work involving what these services provide. And unlike Facebook, their whole point is this model, where people do their jobs on web services - either as payment providers or infrastructure. The same applies to etsy and ebay, pretty much. I'm extraordinarily against how proprietary and controlling the companies behind these ecosystems behave, because they dictate what is a viable business and what is not.
Probably also why they still haven't fixed their handling of security reports since they left everyone's personal information on a system with a web-accessible root Python shell for over a week after being warned about said hole, and it inevitably got hacked and leaked all over the Internet. (A researcher was complaining about not being able to report a serious issue a couple of days ago.) As long as everything's centralised on Patreon and there are no meaningful alternatives there's no reason for them to care. After all, what are people going to do? For ordinary people, Patreon is where all the artists and content are; for artists it's where all the poeple funding them are.
I'm a security engineer at Patreon. Like most companies we take security reports from folks via security@patreon.com and support@patreon.com. The dedicated security email is the quickest route to the security team.
We also have an invite only HackerOne program where we've invited the top reporters on HackerOne. When folks send us a valid report via email we also add them to our HackerOne program for reward (we've paid out >$17,000 to security researchers to date). As with any developing bug bounty program we're still improving it and we plan to open up our HackerOne program soon.
>it would be insane to let a private company dictate who gets to use the platform
It would be absurdly easy for anyone who has problems with Patreon to set up an alternative place. Though you still have to deal with payment processors.
Patreon is less a platform, and more just a hosting service. Saying someone banned from Patreon is shut off from this sort of service might be a bit of a stretch IMO.
This is dismissing its mindshare model. People recognize patreon. Once they use it once, the friction to support more artists is minimal. This means if you are someone who wants patrons for your work, you have to use Patreon. Not because of technical merit, but because that is where people are.
It isn't that bad yet. It hasn't taken off massively and conquered the universe like Facebook. But it is currently on track to. The only saving grace is that the usual onboarding is content discovery -> patreon rather than patreon -> content, but if they ever become a content platform and creators stop releasing their work anywhere but on patreon it spells the death of competition.
I am totally convinced Patreon (or the patreon model) is the future of content creation. Ethical, decentralized, economically viable flourishing of the arts.
I agree. It's interesting to contrast this approach with other attempts, such as App.net for social media and Vessel for video.
On those platforms, it always felt like the paywall was first, and the content was second. When you signed up, you would feel fleeced -- as if you were paying the platform creators first and the content creators second. There was no mechanism for content discovery until after you paid to be part of the network. That isn't going to motivate people to join the network.
On Patreon it's the polar opposite. I find interesting content on Youtube, pick a handful that I like enough to keep watching, and eventually decide that I like some of then enough to pay the creators for their work. I'm still paying the platform creators, but I'm motivated by the content. And content discovery is exactly as accessible as the get-all-your-content-for-free approach.
One of the most important implications being that with services like this, creating content that a few people love is now as viable as creating content that many people like.
How is that undue influence? Did you arrive at youtube without any action on your part, was it auto playing when you logged in to your computer? Sounds like you dislike big media... just not enough to tune out.
tldrl; eat your own dogfood before telling others to do so.
Youtube is big media? It's only in recent history that Youtube is exercising power to decide what stays and what doesn't, even if it meets the youtube content policy. This is political opinion enforced by youtube.
Given Google is a public company, taking one side or another in a political discussion may not be in their interest, it would be their right of first amendment to change the sites they own as they wish, but it dilutes the usefulness and trustworthiness of their product in the eyes of the customers, and the stock holders may not like it that way. The employees have fiduciary duty to not impose their political views on their product.
I am asking these companies as a fan of their platform that they keep it neutral.
I am not selling any dogfood. I am asking dogfood companies to sell it to all dog owners, don't discriminate if they have a poodle or a pit bull.
I guess I'm not a big fan of too much social cohesion. I actually prefer societies that embrace differences. Though I would agree that can be taken to a dangerous extreme.
I'd be curious how, in your model, you'd moderate personal behaviors to tune macro results between social harmony and everyone being a low level sociopath. Historically, peer pressure and social moores provided that functionality.
Isn't there a Black Mirror episode about this with social capital? [+]
I guess that I've seen less moderation of personal behaviors via these mechanisms in our current society over my lifetime, and I'm not sure that's a big problem. I'd argue that most of the peer pressure and social moors society (especially local society) pushes are typically a net negative, and as we grow globally, we're realizing that they don't usually make sense.
NOTE: I'm mostly talking out of my ass here as I've never really thought much about this subject before. I'd gladly welcome new ways of seeing this issue and facts that counter my view.
> I'd argue that most of the peer pressure and social moors society (especially local society) pushes are typically a net negative, and as we grow globally, we're realizing that they don't usually make sense.
It seems to me that Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat are causing extreme narcissism to embed itself in younger cohorts, along with workers being more mobile causing family units to fall apart. The shitty parts of human behavior are being exploited by tech companies for obscene profits with no governance of their actions.
Data shows that loneliness kills, but we shun extended family living arrangements in the US (you still live with your parens/grandparents?). Data shows that social media networks trigger the same parts of your brain as cocaine, and are just as addictive.
I'd agree that the changes you describe are taking place, but I'm not convinced it's all a bad thing.
There absolutely are negative aspects to these changes, but I think there's also a lot of good aspects to them as well. Instead of viewing these changes as good or bad, I guess I generally see them as "just different". Additionally, I think a lot of the bad sides to these issues seem to be ones that already existed to one degree or another, and hopefully this will increase our ability to fix them.
> The shitty parts of human behavior are being exploited by tech companies for obscene profits with no governance of their actions.
I absolutely agree with this though, and think that we should be doing a much better job here.
Well, it definitely corrolates. That's how agreements are made, after all. If you have nothing in common with another person there is no framework for understanding.
Why would the type of content you listen to prevent us from ever collaborating ? You gotta be close minded not to collaborate with people who don't consume the same content as you do...
I patreon, it allows me to support podcasts and youtube producers that really wouldn't get the light of day otherwise.
That said, patreon is centralised. What happens if you're a creator and that $2000 a month stops coming from patreon? I trust and believe in the now, but who knows where they'll be 5 or 10 years.
PS. Patreon, please make a Japanese version of your site!
> PS. Patreon, please make a Japanese version of your site!
So you know, https://enty.jp/ is largely this. Some of the creators I follow there are moving to Patreon though, interestingly.
The Japanese creators I see (mostly visual artists) also don't seem like super huge fans of the idea of digital content, which is what Western folks on Patreon largely expect. Japanese creators seem to like selling books and such at conventions and rarely sell their books digitally, which is a bummer for someone who doesn't want to pay international postage. I have seen some change this though (the ones who moved to Patreon).
I'm not sure if you're talking about Patreon failing or them maliciously not sending you your money, but in either case the answer seems fairly obvious: You publish something to your audience telling them what happened, and ask them to use an alternative payment system.
You'll probably lose some portion of your income due to the friction, but given that your patrons are likely to be fairly devoted fans, I'd imagine the retention will probably be pretty good.
I have 75,000 followers on YouTube and roughly 8.5 million views. Most people don't contribute even if they love your content. At least that is what my experience has been.
> Most people don't contribute even if they love your content.
You're making that too permanent, and too general. Right now, most of your viewers aren't contributing even though some of them love your content.
If you want people to contribute, you need to do specific things to get them to convert. It's the same as any other funnel optimization. Look at other successful channels, form hypotheses about conversion, and then test them.
I am totally convinced Patreon (or the patreon model) is the future of content creation. Ethical, decentralized, economically viable flourishing of the arts.
Scott McCloud called this in the early 2000's. (Then the Penny Arcade guys lambasted him and his ideas.)
