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Translation: OH poo poo WE LOST ALL OF OUR GOODWILL AND MONEY INSTANTLY Their apology doesn't mention their whole thing about how they'd prefer no low-earners, just whales, and I'm guessing is purely financially motivated. It's still the right decision but that goodwill should stay lost. They're not here to be your friend.
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Dec 13, 2017 19:17
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Well they haven't shot the foot entirely off. EDIT: Should be it's own post. Comrade Gorbash fucked around with this message at 19:43 on Dec 13, 2017 |
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Dec 13, 2017 19:18
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I wonder how much business will actually come back. Once burned, twice shy and all that.
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Dec 13, 2017 19:23
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Mors Rattus posted:Translation: OH poo poo WE LOST ALL OF OUR GOODWILL AND MONEY INSTANTLY expecting the right thing for moral reasons rather than as a happy coincidence in a capitalist system is going to leave you continually disappointed
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Dec 13, 2017 19:26
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I plan on keeling the patreons I still have, but I'm still skittish about any new pledges regardless
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Dec 13, 2017 19:27
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Countblanc posted:expecting the right thing for moral reasons rather than as a happy coincidence in a capitalist system is going to leave you continually disappointed Oh, sure. Just, yknow, don't pretend that Patreon won't gently caress you over immediately if they see another shiny coin.
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Dec 13, 2017 19:33
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Mors Rattus posted:Oh, sure. Just, yknow, don't pretend that Patreon won't gently caress you over immediately if they see another shiny coin. Were you pretending that before, when you made pledges?
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Dec 13, 2017 19:35
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I think a lot of people were, and saw this entire thing as a huge betrayal.
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Dec 13, 2017 19:39
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The Chairman posted:Patreon relented: https://twitter.com/Patreon/status/941005364882845696 https://twitter.com/CatPianoClassic/status/941007340085456896
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Dec 13, 2017 19:39
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I've been thinking about this, and I honestly think some of the discussion around Patreon not being arts funding or doing this out of altruism kind of misses the point. They don't need to do those things to be a valuable resource, and the specific actions they were planning and the philosophy they exposed are also bad business decisions. Patreon isn't as unique as it paints itself. It's a lot like a payroll company, such as ADP. Every company has to do payroll and benefits, and there's a certain minimum effort required to do it at all, no matter what. It's also an area where scale has a big impact. As a proportion of total effort, payroll and benefits mostly gets smaller as your company gets bigger. It doesn't do so evenly, and certain regulatory requirements can reverse the trend at certain thresholds, but it holds overall. So if you're a small company, payroll and benefits can be a big drag on your total workload, and you probably can't afford to do it well. Enter ADP. By handling those tasks for a whole bunch of companies, they can offer all of them the benefits of economies of scale as well as additional expertise and resilience. If you're below a certain size, outsourcing to ADP is going to result in cheaper and better service. At no point is ADP doing this out of the goodness of their hearts. They're more expensive per capita compared to companies with similar numbers of serviced employees, and everyone knows it. They're totally up front about it. But they're still either cheaper, or providing better service for the cost, than what a small company can do on it's own, so it makes sense for everyone. There are other companies in the field, and some of them are exploitative and lovely, but the concept makes a lot of sense, and ultimately is better for everyone. Even if capitalism was smashed tomorrow, similar arrangements would still make sense - quantity has a quality all its own, after all. That's the business Patreon is in. They're providing a set of services that many creators need - a way to accept subscription payments and private patronage funding, and a platform to deliver content to their customers - where economy of scale is a huge benefit. Bundling together lots of smaller actors so they can function as one very large actor can, if done properly, mean better outcomes for everyone. Again, if you compare to a unitary content provider of similar size, Patreon isn't nearly as efficient. But it's way more efficient than what any one of its members could manage on their own, if only by avoiding duplication of effort. But that only works by marketing to the small creators. Because of that divergence at scale, where doing it yourself becomes equivalent or cheaper, the big creators Patreon claims they want will never move to the platform, at least not in the numbers they need. There's no benefit for them to do so. They're giving up control for no benefit. The only way to have those whales is to catch them when they're minnows, to torture an analogy. Because then moving away from Patreon becomes a cost itself. Combined with just general inertia, that means those big actors will tend to stay where they are.' To contrast with ADP, everyone knows ADP is in it for the money, that they're a business, that they aren't a friend and are going to go after profits. But they can trust ADP to behave in certain ways because that's the only way ADP gets to keep doing business. This whole clusterfuck speaks to Patreon not understanding what it's own business actually is, and therefore can't be trusted because they'll do things that actively hurt their own business model in a misguided attempt to raise a quarterly number. Comrade Gorbash fucked around with this message at 19:46 on Dec 13, 2017 |
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Dec 13, 2017 19:43
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Comrade Gorbash posted:The only way to have those whales is to catch them when they're minnows, to torture an analogy. Yeah, I think their preference for whales (or at least plump salmon) can be satisfied by growing people as well as bringing in already-successful creators. I’ve been surprised that they don’t have more tools for creators to promote themselves or manage rewards.
