Live data from Hacker News

Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

techcrunch.com

181–190 of 277 posts

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#181
post #166
post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apps get access to a lot more data than the browser does.

Indeed, it's profitable for the developers (leeching users' data) but not the users.

Agreed. In my experience, the apps usually have a far worse UI than the websites. Often worse performance, too.

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Patreon has always had its hands dirty in enforcing their definition of "morality" -- while I almost completely agreed with their decisions, banning "anime" was the last straw for me. https://www.reddit.com/r/patreon/comments/fho2ii/patreons_ba... Each choice they made to ban an "influencer" in the name of morality was a massive hit to their business because by definition, not only was said influencer banned, but als…

Except that they didn't ban anime. Not even close. From your link a little further down: https://www.reddit.com/r/patreon/comments/fho2ii/patreons_ba... > They're not banning anime. They're banning the fetishization of young girls, which has been against the community guidelines for quite a while: > However, we have zero tolerance when it comes to the glorification of sexual violence which includes bestiality, rape,…

The issue is with how they define minors. Considering they're stylised cartoons it can be pretty subjective, and for some, simply having a flat chest = child, regardless of anything else. In other cases, curvy body + large breasts can also be considered child if they are deemed 'too cute', etc.

It leads to inconsistency, which leads to people creating content that is well within the guidelines deciding to not publish to Patreon as they can't guarantee whoever is enforcing the rules that day won't arbitrarily decide otherwise.

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#183

Patreon's problem, I think, is that they've taken enough VC money to be at a kind of "half-unicorn" status -- and there's no possible way for them to return on that investment unless they start wooing megastars to their platform. The majority of creators are always going to be way back in the long tail, but the folks at the top of the curve need to be bringing in a lot. Like, a lot. A million a month or more. And I c…

I've never been in the position of taking VC funding, and I don't expect to be in my life, but if I were, I don't think I would. It seems to be a recipe for destroying your company ~5 years down the line. Perhaps the early founders get out with a bunch of money, and maybe that's the point, but I just don't think I'd want to do that to my employees and the people who came to depend on my company. If you don't have a sustainable business model from day 1, you've already lost, haven't you?

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#185
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard it said that porn tends to have a large amount of chargebacks. There would also, presumably, be a fear of censorship targeting your entire company for over a subset of content. Back in 2018 Tumblr was blocked from Apple's app store [1] and responded by banning all adult content on the service [2] - and I'm sure there's a similar risk from school/workplace/ISP NSFW blocking services which are of course famo…

> Obviously, tumblr could have shifted everything NSFW to nsfwtumblr.com Or just kept using their web page?? I'm pretty sure that I can still access NSFW content in Safari. I never understood what's the point of website-specific apps - like HN app or Reddit app or even Facebook & Twitter app - except of course some middle manager's quest for promotion.

much stronger surveillance of the user, thus better surveillance surplus

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#186

I have no idea about the financials of Patreon but their site leaves so much room for improvement. It's actually pretty awful. There are lots of independent artists running Pateron accounts with 200-5000 patrons. Fans sign up to support them but also to get access to their library of content. Patreon provides a piss-poor UX for getting to this content. There is no list of content. There just "here's the stream of pos…

I don't think most consumers of content use patreon to get at the creators content eg I use YouTube to watch forgotten weapons.

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#187
post #117
post #83

Patreon became successful mostly because of the girls charging money for their nudes. Then they've started to ban these girls because they wanted a clean platform. Guess what, these girls have now moved to onlyfans and they won't come back. Patreon has lost the money bringing members thinking that failed musicians/youtubers would bring them the big bucks.