I have so many things that was paid by ads and now is behind a patreon-paywall. A plague. No thanks, bookmark deleted.
Ads is a good business model, very unfortunate that greed created this current toxic ads crash browsers and waste way to much CPU cycles - Google & co need to step in and throttle the ads.
Ads are only a good business model for Google and co. As it stands now, only the obnoxious ads really get any eyeballs/clickthroughs, and click fraud is a huge issue that is disincentivising companies from even offering online advertising.
See the example in the original article for a great example: Peter Hollens was originally only ad supported, and was living the raman/couchsurfing life. He is now Patreon supported and making enough to support a family and touring.
I don't know of any solely ad supported channels making over $11k a month for 1-2 videos.
Ads suck, they're on the decline because everyone is discovering blockers, they pester 99% of the people with things they'll never click on, require a force against privacy, generates money for a small group of companies, and generally favours quanity-content over meaningful-content (i.e. a meaningful documentary impacting the lives of 5000 people will generate pennies, whereas a cat video that one million watch and may or may not have substantial impact, makes orders of magnitudes more money).
Ads are also lovely, I get your point... but let's not pretend it's not great to see an alternative which doesn't suffer (as much) from the above issues, and can build genuine interaction/support/community between creators and users of content.
Ads are a good business model but a bad cultural model. If your users are paying the bills, only your users can penalize you if you do something an advertiser wouldn't like. If you make a hard hitting documentary that says mean things about powerful people, advertisers pull their funding but your audience might have wanted to see it.
I like patreon but at the same time I'm a bit uncomfortable with how the interaction aspect of it sometimes works. Lots of artists are essentially charging for interaction with them rather than a product. From the article: "In this system, it’s almost impossible to separate a work of art from its creator — or, at least, its creator’s public persona. Is there a future for someone who wants to be a musician, but not a personality? “No. I don’t think so,” Hollens says. “I don’t think the reclusive thing is going to happen anymore. That’s not the world we live in."
While that works for plenty of artists I'm sure there are others that can't handle it. In addition it seems really exhausting.
I get $3-800 per month from Patreon, depending on how productive I am on drawing pages of comics.
I have next to no interaction with my patrons. It's pretty awesome. If I ask a question in a post I'll get a few replies, that's about it.
I mean they know something of who I am from following my Twitter or whatever, I'm no Pynchon, but every now and then Patreon sends out emails suggesting ways to make more patrons by livestreaming or whatever and I'm all "oh fuck that".
I'm not charging for time with me. Im not selling the illusion of companionship. I'm just charging for my comics.
> Is there a future for someone who wants to be a musician, but not a personality?
There are tons of edm producers who don't cultivate much of a public personality, but even then, there is a lot of behind-the-scenes networking that goes on.
Being a professional artist has always been about cultivating relationships with people who have money. Whether it's wealthy patrons, or people who own record labels or galleries, or event promoters, etc.
One might even argue that being a professional anything (at least, a successful one at it) is about cultivating relationships with people who either have money (investors), have network, or have power (to hire you, etc.). This applies even for software engineers. Even the greatest software engineers in the world won't get very far by just sending job applications on a job listing site.
> Lots of artists are essentially charging for interaction with them
It's just marketing. Not all artists on Patreon provide this kind of interaction, and a number of artists on YouTube do. Peter Hollens' opinions are amplified because of his popularity, but his is not the only model of operation.
And ultimately, if a personal interaction is what the audience wants, aren't those artists simply playing to those desires? If I'm paying for a ticket to a rock festival, I'd like to hear rock, not country.
This depends a lot on the creator. I support 22 creators and there are 3 that I really interact with at all and that's only because my rewards require it (they're artists and I get commissioned works). Some of them promise a monthly Skype call or something like that but artists you're talking about are definitely a minority.
> “I don’t think the reclusive thing is going to happen anymore. That’s not the world we live in."
I think that's true for most creators but I also don't think it's impossible for an artist to just throw up music tracks, videos or artworks with no title, no description and no interaction and still have people support them.
Personas are more popular but it's not the only way to go about it.
I support 5 people on Patreon. A blog, two comics, and two web serials. The blog (Wait By Why) and one of the comics (SMBC) do any kind of creator-marketing; the other comic (Kill Six Billion Demons) has rewards, but they're all KSBD content. Neither of the web serialists (Wildbow and Erraticerrata) have no rewards, and I've never seen anything from them.
It's probably depended on content type; a lot of the value of some art - say, paintings - comes from the artist; whereas the value of the genre fiction is entirely contained within the fiction.
So one group pretty much does need to market themselves as an artist, whereas the other just needs to market their art.
There is a tradeoff artists can make. If they make more or better material with their time rather than socializing online, they can attract more patronage that way. If they interact with their supporters, they can also see more participation that way.
Copying scales infinitely. Personality doesn't. Only through unscalable things can people get margins above zero in creative things. See e.g. streaming rates being a fraction of a cent but people will pay lots for live performances.
I pay some people on Patreon who have never posted a single thing. I do that because I read some of their fanfiction and liked it, and I wanted to reward them for it. I even do it with Wildbow, whose epic Worm I never read (!) but I read hundreds of fanfic based on it instead.
Personally I like the patreon model, and think it works really well.
Bundling together payments for different creators into one place is handy and I'm guessing helps reduce fees, so smaller payments work better.
I only have to provide payment details to one site, so that's nice and easy too.
I get to support creators who's work I enjoy without having to endure web ads, which I dislike.
From the creators standpoint it seems to provide a nice even revenue stream. Whilst I don't know any personally, I'd guess it must be nice to have an idea of the base income you're going to get in a month, rather than relying on something more variable like advertising or ad-hoc tips.
Unless I'm missing something, they seem to only have a monthly contribution model.
There are many times where I find a content creator helpful (for example a video tutorial on how to fix my broken washing machine), and I'd like to reward them. But I don't want to do it monthly, as I'll probably never watch another thing from them.
So I'd like to be able to easily leave a one-time tip.
Hate to sound pessimistic to your well-intentioned suggestion, but if someone prefers not to support a creator monthly/regularly, then they are unfortunately choosing not to support them sustainably. I feel strongly that to ask for one-off giving is to ask for a badly designed system. People can't dedicate their output to creating value for you when they're living off a tip-jar. Consistency is the key to backgrounding the profit-motive, and allowing for the creativity you've probably come to appreciate in their work :)
Disclaimer: quit my job to contribute to Gittip community, and have lots of a thoughts and feels on the patron/gratitude economy
Everything is a trade-off. One-time "tips" may or may not provide an income flow as as predictable as monthly pledges. However, the flipside is that it broadens your donor base. I'm more than happy to make one-off "tips" all over the place, if you have a low-friction mechanism through which I may do so. However, I'm simply NOT going to sign up as a monthly subscriber. For pretty much anything, whenever I can help it.
Obviously, you lose money by not providing a mechanism for donors like me. However, I can see the argument that if you DID provide such an option, you might lose money from donors who otherwise would have pledged monthly. So which direction provides the best trade-off? I don't know, and this would probably call for some actual research to come up with real numbers rather than gut feelings. But it's definitely not an obvious no-brainer, regardless.
I wryly note that this community tends to look down upon salaried employment, and seems to think that everyone with any merit should be quick-gig consultants or startup entrepreneurs. Start talking about self-employed artists though, and suddenly people want a safe predictable salary again.
The thing is sometimes you find something helpful, but don't think they are exactly an artist. I'm slightly ashamed that I couldn't figure out how to put the batteries in the Amazon wand they'd sent me, a quick search and a YouTube video showed me what the instructions missing hadn't, tug it forcefully.
That kind of thing isn't useful enough for patronage. But it would be nice to be able to throw a nice little tip.
