Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple's requirements are about to hit creators and fans on Patreon

news.patreon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

491–500 of 1001 posts

Re: Apple's requirements are about to hit creators and fans on Patreon

#491

Post by baby_souffle »

brookst wrote: post #476
danShumway wrote: post #389

Another point that Patreon isn't really emphasizing here that seems relevant to any conversations about "fairness" is that Apple's fees on Patreon subscriptions in-app are now higher than Patreon's fees. It's important to recognize any time that we're talking about the market that services charge what they can, not what is fair. The market does not have a concept of fairness, only competition. This is why there is no…

> does anybody want to argue that Apple hosting the Patreon app on iOS provides more value to Patreon subscribers and creators than the existence of Patreon itself does? I'll bite, kind of. People get emotional about particular companies so let's abstract them away: is it possible for a second-tier distributor to bring more value to a first-tier distributor than the first-tier brings to suppliers? Looking at it that…

> The economics would suggest that Patreon should do away with their iOS app, focus iOS users on the web, and everyone would be ahead.

Apple doesn’t let web apps do everything that native apps can do. Their App Store is the only way people get apps on their device and if a search for ‘patreon’ in the App Store returns nothing, that’s a lot of confused or angry people that are going to wonder what their monthly bill is for. Maybe some very low double digit percentage of these people will try to load a pwa from patreon.com

Re: Apple's requirements are about to hit creators and fans on Patreon

#492

Post by danShumway »

frereubu wrote: post #482
AmericanChopper wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't like this action form Apple, but I don't agree with your assessment of market economics here. The problem with "fairness" is that there is no objective measure of it. Everybody evaluates fairness according to how it aligns with their own personal interests. This is one of the key problems a free market economy solves. Price discovery is the intersection of what somebody's willing to sell something for, and wh…

I don't think the parent comment's main point was about using fairness to judge anything - the two main good I questions I got from it are (a) does Apple provide more utility in hosting the apps than the entire Patreon service? and (b) if not, doesn't the fact that it costs more show that something, somewhere is very wrong with the economic model? I'm a mild advocate of the Apple ecosystem in that I really like the f…

This is extremely well phrased.

I will say, I do have opinions about what to do ;) But parent comment is right that I'm not trying to advocate for those opinions above, someone might completely disagree with me about how to respond to the situation, and that's fine.

I'm more just pointing to the situation and saying, "this seems really weird, right? This is not the outcome that any of us would expect or want. Maybe you disagree with me about how to solve this, but this does seem like something we should try to solve."

Re: Apple's requirements are about to hit creators and fans on Patreon

#493

Post by egypturnash »

jprete wrote: post #10

I remember reading that per-creation billing is a very important feature for Patreon creators, because it removes the moral obligation to produce content just to justify a subscription. If Patreon really doesn't want to kill the feature itself, but is just responding to Apple's enforcement, then it seems like a really clear illustration of monopoly power - pushing unrelated markets to change their own structure and p…

Patreon has been trying to kill it for like half the time I've been using Patreon. They haven't offered it as an option for new campaigns for years, and their last redesign completely removed what little data was available in the web UI - you wanna know how much money you can expect? Download a CSV and do it yourself, we can't be bothered to give you even the simplest data of "your next three posts will be worth $x, $y, and $z" any more.

I am pretty sure there were people at Patreon who said "Oh god finally we have an excuse to kick everyone off this damn thing". The writing's on the wall for this model, no Patreon clone ever offers it, and I sure do not want to cobble together my own version out of Wordpress plugins, or get involved in making a Patreon-like that does offer it and recapitulating the whole growth cycle of "oh god nazis are using my platform, what do I do about it" to "oh god now I have to make enough money to pay all these moderators" to "oh god we're big enough for the payment processors to notice how much porn we have and tell us to stop", and finally to "oh sweet fuck we're big enough for Apple to inform us that we must pay their tithe or leave iOS, are we big enough to hook up with Epic Games's suits".

Although if anyone on HN looks at that last paragraph of Growth Problems and says "sign me right the fuck up, convincing a bunch of VC money that they want to support the arts by running a Patreon-like at a loss for a decade and taking a couple tenths of a percent off of the top of the money flowing from fans to creators through my pipe sounds like a great way to spend a few years of my life", hey, I'll gladly give you input on your MVC, maybe even draw some art for your site or something.

Re: Apple's requirements are about to hit creators and fans on Patreon

#494

Post by kelnos »

lenerdenator wrote: post #202
albertopv wrote: post #155

I think one of the reasons Apple feels entitled to do this is almost monopolistic US market share. People should stop buying iPhones for this, but it's not hard to foreseen it won't happen.

