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Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

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Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#141

Post by tomp »

cirno wrote: post #123
asiachick wrote: post #104

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…

> 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…

Piracy has proven to be the best competition for shitty legacy content delivery methods. I wonder if we'd have Netflix without ThePirateBay. Fact is, people want to pay for content (not because it's "not cheating" or whatever, but because they genuinely want to support artists and want them to keep creating) but are unwilling to jump through hoops for that. It's on Patreon & co to improve their game.

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#142

Post by tomp »

michaelt wrote: post #137
Mirioron wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does it happen though? What's the motivation behind the credit card companies? As in, what's the ultimate reason for this?

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.

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#143

Post by jariel »

Mirioron wrote: post #129
nikanj wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the eternal churn: 1) A new payment platform is started, small enough to be fly under the radar 2) It attracts more and more adult content producers who've been turned away by the bigger players 3) It grows big enough to attract attention 4) The Nazgûl lawyers ride from Mastercard / VISA to shut the adult business down 5) Lather, rince, repeat

Why does it happen though? What's the motivation behind the credit card companies? As in, what's the ultimate reason for this?

Aside from the credit issue, nobody wants to be associated with a porn site.

Would you launch your new line of e-books on a site that is 95% porn and well known for porn?

No.

If you're a porn site, then you're pretty much going to be just that, it's its own content vertical, fairly distinguished from everything else.

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#144

Post by Kiro »

ac29 wrote: post #139
Kiro wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Europe most companies are doing this instead of laying off right now. It's a conventional practice that saved a lot of companies during the 2008 crisis and in many countries it's subsidized by the government.

If its subsidized by the government, how is it a paycut? Similar programs in the US exist, for example states paying a 50% unemployment payment for employees who have their hours cut by 50%. Its a win-win - companies effectively pay nothing to keep their employees at a full time salary for reduced hours, and the government avoids needing to pay out full unemployment benefits to laid off employees. Edit: see this for…

Can only speak for Sweden but you do need to take a paycut as well. In Swedish but you can see the table here: https://tillvaxtverket.se/om-tillvaxtverket/information-och-...

For the 60% bracket the company reduces your working hours by 60% and you get a paycut of 7.5%. The government covers the difference, effectively reducing the cost for the company by 53%.

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#145

Post by phreack »

jariel wrote: post #143
Mirioron wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does it happen though? What's the motivation behind the credit card companies? As in, what's the ultimate reason for this?

Aside from the credit issue, nobody wants to be associated with a porn site. Would you launch your new line of e-books on a site that is 95% porn and well known for porn? No. If you're a porn site, then you're pretty much going to be just that, it's its own content vertical, fairly distinguished from everything else.

I mean, if Patreon provided a good service and the porn was hidden away under the default filter and not visible from my subsite or the homepage, I don't see at all why I wouldn't launch a product on it if I decided the business model was a good fit.

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#146

Post by preommr »

tempsy wrote: post #84

FWIW I’m pretty sure OnlyFans is run by one guy out of London. Maybe has a handful of contracted employees for engineering and support. Basically the same business. Not sure what the payment volume comparison is but must be hundreds of millions a year, at least.

Where are you getting this from? I tried looking it up, but it seems like Timothy Stokely had an entertainment company that was responsible for a bunch of cam sites before eventually making Onlyfans.

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#147

Post by baud147258 »

asiachick wrote: post #104

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…

Though for content producer without Patron-exclusive content and which are not using Patreon to distribute their content, instead using Youtube or a blog, it works well. At least that's my experience with the content creators I follow.

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#148

Post by imtringued »

rtpg wrote: post #44
Nextgrid wrote: post #9

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.…

I feel like this sort of comment can only come from somebody who's never had to deal with operations. When you have a lot of users (especially when they rely on you to get money from you!) even 0.1% of them asking questions and having difficulties is a huge work generator! It's not "oh it's easy to write a for loop". It's "my for loop now has 20 non-orthogonal options, and a user is saying we emptied their bank accou…

> I feel like this sort of comment can only come from somebody who's never had to deal with operations.

If you really think that way then the company is doomed. The primary reason for technology companies to exist is the fact that the number of users is disconnected from the number of employees in the company. Companies like Patreon completely waste this huge advantage and just set money on fire. You are no longer a tech company anymore and if you are not a tech then you don't deserve unicorn valuations. This is why the company is doomed.

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#149

Post by imtringued »

crazygringo wrote: post #62
rtpg wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like this sort of comment can only come from somebody who's never had to deal with operations. When you have a lot of users (especially when they rely on you to get money from you!) even 0.1% of them asking questions and having difficulties is a huge work generator! It's not "oh it's easy to write a for loop". It's "my for loop now has 20 non-orthogonal options, and a user is saying we emptied their bank accou…

Exactly this. A lot of people don't seem to realize, when you're dealing with communities -- especially communities that involve money flying around -- there's tons of work in managing it. You've got employees trying to grow the community in different areas (genres?) and different geographies, reaching out to people, giving advice to get them on board. You've got employees giving support. You've got employees looking…

That argument makes sense when you are Reddit which has 400 employees. Patreon has no excuse.

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#150

Post by imtringued »

danans wrote: post #119
baron_harkonnen wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know why X needs N people This statement can be made about almost any company in the US right now. There is some serious systemic risk in the surreal number of people working whose jobs do not matter at all. Even for productive software engineers, think back on how many projects in your career really shipped, how many of those then made any money, and then how many of those companies are still thriving. For…

> There is some serious systemic risk in the surreal number of people working whose jobs do not matter at all. There is perhaps greater systematic risk in not having backups. Too much efficiency can equal a lot of fragility.

I've once read a HN comment that said that Aboriginees are economically useless and should work in a major city so that they can be useful. This completely ignores systematic risk posed by nuclear weapons or viruses like covid-19.

Those Aboriginees have much better survival skills than the average NYC resident and they are far away so they are more likely to survive global disasters.

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