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Dec 13, 2017 19:53
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Subjunctive posted:Yeah, I think their preference for whales (or at least plump salmon) can be satisfied by growing people as well as bringing in already-successful creators. I’ve been surprised that they don’t have more tools for creators to promote themselves or manage rewards.
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Dec 13, 2017 19:54
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Comrade Gorbash posted:I am surprised by that in a macro sense, but seeing their behavior elsewhere, I'm also not surprised that the specific people running Patreon lack to competence to see the benefit. Yeah, surprise was born out of my natural optimism, much more than realism about the clowns jammed into that car.
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Dec 13, 2017 19:56
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Just an addendum to the above: the ADP model is still stupid and bad for all the reasons that late stage capitalism and corporations are bad. In a more humane system overall you could derive all the same benefits with far fewer trade offs. But even in the stupid system we have now, what Patreon is doing shouldn't be cast as "this is what businesses do" as either apologia or criticism. It's stupider and meaner even than that. Somehow, even in 2017, Patreon managed to find a way to actively do worse than meet the perverse incentives of our current society.
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Dec 13, 2017 20:01
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People don't have to naively think that a corporation is somehow their best friend in the world to not expect that corporation to pull what Patreon pulled, is the point. It's like how you don't have to be a company cheerleader for your job to still be caught off-guard when you walk into work one day and get told that there's going to be a round of mass layoffs, despite the fact that we live in an insane hellworld most people don't go around expecting something like that to happen 24/7.
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Dec 13, 2017 20:03
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Kai Tave posted:People don't have to naively think that a corporation is somehow their best friend in the world to not expect that corporation to pull what Patreon pulled, is the point. It's like how you don't have to be a company cheerleader for your job to still be caught off-guard when you walk into work one day and get told that there's going to be a round of mass layoffs, despite the fact that we live in an insane hellworld most people don't go around expecting something like that to happen 24/7.
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Dec 13, 2017 20:06
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And to carry the tortured analogy a bit further, what Patreon did here might be "nice" of them but they've probably completely lost the confidence of their userbase the way a company loses the confidence of its employees even if those rumors of mass layoffs get brushed off. A bunch of people who would have been perfectly content to just keep on keeping on with Patreon are now probably going to be metaphorically making copies of their resume on their coffee breaks to ship around because now everybody rightly suspects that this sort of thing will inevitably happen again. Diversifying into various other service providers like Drip etc. might be a pain in the rear end for creators, but a lot of them are probably going to do so now that they no longer trust Patreon not to gently caress them over on a whim.
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Dec 13, 2017 20:20
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The thing that's really bizarre about this whole thing is that their intial idea seemed to be that "good will" is fungible? Like, rather than giving 1 dollar to 10 different groups they'd just give 10 dollars to one group, and that all the other low-amount supporters would do the same and this would also somehow magically aggregate down to each Creator getting the same amount of money just from less people, rather than there being a few gigantic whales and very little else.
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Dec 13, 2017 20:22
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It's not even necessarily terrible to make the actual costs of a business more apparent (setting aside that they could probably make things cost less if they really tried). But it is terrible to do it by yelling "SURPRISE!" and actively setting fire to the vast majority of your userbase, even if most of them are minimally profitable to you.
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Dec 13, 2017 20:28
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The Chairman posted:Patreon relented: https://twitter.com/Patreon/status/941005364882845696 They're still doomed. This whole thing has set them up to get MySpace'd because they have made the creators that pay their bills realize the guys handling their money can't be trusted. It's a developed market now, the next company to do it right will eat their lunch.
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Dec 13, 2017 21:24
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It's a signal to all new users to sign up with some other similar service instead, because Patreon could do exactly the same thing again. It should really impact new registrations and encourage all the medium fish to diversify. But all the biggest fish don't need Patreon because they can sell merch or other things directly to their userbase. Look at things like Comic Book Girl 19s Dune Club, which circumvents Patreon, because content creators have been getting screwed by youtube, Google Ads and now Patreon.
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Dec 14, 2017 00:07
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One of the key value-adds that Patreon offers is literally "isn't Paypal," though. And Paypal is still far worse: unlike Patreon, they don't give a crap about negative feedback and do not roll back their terrible policies based on it.
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Dec 14, 2017 00:16
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One problem with our brave new digital future (er, present) is that these new services usually end up being winner-take-all monopolies (or near-monopolies) in their spaces. There are limits to how badly Bank of America can treat me before they lose me to Citibank, there are limits to how badly Delta can treat me before I switch over to United or American, but if Twitch or AirBnB or YouTube decides to mess with me, then I don't have a whole lot of other options if I want to make a living streaming games or renting out my spare bedroom or posting videos of me eating weird foods. Adding to that, these companies are often unsustainably generous in their payouts in the early days (spending VC money to build market share), willing to lose money until they have a dominant position, at which point they pivot into profit maximization mode and those payouts suddenly get a lot dinkier. It's the nature of the beast. If you rely on one of these services to pay your bills, then you need to have a backup plan for when they cut your revenue by 25% or 50%, because not only can they do just that, the logic of their business plan almost demands that they will.