Interesting: utility vs art. Maybe it's a similar distinction between commission and wage. Art by commission or art by wage... I'm sure there are studies on which type produces happier artists (heh, but in a twist, it's still prob up for debate whether happier artists make their best art, but that line of thinking feels a little gross ;)
Anyhow, guess I was being too simplistic. In the ideal world, I'd hope we'd all have more early (high school) literacy on what these approaches mean, and which works best for which sort of value creation...!
I often would like to tip someone without establishing an ongoing relationship with their site/work - and I'd think that they'd rather get something instead of nothing from me.
While it may be more sustainable, I have to say that personally I strongly associate the subscription model with all sorts of late-capitalist scams, from gym memberships to Juicero. Which isn't to say that I am opposed to supporting people creating cool, ongoing work, but that's the exception, not the rule, to that model.
Many of the large gyms in particular make it absurdly complex to cancel a membership, and count on people giving up and letting it ride. Though honestly I dislike most arrangements where you pay for a service whether you use it or not - imagine if your electric bill was always just $100, regardless of how much power you used... I am sure the gym owners will protest that if they only offered pay-per-visit it'd be more expensive, or they'd go out of business, etc.
Most gym membership are auto renewing fixed length contacts with hidden terms that are impossible to get out of early. Even if you want to cancel at the prescribed time they make you do things like come in in person to get the cancellation form and then you have to mail it certified mail rather than handing it to someone.
For the kinds of videos that I find most helpful and am willing to pay for (eg, how to fix my broken whatever), I imagine the creators would get a steady stream of one-time donations, as various people's $whatever broke, and they found the video. As of now, they get nothing, which has to be worse.
Not really, Patreon has nothing to do with people getting tips, they can use their affiliate links, click their ads or just donate the old way via paypal.
Many kinds of businesses work just fine on the "pay it once" model. You produce a pair of shoes, I buy that pair of shoes, and we are done. This classic, standard model doesn't have to be unsustainable.
In particular, look at the gig economy. Thousands of freelance programmers, designers, artists, and tradesmen are making a living through one-time invoices.
I may be an outlier, as I don't subscribe to much of anything on a recurring basis except Netflix and Google Apps. In the real world, I have a mortgage, not rent, and I own my car, I don't lease it.
And to GP: Patreon does give you a "guilt trip" asking for a cause for your cancellation of a monthly subscription immediately after donating, but it's easy and it works.
Right, but you don't get that pair of shoes unless you pay. We've tried with doing things like, "You won't get to watch that video or read that article unless you pay." It doesn't work.
I agree with your point, and it makes perfect sense not to support a "tip-jar" option.
I know there is an option to cancel subscription at any time, but it just doesn't feel right. I would prefer a limited time subscription, similar to the physical magazines. If I like someone, I will sign up for 12 months of support. The author could count on a steady (to a degree) income for the next year and plan accordingly. If a year later I am still interested I will renew my subscription. And the platform could provide an insight on both current and a projected revenue, so consistency aspect is still there.
Patreon has the concept of donation per creation rather than per month, which works well for people who produce things less regularly.
It works pretty well for the ones I follow, but I guess it could be open to abuse if someone churned out a lot of stuff quickly (although I'd bet they'd lose a load of subscribers if they did that...)
One of the two Patreons I support (https://www.patreon.com/mitchbenn), who is working on a pay-per-thing model, decided to start doing very short daily videos as well as occasional longer ones. All he does is mark one short video a week as a 'thing', with the others basically being freebies. That, combined with the ability to set a monthly limit as a supporter, keeps things sane...
I've run into the same thing. Someone I'd been following launched a Patreon, and I really wanted to support them, but I'm uncomfortable about the monthly subscriptions. (One part of my thought process - I don't want to offend them if I unsubscribe/cancel at a later date, and maybe they're counting on that recurring money for their income.)
Fortunately, that person followed up by launching a Kindle book, and then a paid email series, so I've now sent them far more money than I would have as just a Patreon contributor (approx 3yrs worth so far). Maybe it's best if Patreon is just one of many revenue streams people offer.
As an artist supported by Patreon: we really don't give a damn about your particular contribution unless you are someone we have a personal interest in. Or if your contribution is notably higher than everyone else's. If you subscribe at $3 or whatever for a few months we're not really gonna notice you coming and going.
YouTube used to have a tip jar feature but removed it citing low-usage [1]. The best alternative now is to support a creator for one month and then cancel.
This could easily be solved (though I surprisingly don't see it that widely used) by including a BTC payment address alongside monthly subscription options or displayed within social profiles, for one off payments.
There are two flavors of monthly payments - $x every month, and $y for every post the creator marks as a paid thing, up to a maximum of $z - but you can't leave someone a tip for that one cool thing.
If a creator is on the $x every month scheme, then you could sign up for that, and then turn it off again. Patreon charges you immediately, so that you can't raid someone's paywalled content for free.
Yeah, a donations per piece of content are obvious, but Patreon can't do it as the content (videos, music...) are hosted in other platform. Youtube, for example, could do it, but I guess it's not willing to stop milking the fat cow of ads, yet.
I'm waiting for the time we will be able to donate as low as 5 cents even to a comment in HN.
Choose the reward level, wait until the beginning of the next month (so it's paid) and then cancel. It takes more effort on your part but it can be done.
I just want to correct your comment unless anybody else sees this.
By default this is not how Patreon works. For most creators you are not charged until the end of the month, so if you sign up on August 2nd you are not charged any money, and the money doesn't go to the creator, until September 1st.
They do have a new setting for Patreon campaigns that lets the creators change this, but many have not.
The article is well-done but speaks mostly from the artist's side. From the patron-side, I think an important factor in Patreon success is that it gives the donors the good feels for very little cost. I fund several web-comic artists whose work I enjoy at a trivial level, $0.25 per new comic for instance, or for some, the minimum $1/month. For a few $ a month, I get regular doses of warm fuzzies from knowing I am actually helping good artists continue to make art.
Agreed. Clickspring is my goto example. Stupidly high quality videos with full subtitles, good filming, and a well narrated explanation of a really niche activity. There just aren't a lot of detailed videos about clock building from end-to-end out there.
And it's all effectively funded by Patreon. $3 a video is well worth it.
Patreon is starting to take off for open source, too, which is great. I set one up and it offsets a good deal of the infrastructure costs for my projects. Many FOSS Patreons have pretty low figures - please go looking for them and support your tools!
Let us be honest though, github is bad enough that so many free software projects are using a proprietary web service for project organization. Having the primary source of proceeds to keep the project afloat also on a proprietary web service is really, really dangerous.
It's a difficult problem for sure. I actually built an open source donation platform before I did a Patreon page [0]. Over the past 2 years, I've earned $1500 on it. I've always had an average of maybe $20-30/mo in recurring donations, plus anywhere from $0-$300/mo in one-offs (usually on the left of that scale). Until last month, I had been making $30/mo in recurring donations on the FOSS platform, and now I'm up to $50/mo.
I started the Patreon page two months ago and it was pushing $100/mo within a week, and without any noticable disruption to my FOSS donations - it effectively increases my donation flow 3x-4x. Patreon is a platform people already trust with their CC# and people are already supporting other creators on. Reducing the barrier of entry can get you way more money, which makes a big difference. Patreon also makes it clear that your support is meant to be recurring, which has a big impact on the long term viability of the income stream.
I still accept donations through the FOSS portal, and point people there first if they ask me directly how to donate. But it doesn't make sense to turn down Patreon, either.
Aside: I'm working on an open source git platform too, I feel you wrt GitHub.
I can echo this, my Patreon isn't for software, but I get more per month on Patreon than I was getting per year through donations with basically the same level of marketing.
