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Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

blog.patreon.com

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Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#381

Post by cfeduke »

xenadu02 wrote: post #341

I subscribe to a single Patreon. It's an artist publishing an online comic. I pay for day-ahead access vs the public site. Reading the thing I pay for is fucking _painful_ on Patreon. So is trying to use their comment system to interact with the creator or other fans. Everything is slow-loading infinite scroll with tons of "load more" links. It is absolutely dreadful and every time I interact with the site I'm remind…

100% this. I subscribe to a couple dozen digital sculptors who provide monthly STL file drops. Patreon's platform is terrible. Their billing is amateur. Their customer support is pathetic. The UI is... just impossible once you get above a few creators.

The alternative in this monthly subscription digital sculpting space, MyMiniFactory, is also not great, but it's eating Patreon's lunch by not being actively hostile to the subscribers. (Well, a bit hostile. I need to use an adblocker. But they have $1M funding or less [compared to $473.3M], so I can make some allowances here.)

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#382

Post by kQq9oHeAz6wLLS »

bogomipz wrote: post #323
jrockway wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are probably a large number of HN readers that have weathered the dotcom bust, the 2008 financial crisis, and the 2022 financial crisis. If you were born 1980-ish and you haven't been laid off 3 times, congrats!

>"There are probably a large number of HN readers that have weathered the dotcom bust, the 2008 financial crisis, and the 2022 financial crisis." The "2022 financial crisis"? That's not even a thing. Slowing economic growth and even a recession, should we enter one later this year does not constitute a "financial crisis."

By most historical measures of recession, we're already in one. This redefining of what constitutes a recession is a recent phenomena, and has political roots, not financial ones.

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#383

Post by balderdash »

snapetom wrote: post #310
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've been survived a few layoffs that work this way. How many times have you been laid off?!

Unless you're in government/health. You're going to lucky not to be laid off multiple times in your career and if you're not laid off at all in your career, consider yourself extremely lucky.

I’m not quite sure that’s true

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#384

Post by pessimizer »

chrisseaton wrote: post #375
unity1001 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They say there's 3 months of pay, healthcare, mental care until the end of the year too. And they contracted a placement company to hook people up with new jobs.

Isn’t 3 months a pretty standard severance compensation?

If not, I've had a lot of incredibly decent employers in the past. They all seem to do two or three months. I know of layoffs where people have gotten significantly more, though.

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#385

Post by egypturnash »

remram wrote: post #369
egypturnash wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a time-honored path that this choice to ban NSFW stuff is part of. 1. Make a way for people to get paid over the Internet for making stuff. 2. Be okay with horny stuff, possibly as an explicit choice in the beginning, possibly as a pivot when people who make horny stuff start shifting a lot of money through the pipeline you're providing. 3. Get big enough for Visa/Mastercard/Apple/Google to notice that you s…

Spinning up a separate branch with slightly different branding is probably easier than a different organization setting up shop and re-implementing from scratch. From your post, you make it seem like OnlyFans cannot possibly exist. It does, and therefore Patreon could have built it.

I am pretty sure that the payment processors giving you the choice of banning horny stuff or getting the boot would not look kindly upon “a separate branch with different branding”.

OnlyFans could exist, sure, but like every other horny service ever it had a built-in time limit. When Visa/MC/Apple/etc notice how much porn money you’re doing, then the axe falls. Maybe you continue without the porn. Maybe you fold up. Either way all the pornmongers leave and look for a new way to get paid. In a few years they will be doing this again.

Patreon could have built OF, in theory, but this would require them to have more than the vaguest interest in actually building anything new. I’ve been using Patreon to get paid for my art since a few months after they launched and this is not a thing they have. I’m not sure they even actually have anyone who can do backend development any more. Mostly they just fuck up the front end every few years.

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#386

Post by jeremymcanally »

bArray wrote: post #296

> Last week, we let go of 5 teammates from our security organization, which stemmed from a different set of reasons from the ones guiding today’s decisions. The change last week was part of a longer-term strategy to continue distributing security responsibilities across our entire engineering team, bring new areas of expertise into Patreon internally, and continue partnering with external experts. Unfortunately, the…

I have no idea how their team was composed previously, but it could be that they had a lot of folks who were analysts but weren't contributing much to remediating issues. It sounds like (and I have no idea again) that they're hiring a small number of security engineers (maybe even one) to not only actively look for security issues, but to also actively work to remediate them and improve code security posture as well. This function paired with a specialized external team to handle general SOC/network level security probably is a smarter investment for them right now.

> You may say "we will get an external team to do this", but will they get access to source code? Will they get access to upcoming features?

Most likely yes in my experience.

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#387

Post by none_to_remain »

chrisseaton wrote: post #379
sk5t wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's regular luck, or at least not bad. Options worth > $0 is an occasion of very, very good luck.

> Options worth > $0 is an occasion of very, very good luck. Why do you think that? It doesn’t require ‘very, very good luck’ for most companies shares to not collapse. If you work for a big company like Oracle or IBM your options have cash value no luck needed.

Options as tech startup employee compensation vs. Options in general

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#388

Post by tjbiddle »

Barrin92 wrote: post #372
pc86 wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you expect him to commit seppuku in the town square or something?

how about cutting executive pay first? That is what usually happens in Japanese companies if leadership doesn't live up to expectations. During covid lawmakers cut their own salary by 20%. A little bit of honor in a culture when ordinary people are taking hits goes a long way, rather than lipservice and PR.

Patreon executive salary is $250k. You really think cutting that is going to make a drop in the bucket for 80 employees?

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#389

Post by moneywoes »

Tsukiortu wrote: post #241
gabereiser wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This, I've been laid off about 6 times, only once because of my own accord (and I freely admit my fault there). I've left a company 2x that count. I started my career in 1999. What a year to start...

I started in 2020 :) officially. I technically did side things throughout HS, but officially looked for jobs in 2020. Was pretty miserable.

Same

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#390

Post by bagels »

jrockway wrote: post #163
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've been survived a few layoffs that work this way. How many times have you been laid off?!

There are probably a large number of HN readers that have weathered the dotcom bust, the 2008 financial crisis, and the 2022 financial crisis. If you were born 1980-ish and you haven't been laid off 3 times, congrats!

Been through all of them.

Saw the writing on the wall for each of those and left before I was the one laid off.

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