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Dec 14, 2017 00:36
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Fortunately, this fuckup has made Drip and other such services have gotten a lot f attention as they get rolling.
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Dec 14, 2017 01:11
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Yeah, i'm betting there was a conversation at Patreon headquarters this weekend to the effect of "What about Drip?" "What about what?"
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Dec 14, 2017 01:28
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They'll just form an oligopoly or a cartel instead.
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Dec 14, 2017 01:42
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All those NSFW patreons... 
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Dec 14, 2017 14:57
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Plutonis posted:They'll just form an oligopoly or a cartel instead. Kickstarter, for all its faults, is a public benefits corporation. That means it is prohibited from being extra lovely like that. It's been around since 2009 and they're still pretty consistent as a platform. Obviously, not perfect, but think about how much worse it could have been. Patreon does have features that as of right now Drip does not - podcast specific stuff like RSS feeds and a streaming app. I'll stick to Patreon but I've always worried about them raising their prices/getting shittier. I assumed they would introduce new tiers of services for creators or something like that. I was surprised by this move because I attended Patrecon last month, a creator-only conference that Patreon hosted. They didn't mention anything about this policy. Ironically they did talk a lot about the youtube adpocalypse and they had comic book girl 19 as a speaker. She specifically brought up the dune book club as well. Edit: At Patrecon, they had a NSFW creator lunch where they wanted to let the creators know that they were welcome. They added new guidelines for their patreon pages but I think they want to keep them on the site. The problem is dealing with credit card processors and paypal.
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Dec 15, 2017 23:33
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So hey did Green Ronin ever come out with the amazing timeline that explains all that dumb lovely bullshit of theirs yet? No? Cool just checking.
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Dec 16, 2017 01:19
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Kai Tave posted:So hey did Green Ronin ever come out with the amazing timeline that explains all that dumb lovely bullshit of theirs yet? No? Cool just checking. Its been more than a month so I figure the vacation all the important decision makers are on should be up in another four weeks.
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Dec 16, 2017 01:26
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I heard about Green Ronin ignoring a harasser who worked for them, but what's this about a timeline?
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Dec 16, 2017 04:28
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clockworkjoe posted:I heard about Green Ronin ignoring a harasser who worked for them, but what's this about a timeline? They made the claim that they could explain everything about their actions (supposedly being complicated by other factors) once their leadership got back in the office after a few days and they released a timeline to clarify what occurred. No such thing has been released, and it's dubious what one could possibly say, anyway.
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Dec 16, 2017 04:34
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Given how they couldn't seem to stop digging once they found themselves in a hole of their own making, it's probably the right call from a business standpoint. Cowardly, but the right call.
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Dec 16, 2017 05:44
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It was obvious from the first time they said they'd have that timeline which would explain everything out Real Soon Now just you wait that they were never ever going to release it.
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Dec 16, 2017 05:56
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Actually, I believe they had every intention of releasing a timeline. The problem is it was going to contain... if not lies, then let's say a very generous slant on events, and David Hill sort of cut them off at the pass on that one.
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Dec 16, 2017 05:59
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Falstaff posted:Given how they couldn't seem to stop digging once they found themselves in a hole of their own making, it's probably the right call from a business standpoint. Cowardly, but the right call. I'm trying to bag on you specifically, but "from a business standpoint" really isn't any kind of excuse here - you can justify all sorts of immoral and unethical poo poo on the back of "it's better for us from a business standpoint", and part of the reason this whole sexual harassment culture has persisted for so long is because it's easier/cheaper/more-business-minded to shuffle it off under a desk.
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Dec 16, 2017 06:41
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Does anyone run a company to, like, make money any more, or is it all about trying to get bought by a bigger fish?
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Dec 16, 2017 10:36
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Nessus posted:Does anyone run a company to, like, make money any more, or is it all about trying to get bought by a bigger fish? It's pretty much trying to sell yourself either way. You're either looking for short-term shareholder profits to pump your stock price so the execs can divest, or looking for a buyout for the same reason.
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Dec 16, 2017 11:06
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Nessus posted:Does anyone run a company to, like, make money any more, or is it all about trying to get bought by a bigger fish? Depends on the industry structure and/or how much PE or VC money is involved. Some industries (like medical devices for example) are super consolidated and the whole thing is built on venture capital backed startups doing all the legwork and then getting acquired. Other industries doing advanced material sciences aren't necessarily like that though. Our firm works with a number of polymer companies, and most of those guys (who are private or only have minority public shares) are thinking more long term in terms of production and expanding into different industries.
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Dec 16, 2017 14:04
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Nessus posted:Does anyone run a company to, like, make money any more, or is it all about trying to get bought by a bigger fish? Success under a capitalist system is determined not by steady profit but growth and how well you can sell that vision of growth to your shareholders. If you think about it for like, two seconds you can see the problem with this, but that's why so many businesses behave the way they do.
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