I'm thinking of getting a team of friends to make a Patreon platform but tailor made for software devs/code projects/open source projects rather than creative content. As someone that's on hacker news and has a patreon but isn't for software, do you have any suggestions for someone like me that wanted to develop a patreon focused on software?
Me! It's an idea I've been thinking a lot lately. I have some ideas I would love to discuss if there are more people interestes in doing this.We can get in touch if you want.
Ya the idea itself would be so neat. In fact, a super meta way to do it is to have the campaign to build the platform be the first campaign on the MVP version of the platform itself! What better way to demonstrate your software patronage platform by using it to build said software patronage platform. I truly think a dedicated patreon for coders could really change the entire VC hypergrowth stress cycle that is Silicon Valley and instead usher in a new era.
Absolutely.
I thought about creating something similar to humble bundle, where you can pay as much as you want distributed as you want. Or creating a git tracker, a tool that tells you at the end of the month which packages and repos have you used /cloned more so it can distribute your monthly donation budget accordingly. The problem with this approach is that you are not giving any chance to all those people who are developing stuff on their own and you don't even know they exist (this happens constantly if you are using a linux distro).
I have many ideas I would be very happy to share. I'm on vacation right now, but I will write you back if you send me an email to my personal email. Check my HN personal description to get my email addresss.
Ya, that's not a bad way to execute on the idea, however it does not perform one of Patreon's chief functions that make it so successful: discovery of projects on one, unified platform. Essentially the main setup that Patreon has over all the "tip jar" or decentralized methods that have been tried but never reached critical mass is that the entire patronage ecosystem has a home on the web rather than simply living inside everyone's browser extension or something. That's why a dedicated site for software patronage could really take off because so many open source projects and software ideas are floating around with really just donations or VCs as the only funding mechanism in the valley.
A) Given the community supporting you as patrons, fully free/libre/open productions are the only ones that really deserve support. What justice is there for creators to retain All-Rights-Reserved monopoly when they are already getting paid up front? The works ought to all be free/libre/open.
B) Patreon itself ought to be fully free/libre/open and run democratically as a cooperative (too late now, VC business model etc)
Yes, every additional $ to FLO projects is a good thing. I don't think Patreon as a middle-man capturing $'s that would go to the projects anyway is good though. Hard to know what's the case often. The $'s are more a result of the project making a concerted effort to fundraise and would likely happen with the same concerted effort whether they use Patreon or another payment method.
Do you mean coders on patreon itself? Any links to coder patreons I can look at? Or do you mean a new startup that's patreon for open source/coders? It would be really interesting to build a patreon platform tailor made for coders if the market for it is not already taken by patreon.
I just opened it a couple of days ago, still have to polish the story and probably be more active on social media (I don't have Twitter, etc... I really despise Twitter but I kind of feel I am missing huge opportunities to get visibility...)
Oh very cool. That's actually really legit and some of them are great projects/talented people. Patreon is definitely not for entertainment or the arts itself, but it does sort of have that vibe and the software's intuitive usage is built around content patronage instead of software patronage (understandably so). I wonder if patreon model can be disrupted for coding/software projects or if it's already too big and enough coders are happy with the current way it is.
I'm in favor of directly funding creators. I hate everything about ads. That said, I don't see any real value Patreon provides over other payment services, especially given their cost.
I definitely don't want politically driven judgement calls made on my behalf as to whether or not that creator should even be allowed to have my money, when that person hasn't actually done anything illegal. It's my money, and no business has any business telling me who I can and can't give money to, or why, and to step into that position is to trivialize competition. It's a bad move on Patreon's part, and it's completely antithetical to the service they should be providing: making it easier to find content you like by creators you like and then fund it so there's more. They don't do the former, and the latter is more and more only for "Patreon approved" creators. What is it they do that makes them invaluable or irreplaceable, because I'm not seeing it.
I've given thousands through Patreon but I've stopped using it for many reasons. I feel pretty justified in that decision just looking at their behavior, both lately and in the past. They've allowed pages to remain up for people who are provably doing nothing but harassing others (and advertising that behavior as the "activism" their Patreon page is funding), but taken others down just because they run a service which on principle refuses to police discussion but which isn't breaking any law because Patreon dislikes what people on that service say/do. Now they've removed someone because they disagree with something that person has done unrelated to their content creation being funded through Patreon (again, not even illegal behavior), and it looks entirely politically motivated.
I don't support Lauren and never have, but this kind of moral grandstanding and virtue signaling from Patreon just isn't acceptable to me, and definitely not from what is a glorified payment processing web interface. Tim Pool as usual has a fairly solid take on it, and I mostly agree with him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_yIp7eQO1c.
I asked this before, but it wasn't really the place:
1.
To those who donate to Patreons, how do you budget/think about/justify your donations?
2.
Do you have a set budget? What if you really want to support someone suddenly, do you stop supporting someone else to do so, or reduce how much you give them?
3.
When do you stop/reduce Patreon support? How long do you typically support someone? Until you feel they no longer need it?
1) I try to donate roughly $1 per hour of content I consume. For example, a podcaster I support creates several different podcast series on different topics; I am interested in two of the series each of which has about four 1-hour episodes per month; so I contribute $8 per month. The $1 figure is pretty arbitrary. A major-cable-network television episode purchased from iTunes/Amazon/Google costs $2-$3, so $1 seems fair for an amateur podcast?
2) The total amount so far has stayed small enough that I haven't needed to set a budget. If I needed to, I might ask myself questions like: whose content would I miss the most if they stopped making it? Which creators do I know to be trying (reasonably plausibly) to make a living from their creations, vs. those doing it as a hobby who would probably continue without Patreon contributions?
3) I have reduced or stopped contributions when I stop enjoying (and therefore stop consuming) a creator's content, or when the amount of enjoyable content they produce goes down. (I know the latter reason for reducing contributions can create a vicious circle, I don't have a good answer for it.) If the person is trying to make a living off their art, and they aren't a megastar, they will never really stop "needing" contributions from some minimal number of fans.
Some creators I support don't easily fit into the above framework. For instance, for Every Frame a Painting I contribute $1 per video. His videos are rare (one every few months), far less than an hour long, make over $7000/video (so I don't feel like my personal contribution is particularly "needed"), and (so far as I can tell) are not a source of income he depends on. But I enjoy them so much that I often find myself watching them repeatedly and find I want to contribute.
1) Entertainment - just like cable, Netflix, movies, etc.
2) The amounts I donate are so small on a monthly basis - around $3 per artist - that adding a new artist isn't a pain point in my entertainment budget.
3) When I stop consuming the content. Usually after getting the monthly breakdown of my contributions in my email, I say "I'm not listening to/watching this anymore, so I'll go ahead and cancel it."
1. There's currently only one creator I'm supporting, so its not that hard to justify for now. But considering that he puts out ~2 hours of quality video content per day, and I watch 90% of that, makes sense.
2. I like to compare it to my Netflix subscription. I'm pretty sure I watch this certain YT channel more than Netflix, so the $1 a month I give is a good deal IMO.
3. For most patrons, the goal is to enable the content to be created. My money goes towards the creator paying their bills (YT is their only job). Unless I stop caring about the content, or the creator finds an alternative revenue stream that lets them create full-time, I don't see myself cancelling.
Some creators I support just because I like their stuff and want more of it. I usually think about this in terms of the impact my contribution will have on the creator and how much I'll end up enjoying it. For example a guy who makes hours of video in his living room that I watch every month and love (personally, Lindybeige) is worth more to me than someone who makes super high production value stuff very infrequently (e.g. CGPGrey).