Tumblr v2? Patreon is not an advertising supported platform, so it can't be from advertisers. Onlyfans has no problem accepting credit cards; and Patreon is certainly at the scale where they negotiate with payment facilitators. I'm curious why they made the decision... moral superiority? If it's a brand perspective, then I think the biggest regret of Patreon in the coming years is going to be not spawning off their o…

If you've ever tried to monetize NSFW content in a context that involves credit cards, you know it is an absolute nightmare. If Onlyfans is seriously NSFW, it may have no problems accepting credit cards but its days are numbered and it runs the risk of the credit card processors unilaterally refusing to service them anymore (especially Visa, IIRC)

Patreon is at the scale where they would be exceedingly aware of this. One of the side-effects of the earlier 'not tying payments super tight to individual creators, but just charging patrons for ALL their committments' is that it let them aggregate charges in such a way that patrons were doing business with THEM, not 'NSFWCamGirl69', while still supporting CamGirl as the patron intended. The credit card company didn't really have a way to dig in and go 'prove you're not giving any of this money to porn creators'.

This changed, but Patreon remains a platform where it screens creators pretty well from the moral expectations of credit card processors (and governments? kinda? It's a very tough problem if they expect to do business at all in certain countries)

The question is more 'will Onlyfans be cut off from service by credit card companies': 'growing faster' is not useful if it's doomed. They have to also stay in business and maintain relationships with processors that have a record of showing intent to blacklist certain types of creation.

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#188
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In other words a bad user can share the links with others where as if they did this through patreon you'd have to log in to access the media. Of course bad users can still share the media they downloaded in other ways. They do. There's a popular website I won't name (----.-----) that has users provide their Patreon logins, and it goes and auto-scrapes all post content from people that login supports and mirrors it…

Yes, water marking downloads with account details and charging for this sort of thing would help put a stop to it...

A PDF I bought on sellfy actually did this. It stuck my email address in the footer of every page.

That email was tied to a transaction in paypal, making it highly traceable back to myself. In 30 seconds, one could easily remove that from the PDF in Acrobat, but that doesn't mean there aren't other hidden watermarks in the file.

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#189
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tumblr v2? Patreon is not an advertising supported platform, so it can't be from advertisers. Onlyfans has no problem accepting credit cards; and Patreon is certainly at the scale where they negotiate with payment facilitators. I'm curious why they made the decision... moral superiority? If it's a brand perspective, then I think the biggest regret of Patreon in the coming years is going to be not spawning off their o…

If you've ever tried to monetize NSFW content in a context that involves credit cards, you know it is an absolute nightmare. If Onlyfans is seriously NSFW, it may have no problems accepting credit cards but its days are numbered and it runs the risk of the credit card processors unilaterally refusing to service them anymore (especially Visa, IIRC) Patreon is at the scale where they would be exceedingly aware of this.…

By your logic, all NSFW online businesses online are vulnerable to their payment processing being taken away from them.

Can this possibly be true?

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Patreon has always had its hands dirty in enforcing their definition of "morality" -- while I almost completely agreed with their decisions, banning "anime" was the last straw for me. https://www.reddit.com/r/patreon/comments/fho2ii/patreons_ba... Each choice they made to ban an "influencer" in the name of morality was a massive hit to their business because by definition, not only was said influencer banned, but als…

Except that they didn't ban anime. Not even close. From your link a little further down: https://www.reddit.com/r/patreon/comments/fho2ii/patreons_ba... > They're not banning anime. They're banning the fetishization of young girls, which has been against the community guidelines for quite a while: > However, we have zero tolerance when it comes to the glorification of sexual violence which includes bestiality, rape,…

> even though anime characters more closely resemble aliens than actual human beings

The typical characteristics of child-like appearances is proportionally large head compared to the rest of the body, round head, and large eyes.

It also happens that having a large head with large eyes is a common method to make it easier to express emotion for objects which we know is fake. For example, the two main robots in the movie wall-e utilize this a lot, and yes, one can interpret that as if both robots are children as they do have more human child like proportions than human adult proportions.

The only real way to know the age of non-photo non-realistic image of a character is in context or if the author spells it out. If we were to guess the age of Donald duck we would base it on that he has a job, has nephews, and wear a time appropriate hat for adults, but also that his head is slightly less round compared to Huey, Dewey, and Louie.

Post reply on HN