221–230 of 277 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some of the services Patreon offers bring them dangerously close to being regulated as a lender, or even a bank. Wouldn't surprise me if some number of their staff are retained to meet any such compliance needs.
Such as?
tl;dr: payday loans
I think there should be a music service that works exactly like Spotify / Apple Music / Google Music but with these differences: 1. No free tier 2. Your views determine which artists get your money. AFAIK all of the above mentioned services pool views and give your money to the artists with the most overall views. If I listen exclusively to Scatman John's Scatman's World then I would have expected his estate to get a…
What's the difference? Maybe I misunderstood but isn't pooling the views and then giving money weighted by views the same thing?
I listen to artist A's song 1 time, you listen to artist B's song 9 times. We listen to no other songs for the month.
With pooling, A gets 10% of the money, B get's 10% of the money.
With their suggestion, they each get 50%
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…
Their UX for viewing creations is absolutely atrocious. If you're going to write a site like a JavaScript SPA, at least do it well. Scrolling down the stream of a large creator brings down my i7 Macbook Pro to its knees. That should not be happening at all. Finally, Patreon's 'no refund whatsoever' policy is acceptable for donation jars, but with the growth of creators offering $100-$250+ tiers, it is only going to h…
It says a lot about the universe of web sites, sellers and payment processors that offering that put them well above every one else.
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 s…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The world is bad UX which I tend to think is a conspiracy. For example, the Postmates driver app functions like it was programmed (automated) in a parallel dimension by toddlers in a thousand year future using an analog of Visual Basic. Then ported to iOS and ran via 480 API requests that transverse space, time and logic. Nothing makes sense, everything’s broken.
Goes to prove again (and again) that product success is weakly correlated with engineering effort / quality
The delivery address is the smallest possible font hidden behind screens. The endless dinging etc makes no sense. I feel like people designing apps have never actually used them. Or maybe it’s all designed to make one so frustrated as to question the nature of reality.
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.
They also banned Carl Benjamin, leading to a mass exodus. They justified this by citing his use of a racial slur in a YouTube video, although the word was not used in the context of a racial slur. In the USA there is some kind of Voldemort status given to this word where you cannot even use it out of context - it reminds me of that Jehovah sketch in Monty Python where that parody has now manifested itself into a real…
I don't really understand why Patreon needs so many employees. We're talking about almost 300 people to just supervise a fully automated process. The tech has already been built almost a decade ago and hasn't changed much, so it can't require that much engineering work. It's also an easy problem (take X amount of money, divide it between Y people, pay them out) and they ironed out any potential issues over the years.…
What's astounding to me is they don't even do _that_! It's a many-to-one payer-payee scheme... essentially a pretty wrapper for Stripe.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They also banned Carl Benjamin, leading to a mass exodus. They justified this by citing his use of a racial slur in a YouTube video, although the word was not used in the context of a racial slur. In the USA there is some kind of Voldemort status given to this word where you cannot even use it out of context - it reminds me of that Jehovah sketch in Monty Python where that parody has now manifested itself into a real…
For context, here is a censored version of the transcript that caused Carl Benjamin to get banned: "I just can’t be bothered with people who chose to treat me like this. It’s really annoying. Like, I — . You’re acting like a bunch of n-----s, just so you know. You act like white n-----s. Exactly how you describe black people acting is the impression I get dealing with the Alt Right. I’m really, I’m just not in the mo…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Goes to prove again (and again) that product success is weakly correlated with engineering effort / quality
It’s so extra in its absurdism that I’d rather believe in sinister intent than systemic stupidity. The delivery address is the smallest possible font hidden behind screens. The endless dinging etc makes no sense. I feel like people designing apps have never actually used them. Or maybe it’s all designed to make one so frustrated as to question the nature of reality.