Others I'll support for the rewards. I know Patreon is meant to be a "support people out of the goodness of your heart" kind of thing but a lot of creators I just want "stuff" from. Typically for me this is high resolution digital art or physical pieces of original art mailed to me.
Sometimes it's a combination of both.
2. Nope. I just think about how much money I'm spending on Patreon when I do it. I mostly think of creators as individuals, not a big bucket of stuff and I consider my monthly expenses as a whole. If I think I'm spending too much I might cancel a Patreon contribution because I've lost interest in that creator or I might cancel a software subscription or something.
3. See point 1. When the value I place on the support/rewards goes down, the contribution goes down with it. This can be because a creator no longer interests me, a creator has so many contributions from others that I feel mine no longer have impact or because the rewards no longer satisfy me.
It is about the entertainment, perks, and access. So depending on the creator how I go about it. For one person the highest level of perk is $5, and they also have thousands of supporters, so I only do $5, but for another they have much fewer contributors, and I really enjoy what they do, so I donate more. Which gets me email / discord access directly to the creator at a higher level. I get to be a part of it, and I enjoy that. But if I stop listening to a podcast, and start a different one, I may switch my support to them, as a way of balancing the budget. I will stick with supporting someone as long as I derive value from it, and feel they still need it. I have a couple I am thinking about reducing, but will see how things go over the next couple months before I decide for sure.
I judge my donations as paying for content I enjoy. I donate to several web comics and some youtube channels. I enjoy the content but dislike web ads, so patreon is great for me.
I don't have a set budget but I don't tend to go for higher tiers.
I support someone as long as I'm enjoying the content they're creating. So for webcomics, if they're still creating and I'm still reading, I'm happy to keep paying.
1. Anyone I subscribe to (consume content from regularly).
2. 1-5$. 1 guy has 10k patrons, so for him I just do 1$ per episode. "Philosophy Bites" has <300 patrons, so I give them more per episode.
3. When I stop consuming someone's content regularly. I have done this once or twice.
I don't make all that much so I only fund 4-5 creators (and one has stopped taking funds and another has had health issues so isn't producing anything)and I cap them at $1-2 dollars a month.
If anybody at Patreon is reading this, here's some feedback.
I spend maybe $20 a month on Patreon. The main thing keeping me from spending more is the interface makes artists appear more money-grubbing than they might want to.
I don't want to scroll down someone's feed only to find half of the content is locked. This is a negative user experience and makes me want to click off the site and go do something else.
Suggested fix is a checkbox or setting that allows me to hide content that I'm not at the right patron level to see.
I don't think they're ever likely to do that; the response to locked content that you want to see is to decide whether or not to pay for it. This is like complaining that Amazon shows you products you can't afford.
It's cool, I just won't use the Patreon website as a way to explore new creators, nor will I patronize creators that heavily tier their content. This means pretty much all of their adult content. If they knew how much time and money I've spent on that kind of thing, they wouldn't take my complaints lightly.
Last time I tried something like this it was completely unreliable. Sometimes my javascripts / styles loaded, sometimes they didn't. That was when I was trying to alter HN, so it couldn't have been the site.
The main problem is that there's a lot of content that I like on Patreon, enough to give a small amount of money towards, but I don't like it enough to want to pay $40+ a month for it. And getting constantly beaten over the head with "why aren't you paying $40-60??" just leaves me cold. I know damn well why I'm not paying more, you don't have to remind me all the time.
I've got a pretty niche patreon where I post a stream of consciousness devlog for Luwa. Only 1 subscriber, but it keeps me motivated having an outlet & knowing _someone_ thinks it's worth 5 dollars a month for me to flail around hand writing WebAssembly after work
What I've found interesting is the number of smut games and comics creators that are thriving (sometimes making their creator 6 figures a year) because of patreon.
I do wonder how Google, Facebook and the ad sphere sees Patreon. A fair number of creators I've seen use Patreon to go ad free. It seems small but growing with strong network effects, and a clear path to profitability. In a lot of places on the internet it's almost a household name. It also is relatively platform agnostic and there is a lot of room for it to grow into. This seems like it might be a deep threat to the current power players of the internet and the current structure of the internet.
On the other hand, you could have said the same thing about Kickstarter a few years ago, but then it hit its growth limits and became just another, still slowly growing but no longer earth changing, feature of the internet landscape.
There's a part of me that just wants to set up a Patreon, link to it from a few places with enough content to have a profile (Github, Medium; if I ever finish an article), and if it starts getting traffic, do more of that content. See what happens.
(Unlikely to be anything without marketing, but, why not? Cost of the effort is low.)
I think the hyperbolic title needs an injection of reality. My 2c. Patreon ... added it 1 year ago to a commercial-friendly (LGPL3) library, in finance of all areas, that I've ploughed hundreds of hours in to over 8 years ... 14,000+ downloads per month ... and nobody has ever given a cent.
Any corporation that doesn't pull down The Sarkeesian Effect is being far more generous to the alt-right than the vast majority of corporations would be.
You really think The Sarkeesian Effect is alt-right?
This kind of misuse of labels suggests that either you are ignorant of the subject matter or you wish to smear your ideological opponents by associating them with a group that doesn't hold their values.
Which case are you referring to? Lauren Southern was literally attempting to block ships (thereby endangering life) so that goes beyond "speech" in my book.
True, but it shows that Patreon will make it a priority to refuse service to people they disagree with. If I were a creator in Patreon who in my spare time engaged in such activities, it's clear that Patreon is willing to ban my account. After all, it's easy to argue that the money coming in from my patrons is supporting my activities.
This is not good news for creators who are looking for a way to do something controversial, having been turned down by other providers like Youtube.
This is just false, they've made it a point not to block people they disagree with. This is a case of them blocking someone who was literally intentionally endangering the lives of people she disagreed with.
"If the politicians won't stop the boats, we'll stop the boats… and we'll be back with more boats..."
She was arrested by the Italian Coastguard for attempting to block a boat, she wasn't just reporting that someone else was doing it. She was clearly participating.
I apologize, I wasn't aware of that quote by her until you posted it, as I only watched her explanation. She definitely steps out of the lines of "reporter" when she said that.
However, my question still stands: what law or policy did Lauren break?
Using her boat to physically block a ship from leaving the harbor and firing flares in that direction. That is definitely illegal.
The ship had no cargo at the time, but even if it was carrying tons of heroin and literal slaves, trying to block a large ship at night with a small boat is dangerous vigelantee behavior at best.
And it's most definitely illegal. Call the coast guard if you think something illegal is going on. The minute you start forcing ships to maneuver around you at night, your risking the lives on that ship and any ships they might hit trying to avoid you.
The rediculous part is that she was there to supposedly stop "human trafficking", but her and her boatmates were chanting "no illegal immigration" the entire time.
No one except these far right groups think that NGOs are working with smugglers to get people into Europe. And the far right groups don't care about it either as evidenced by what they were chanting and what they say on their website. They've just latched onto something they think they can use to justify their anti illegal immigrant stance.
There's no evidence of it. It's like an Italian renting a car and pulling out in front of trucks headed into the US because she says she thinks they might underage prostitutes in them.
It's not your job to enforce a foreign country's immigration policies, and it's definitely illegal to try to do it by endangering yourself and the crew of another ship.
The even more rediculous part is that the group she was working with has actually been accused of human trafficking after several of the crew of their ship requested asylum and said they paid to access the boat.
You're seriously arguing about the legality of using your boat to attempt to block a ship from leaving a harbor? I'm going to leave it to you to find the law the coast guard believed the violated when they arrested them. I don't speak Italian, so you have at it.
>Wrong. The Chief Prosecutor of Catania, Sicily thinks so:
And he's a far right politician who has zero evidence.