Apple has a far from monopolistic US market share for mobile devices. They might be one of the largest single vendors, but if I want to go buy a new smartphone that has decent app and service support from the marketplace, I can absolutely do that without giving so much as a penny to Apple.

I don't think this simplistic view of "monopoly" is all that useful today. This article, IMO, is proof of that: Apple is forcing an unrelated company to change something fundamental about how they take payments, which (negatively!) affects that company's customers (both patrons and creators), even those who do not use Apple products at all.

If that's not abuse of market power, I'm not sure what is, then.

Re: Apple's requirements are about to hit creators and fans on Patreon

#495

Post by hermitdev »

xyst wrote: post #478
danShumway wrote: post #389

Another point that Patreon isn't really emphasizing here that seems relevant to any conversations about "fairness" is that Apple's fees on Patreon subscriptions in-app are now higher than Patreon's fees. It's important to recognize any time that we're talking about the market that services charge what they can, not what is fair. The market does not have a concept of fairness, only competition. This is why there is no…

It’s time for tech (not just Apple) to be broken up. If only we haven’t defanged the regulatory agencies …

> It’s time for tech (not just Apple) to be broken up. If only we haven’t defanged the regulatory agencies …

I think you mean we should de-FAANG the regulatory agencies.

Re: Apple's requirements are about to hit creators and fans on Patreon

#497

Post by jdiez17 »

nabla9 wrote: post #350
sschueller wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is the EU going to respond to this since it is literally blackmail with Apple's market dominance?

When they respond Apple changes policy for EU users, not for anyone else. Already users based in the European Union with an iPhone have the ability to install apps using alternative app marketplaces or web distribution, in addition to the App Store.

Is that so? I’ve been waiting to try app sideloading but haven’t seen any app repositories or so that work with the app marketplace APIs

Re: Apple's requirements are about to hit creators and fans on Patreon

#498

Post by iudqnolq »

cyberax wrote: post #475
danShumway wrote: post #389

Another point that Patreon isn't really emphasizing here that seems relevant to any conversations about "fairness" is that Apple's fees on Patreon subscriptions in-app are now higher than Patreon's fees. It's important to recognize any time that we're talking about the market that services charge what they can, not what is fair. The market does not have a concept of fairness, only competition. This is why there is no…

[flagged]

I downloaded the Patreon app to listen to podcasts. Regardless of who is to blame from my perspective their imperfect app provides a better user experience than Firefox or Chrome on my Android phone.

Re: Apple's requirements are about to hit creators and fans on Patreon

#499

Post by rtpg »

baby_souffle wrote: post #491
brookst wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> does anybody want to argue that Apple hosting the Patreon app on iOS provides more value to Patreon subscribers and creators than the existence of Patreon itself does? I'll bite, kind of. People get emotional about particular companies so let's abstract them away: is it possible for a second-tier distributor to bring more value to a first-tier distributor than the first-tier brings to suppliers? Looking at it that…

> The economics would suggest that Patreon should do away with their iOS app, focus iOS users on the web, and everyone would be ahead. Apple doesn’t let web apps do everything that native apps can do. Their App Store is the only way people get apps on their device and if a search for ‘patreon’ in the App Store returns nothing, that’s a lot of confused or angry people that are going to wonder what their monthly bill i…

In particular Patreon can host things like podcasts so has a media player. The app isn’t just about configuring billing

Re: Apple's requirements are about to hit creators and fans on Patreon

#500

Post by brigadier132 »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #480
danShumway wrote: post #389

Another point that Patreon isn't really emphasizing here that seems relevant to any conversations about "fairness" is that Apple's fees on Patreon subscriptions in-app are now higher than Patreon's fees. It's important to recognize any time that we're talking about the market that services charge what they can, not what is fair. The market does not have a concept of fairness, only competition. This is why there is no…

Fair is what two consenting adults agree to in the market place. >does anybody want to argue that Apple hosting the Patreon app on iOS provides more value to Patreon subscribers and creators than the existence of Patreon itself does? I will. If most apple users refuse to go outside the app store for their content, Than clearly they care more about the ease of access than the content itself. I agree that the high prop…

> Fair is what two consenting adults agree to in the market place.

This has been known to not be true since capitalism was first conceived. I am the biggest free market capitalism proponent and what apple has on their app store is not free market capitalism, its pure rent seeking.

Apple users should be able to decide what software and stores run on the device that they own.

Post reply on HN