After he made that statement, the Italian Justice Minister asked him to open an investigation if he had any evidence, but he refused and stated it was merely a hypothesis and he had no actual evidence.
There's nothing but looney toons conspiracy theories to support this stuff about George Soros working with ISIS to smuggle in terrorists, it's complete nonsense.
I get it, you want to keep Europe white. Defend Europe wants to keep Europe white. Far right news sites and bloggers wants to keep Europe white.
You can say that without resorting to conspiracy theories, and trying to co-opt the international outrage against sex trafficking.
I get why you do it, out right saying that you want a white civilization isn't palatable to most people. But wrapping it up in language about "Western Civilization" and stopping human trafficking is so transparent that it's not worth the effort.
And if you do want to keep migrants out of Italy for whatever reason, the correct way to do it isn't by pulling your boat in front of a ship at night and firing flares at it.
So in other words, corporations should be able to prevent any monetary transaction if they assume you're spending money on something they don't approve of? The only option is cash through the mail?
Where did they say they wanted to block ships ? All I've seen is that they wanted to film & document the ONG's activities, to see if they are not engaging in human trafficking.
See https://youtu.be/YmcK6GvgVPs?t=3m27s, Patreon's presentation of evidence that they were blocking ships, and that Southern was actively involved. Note that this evidence is video that Southern herself published before she realized that these actions would endanger her own income stream, rather than just people in the ocean.
Lauren Southern. She was banned after throwing flares and attempting to block a ship (with no refugees on board) from leaving port to pick up refugees who she believes are being trafficked into Italy with the government's assistance.
She was arrested for participation in this act of protest and then Patreon made the claim that her activities could have caused loss of life (which is ridiculous).
The alt-right is not "middle-of-the-road conservative". The alt-right is literal-not-figurative fascism with memes and, occasionally, good dress sense. If you consider white supremacists (oh, sorry, white nationalists (oh, sorry, ethno-nationalists)) to be "middle of the road conservatives," there is a profoundly deeper problem in your calculus.
I didn't say that they are middle-of-the-road conservative. The alt-right is a meaningless catch all that currently means "conservatives or nationalists with strong opinions who I disagree with". For reference, I don't belong to the alt right, and I am economically conservative, socially moderately liberal.
What makes you think that Lauren Southern is a white supremacist?
Do you think that someone should be allowed to try to impede human trafficking operations?
Do you think that in the absence of these NGO ships going out to sea that so many people would be drowning on rafts in the middle of the ocean?
Because if Lauren is right, then you are suggesting that incentivizing a life-endangering risk for the purposes of being taken in to human trafficking is an ethical action.
Most likely the association goes alt-right->white nationalism->fascism.
The most common refutation is that the alt-right is not a white nationalist movement, but that is entirely beside the point. The alt-right is absolutely a nationalist and isolationist movement. It was also certainly started by white nationalists and white supremacists, and those two groups are still fully present and influential in the greater movement.
Nationalism, race-cleansing and isolationism are not necessarily fascism although they are intimately related. There are a great number of fascists in the movement, including many who call themselves libertarians, but there are also a lot of people who are anti-authoritarian. Actual, literal fascists believe the government may take ultimate control of the economy and people to accomplish the goals of the nation, particularly in times of "emergency", which most of them believe this is. They do not believe in democracy under any circumstances, only in an umbrella of direct dictatorial control.
So, taking that all together, does the alt-right overall meet the definition of fascism? Yeah, I think so. The alt-right's mandate is to prevent jobs from leaving the country, end international trade (mercantilism, in fact), and to bar immigrants. They're a little wishy-washy on foreign intervention and have strong opinions both ways. They want these goals to be accomplished through direct action by the president- convincing or ordering corporations to hire inside the country, and ordering an end to imports. They want to ban immigration for the safety of the country and many want to additionally protect cultural homogeneity. Trumps cabinet very much recalls Mousollini's corporatism, with energy company reps in charge of the EPA and secretary of state.
Trumps whole thing is a lone wolf against the rest of the government, trying to take control and convert it to what it should be. That applies to the government, economy, and society. His alt-right supporters support that in one or more categories. To the alt-right, Trump is the only one who can restore jobs where they should be, restore the people to who they should be, and fix how people act and the expectations they have of each other. That's pretty textbook fascism.
There's a lot of confusion out there due to a relatively brief appropriation of the term "alt-right" by a political tendency that is now more commonly termed "alt-lite".
The dividing line that's emerged is "civic nationalism" (alt-lite) vs "ethnic nationalism" (alt-right)
ie: anybody can be an American provided they adopt the right values and behave as an American, vs only white people can be American and everybody who is not white (+ jews) needs to be made to leave.
Needless to say, the latter tendency is especially packed with literally textbook fascism.
Probably true. So we fight them. It stinks and it sucks, but it's on all of us to do so to the best of our ability and those of us who were dealt a more fortunate set of life's lottery balls (and I say this as an affluent, straight, white, cis American) have a duty to use our good fortune to help others.
> She was arrested for participation in this act of protest and then Patreon made the claim that her activities could have caused loss of life (which is ridiculous).
You don't get to go into other countries, break their laws, and expect private corporations to back you to the hilt. They are under no obligation to put themselves at risk for your beliefs.
That isn't a reasonable expectation by any stretch of the imagination. Using the logic you are applying, you believe Patreon should be compelled to support the sales of "software" in the US even if its malware on the basis of free speech.
Patreon had no liability in this situation. Patreon doesn't support the sale of software, and software as speech is a much murkier area than... actual, literal speech.
This is effectively saying that investigative journalists shouldn't get too political in unpopular causes, lest they have their livelihood taken away from them. This is a suppression of free speech (not legally ofc) on a platform that syndicates political news and opinions.
“it appears that you are currently raising funds in order to take part in activities that are likely to cause loss of life."
This is taking a political stance; anyone on either side of rescue missions for refugees is funding something that is likely to cause loss of life. One is just politically en vogue.
> This is effectively saying that investigative journalists shouldn't get too political in unpopular causes, lest they have their livelihood taken away from them. This is a suppression of free speech (not legally ofc) on a platform that syndicates political news and opinions.
1) You are arguing now that journalists should have legal immunity.
> Patreon had no liability in this situation. Patreon doesn't support the sale of software, and software as speech is a much murkier area than... actual, literal speech.
2) She was taking actions that physically prevented other people from taking actions. That isn't literal speech and is much further from speech than software is.
> This is taking a political stance; anyone on either side of rescue missions for refugees is funding something that is likely to cause loss of life. One is just politically en vogue.
3) No. This is you attempting to frame outrageous criminal acts as "politics".
1)
There is a difference between legal immunity and the ability to raise funds -- for which she was banned according to the letter.
2)
Her reason for banning, according to the company's letter was fundraising. That is certainly a type of speech.
3)
Ships in the water circling to pick up people certainly makes them take riskier actions, or pushes the risk threshold low enough that people are willing to try.
I personally think that an open border solution would be much better for everyone. I also think that international law is valuable, and painting this situation in which these people are actually being transported by trafficking rings for at least some portion of their trip is not as black and white as you portray it. I'm personally against a modern day work and sex slave pipeline from Africa to Europe, and there is a non-negligible chance that that's what is happening here.
> Her reason for banning, according to the company's letter was fundraising. That is certainly a type of speech.
Fundraising to support a non-speech activity is not purely speech. e.g., if the activity is criminal, fundraising to support it is also criminal in virtually every jurisdiction on the planet, including those with the strongest free speech protections.
This is not necessarily true. I believe in the US, fundraising would make you an accessory, just as encouraging someone's criminal action where they have clear intent to commit a crime would be.
Fundraising for legal actions is certainly speech, and the effort Southern was supporting was in accordance with international law.
> This is not necessarily true. I believe in the US, fundraising would make you an accessory, just as encouraging someone's criminal action where they have clear intent to commit a crime would be.
And now you understand why they booted Lauren Southern. Money is fungible and she fund raised for an activity that was legally dubious.
It's not legally dubious. Fundraising money with an explicitly legal purpose is legal. The potential for misuse at some future date does not an accessory make
> It's not legally dubious. Fundraising money with an explicitly legal purpose is legal. The potential for misuse at some future date does not an accessory make
The purpose with patreon being to fund her "journalistic activities" which included the legally dubious action.
It's... not saying that at all. There is a difference between speech and action. There is a difference between risking your own life for a cause and endangering a political opponent's life for your cause.
Who are her political opponents? The migrants? Their lives are being endangered now, once by governments (who have pulled out of S&R missions) and now by NGOs, and they are very likely being trafficked into Italy. People do not realize that the Camorra and Cosa Nostra are actual things, and that the Italian Mafia is not a joke.
You seem to think, completely without any substantiation, that Lauren Southern is disingenuous when she thinks that people are drowning on styrofoam rafts and being trafficked. You can think that you should have strict immigration laws and still care about people drowning in the ocean.
As far as I can see, she's a politically active woman in her mid 20s who has some unpopular political opinions that is being decried as a murderer for having a different assessment of the situation.
Maybe I see this through a different lense because I sail, but carelessness like this on the water, especially at night, bothers me. To me this is like prank calling 911 and calling it "civil disobedience" -- something I would equally hope Patreon wouldn't support. The politics are not what sways me here, and I would agree that they should not be a factor.
Journalistic ethics prohibit journalists from taking action for one side or another. Investigative journalists should investigate political causes, and even specifically pursue ones they believe in; but their protection as journalists relies on them being observers and not actors.
For this to be the case, they would have to be applying the principle to everyone equally, which they apparently don't.
This has given pause to some people -- for example, Sam Harris, one of the top artists on Patreon, is evacuating the service (even though this is likely to cost him a fair bit of money) to avoid the future potential to be financially pressured over ideology.
Patreon's pretty down-the-line: don't advocate that people break the law and don't harass people. They've thrown antifa off their site. They throw alt-right shitheads off their site.
We've met a couple times, Jon, and I've heard you speak; despite your public persona being prickly, I kind of got the feeling you were wiser than this.
The thing is, the reason they gave her for banning in the initial letter they sent her is actually consistent with international law -- she was raising funds to send out a search and rescue ship which returns refugees to Libya.
The reason they gave was fundraising for a ship that was blocking SAR ships taking refugees to Italy. They included footage of her actions blocking such a ship in the past, together with her actual fundraising appeal in which she referred to stopping boats.
Not sure if it's against international law when conducted in international waters, but that's definitely against Patreon's content policy of fundraising for activities that endanger human life.
This is why we need a diverse ecosystem of these types of services. Patreon getting involved in policing the politics (not legality) of their users is annoying but not unexpected these days. What Patreon does as a service is absolutely nothing special and can easily be (and has been) copied, they just have what I assume is the first-mover advantage right now.
Or better yet a decentralized protocol to easily contribute to people you support that cannot be censored. A stable asset is still needed for this to work and a mature ecosystem around it. Not ready for mainstream, but if you are being denied service, there is always crypto currency.
The most worrying part is tech industry buying news media. Steve Jobs wife bought The Atlantic. Bezos bought the washingtonpost. As the news properties become cheaper and the money floods the tech industry, I'm sure they'll snap up some more.
We really need a more diversity media landscape. It's entirely liberal with pockets of conservatism. We need less liberal, more conservative and much more moderate media.
It's unhealthy for the media to be heavily skewed to one or the other side.
Not only that, we need this is academia and corporations and the banking sector. More diversity. More competing thoughts/ideas.
Probably not happening, since private and unlisted videos have plenty of non Patreon uses as well.
For example, some people use unlisted videos in thei Ycombinator or startup accelerator applications. Or on pages on their own sites where the video merely compliments the content and is useless on its own.
Another example is you only need to be 13 to have a youtube account and the interesting privacy compromise at school is the kids upload their video presentation homework to youtube as private videos.
Another example is prepping for launch day, upload and test everything then change private to public on the big day.
I suspect google can't monetize private videos because it would bring an uncomfortable discussion about income inequality at youtube (much like patreon, almost all users make essentially no money, which is not going to help content provider recruitment if it becomes noticed in wider public eye)
I can't imagine that they would do that. At the very least if they did, they would gate it for a few $$/mo. Make it a feature for red users only or something.
I'm https://www.patreon.com/airwindows and I'm writing audio DSP plugins in AU and VST form, for a living. Here are my observations over the past year of relative success on Patreon.
I'm in the top 3.2% of all Patreon, sitewide. That amounts to only a little over $700 a month (I'm using it to replace a for-pay business model that wildly oscillated from $400 to $3000 a month). It's growing.
I'm having to put out twice or three times the work, but I'm happier with a 'free/patronage' model because what was happening to me under the for-pay model was, I got locked into a 'hype cycle' versus other developers and companies. The sense I had was, my industry sector is dying. The way we treat customers is worsening, and it's a race to DRM-based, extremely invasive monthly software rental and a degree of dishonesty that didn't sit well with me. I feel that I bailed 'in time' to turn my ten years of reputation and experience into just-barely a subsistence using Patreon, and that if I hadn't done so, I would have been run out of business by competitors using every sort of deceptive and customer-abusing practice, and the epitaph would've been 'A shame, he was one of the good ones. Tough business'.
As such I feel I have a real-world view of what Patreon actually is. It's a form of payment processor that can let you bill for basically 'goodwill': the strong point is, it lets you render your income more predictable, at the cost of not being able to exploit individual creations which might be more valuable.
Never, NEVER get sucked into the 'just 0.1% of all living humans donating one cent a month will make you rich!' argument. If you have a hundred thousand known fans, MAYBE you can get a hundredth of them to give to you. You've got no control over what 'the crowd' will do. I don't know how many times I've revealed on HN that I'm creating mass quantities of code with an open-source (planned MIT license) future, on Patreon, and of the 347 patrons I've got, ALL of them are from my existing connections who already use my software. I'm looking to do an experiment with Facebook ads where I literally link to my entire library as a free zip to download and say 'I'm paying Facebook to tell you that I made this for you'. Haven't done it yet, don't have high hopes for it.
ALL your traction on Patreon comes organically from what you're already doing. In no way does it find you patrons: it's your shopping cart software. That does have one unusual consequence: since they aggregate patronage together and bill people in a lump sum, I've never seen anything more effective at enabling content that is routinely censored by credit card companies. Anyone who knows anyone who's tried to run an internet content business with NSFW material as part of the mix (I know a bunch of cartoonists) knows the dangers of getting banned by Visa and Mastercard (IIRC, particularly Visa won't touch you if you're dirty-minded). Patreon is a layer of abstraction that has enabled a startling opening up of opportunity for censored content, and that's shown in the NSFW side of Patreon. It's still not a 'free ticket to money' as you still have to generate your own attention, but obviously if you're good at NSFW content and distributing it free then the internet will beat a path to your door, and Patreon is accepted (in fact, the paywall model seems popular among NSFW creators with few objections to the idea. Premium content may not last long before being 'liberated' but I rarely see objection to the basic concept of a paywall around the freshest source of the creator's output).
I've been keeping records of what constitutes the top 1% of all Patreon, because I was keeping records of where I stood (started out at top 10% almost immediately because I had ten years of existing relationships w. customers). About a year ago, the 1% mark sat at around $2350 a month, with total creators between 41,000 and 45,000. It's been dropping, and as Patreon approaches 78,000 creators the 1% mark is dropping below $1890. This is while key patreon accounts are hitting new records for monthly income. It's definitely the internet power-law thing in action: the number of participants doubles, but most people are doing worse: the distribution is NOT staying the same, it's getting more skewed towards the outliers. I'm guessing this is partly caused by a flood of people who think it's an internet lottery ticket and not a way to bill masses of existing customers…
Summary: Patreon is probably even less prone to 'discovery of worthwhile projects' than Kickstarter, because the mode of engagement is different: rather than seek out 'discoveries' it's a method of inserting benevolent digital leeches onto people's credit cards, very much like DRM-based rental schemes but less coercive. Because it can be used in a 'strictly voluntary' way, the revenue you'll get seems to be a quarter to a tenth what you'd get on a 'direct sales' model, but the consistency of a massed small-donation model combined with billing people's credit cards gives you a steadiness of income that is a LOT more easy to live with than boom-and-bust product development (which I did for a decade, pre-Patreon).
If you can budget for a growth month-over-month that's a little better than, say, the growth of index funds, and you've got created product with a decent number of people already aware of what you do, it's great. I have no regrets about going Patreon. I passed up an opportunity to do my whole 'for-pay' model over again to a market at least twice the size of my original (my whole decade of for-pay work was Mac only, and I relaunched targeting PC VST) but I'm glad I did. It let me double down on my positioning as a product maker, and completely avoid spending any time on being an internet cop. I just give everything away now, and the patronage gradually gets closer to minimum wage ;)
For now, I am your audio DSP waitress, on roller-skates. I always figured that was what ten years of creative work was worth ;)
Patreon, if you are listening, don't buy into all the power that the article wants to shower upon you. They want you to influence your exercise of that power, and they want you to use that power to do their bidding in limiting free debate of ideas.
Patrons and the person that they support, that's it, that's all there is to it. The silver coin is being given by hands of patrons and taken by hands of one that is being supported, that silver coin shouldn't have opinions, emotions and desires. Stay neutral, that is the greatest challenge of our time, stay neutral. If a crime is being committed then co-operate fully with law enforcement, but don't give in to the pressures from lobbying groups with their own agenda.
Don't get carried away into the corrupting power the platforms like youtube, facebook, twitter exercise on the discussion carried out on these platforms. They have absolute power, and you can see that once you use it, it's addictively corrupting. Stay neutral, it is going to be hard to do, I hope you find the power within you to do so.
Here's an hour long interview with Patreon's CEO, Jack Conte, where he goes through some ridiculous mental gymnastics trying to justify why it's ok he is kicking conservative journalists off his platform.
Yes, now white supremacists trying to make sure brown people die in the ocean using patreon funds are conservative journalists. Won't anyone think of free speech? Next he'll ban patreon crowdfunding the creation of snuff films, what a monster. It's almost like he doesn't want to be knowingly complicit in murder.
I'll give you this, though, the man is devious -- can you imagine the mental gymnastics involved in watching a video proudly filmed and posted online by these people of them doing a thing and discussing that very thing in the middle of doing it? And using that as evidence? Truly disgusting.
Not having watched the whole thing, it sounds like this Lauren Southern (the journalist in question) was using funds from Patreon to help blockade a ship in the Mediterranean. They though the ship was leaving to collect migrants, apparently it was being used by doctors without borders for search and rescue operations.
The CEO states in the first couple of minutes that they wouldn't be supporting that kind of activity and is apparently against their terms of service. This seems pretty obviously not about freedom of speech but about what illegal activities Patreon could be accused of supporting financially.*
Does he go on later in the video to justify removing other accounts because of political beliefs? I haven't made it much further in.
*EDIT: So after watching another video on the subject, the official statement has less to do with what Patreon doesn't want to be seen funding but more about a section of their content policy stating they will not allow action that might endanger the life of another person, i.e. blockading search and rescue vessels.
Sure, assuming Doctors Without Borders is in the people smuggling business now, it is still a seaworthy vessel instead of a makeshift raft, the kind that is responsible for that drowned toddler washing up on European shores which is specifically used as an example of the possible harm that would be in breach of the company's content policy.
One of the reasons North African smugglers put people on makeshift rafts is because they know that NGO vessels will rescue them. The African smugglers and NGOs are in cahoots - effectively making the NGOs smugglers as well.
Does that change the fact without the NGO craft, people aboard the raft are at greater risk of drowning? All of this just sounds like justification for allowing people to drown. I'm sure there are better ways to prevent people smugglers than blockading the part of the operation that prevents human deaths.
Picking up people 20 miles off of Libya's coast and bringing them to Italy instead of to the much (!) closer African shore is not exactly "search & rescue".
Ignoring your apparent political motivation to keep these people out of Europe (which is not really what is being discussed), the fact still stands that without these ships, human people are at greater risk of drowning. As I stated in an earlier post, there are better ways to stop people smuggling than letting the people being smuggled, drown at sea.
Yes, the better way is to make it clear that trying to illegally enter Europe is useless. If there is no motivation to cross the sea in a rubber dinghy, there will be no drowning people, either.
But this is apparently out of the question, for reasons of "humanity".
I'm not disagreeing with you, but we aren't talking about immigration policy here, we are talking about whether or not Patreon's content policy was violated.
A lot of creators I appreciate use Patreon, so I signed up to donate to them. They started sending me spam emails. It was like I was paying extra (giving Patreon a cut) for the privilege of getting annoying emails. Now I just donate directly to the creators, and I have a checklist that I go through every month.
I think something like Patreon is a great idea, but having a centralized company handle it and take a cut is not the way to go about it.
> having a centralized company handle it and take a cut is not the way to go about it
Any suggestions, given the "tipjar" model doesn't seem to cut it (as per the article)?
Personally, I like it (especially as a consumer). One bill per month for as many artists I want to support on the platform, one location to look up updates, and emails only when the artist themselves posts something (and the monthly bill). I imagine that, as an artist, losing that 5% cut is fine for not having to deal with CC fees, chargebacks, account transfers, and so forth.
I dont' find the emails I receive via Patreon onerous, myself. Especially when I'm explicitly supporting the artists triggering the emails. Perhaps I'm just supporting fewer artists, or clicked the right account boxes.
The default is to email you every time someone you support publishes anything on Patreon. You turn this off, but the annoying thing is that you need to turn it off separately for each person you support.
I would also like to add Ease of Use to your list.
I have had to help several of my Patrons with basic tech support issues, like setting up RSS feeds in their podcast app. And I doubt that they would be able/comfortable with working with a service that is not as easy and straight forward as Patreon.
Cite your sources, because you're objectively wrong.
Stop saying that people literally advocate for death. This is something that has happened in the past, something that will probably happen in the future, and being a sensationalist about it just makes you an asshole.
Right, so you're saying that some other woman is a white nationalist, therefore Laura Southern is? It kind of sounds like you are smearing her because you disagree with her
In my years on the internet I find the content works itself out, so I'm unsure why I'd pay anyone anything. Half the reason I like most of it is because it's free.
Every I support on Patreon publishes there content for free. Some have token perks, like early access or occasional patron only content, but not enough to justify paying. It is a patronage model. Donors donate so the create has the resources to create.
Before Patreon, internet content creators (from the BBC to a little indie band) were in a dangerous place. Paygates couldn't sustain growth but ad-supported free media couldn't sustain revenue (now more than ever with ad-blockers). Now there is an answer.
I am totally convinced Patreon (or the patreon model) is the future of content creation. Ethical, decentralized, economically viable flourishing of the arts.
If anyone at Patreon reads this, I would love to come work for you, please contact me sparrowmaxx at google’s email service. :)