Thread by @Kavaeric

Yo, @Patreon, mind if you explain why I only ever find out about this kind of crap from people yelling on Twitter?

https://twitter.com/mue_nsfw/status/1352346149903073280

@Patreon Why don't you ever ask us prior to announcing it to some special select people? Why don't you ever ask ANYONE in advance? Is a five-minute survey or a tweet just way too difficult or am I missing something here?

Do you guys not fucking remember that time you absolutely wrecked $1 pledges as a fun Christmas present in 2017, which managed to wipe out 20% of my income in a lovely sweep and that took me nearly a YEAR for me to recover that shit?

/I'M/ somehow supposed to communicate with my patrons about every stupid little change you @Patreon makes to the platform that uproots everything and places it back down sideways, but I'm not even given ANY seat at the table or even forewarning about anything

But here I am, like it was in 2017, having to fucking scream on Twitter to hopefully be heard and not have my income obliterated over the next week, hoping for a dumb "oh sorry we're listening sorry!" announcement to come by so we can do this all over again next year

Because I guess public communiqué is just something @Patreon has to figure out yet beyond Twitter people posting about it with screenshots of black-text-on-white-background announcements, I'm going to try to compile what this change is and why it's a bad idea

@Patreon When you pledge to a creator, you're likely going to be charged twice:

1. An upfront onboarding due (though not all creators have this enabled)

2. A monthly patron due, charged at the beginning of each month

The issue Patreon supposedly identifies is that if you decide to sign up, say, on the 29th of this month, you'll get charged again on the 1st of next month, only a few days apart

https://twitter.com/mue_nsfw/status/1352346149903073280

I would like to remind everyone however that it was Patreon's own decision to push upfront payments, to solve another problem that was that new Patrons could get access to an entire backlog of free content without being charged for it

The "problem-solving" here is shady and I'll explain later, but this new "anniversary" system is meant to I guess replace this

Rather than charging you at the first of every month, you'll instead be charged on the recurring date you pledged. Our hypothetical patron joins on the 29th of this month, and then gets charged on the 29th of next month and so on.

This is a bad idea.

For one thing, many creators send out physical reward packages at the start of every month, in the form of personalised art requests or merchandise.

Charging pledges at all different times throughout the month makes it untenable to fulfil these.

https://twitter.com/mue_nsfw/status/1352346149903073280

With everyone's dues arriving at the same time, it's very easy to check whose payments didn't come through and so makes it easy to hold back on rewards that haven't been paid for yet. This often gets resolved in one go by the first few days of each month.

With payments all coming in all the time, however, that would translate to an ongoing slog of just sending out rewards as payments come in. Multiple trips to a post office in a week.

There is the Benefits system to help track this but it's lame and is just a paperwork solution to solve a paperwork problem, whereby both don't exist using the old start-of-the-month system.

It is, but A) that is just more work for us, B) that means some patrons' rewards come in weeks later than others because of the date they pledged

https://twitter.com/galuade_/status/1352665179796901888

However, the accounting hell also now extends to patrons as well, because fuck you that's why.

If you were a patron to three different creators, and pledged different amounts of $2, $5, and $5 for the three respectively, you'd be charged a lump of $12 at the start of each month.

With @Patreon's new changes though, that would mean throughout the month you'd be charged for those amounts individually on different dates. Which will be fun for your bank.

https://twitter.com/srgl509/status/1352653383400738817

And that is, of course, a simple situation with just three pledges. Many of my long-time patrons pledge to five, six, ten other creators as well, and so the burden of managing these finances will fall to them.

Lastly it's important to note that there is zero talk on how it replaces this. Patreon "double charges" you because the first charge is paying for /viewing the backlog/, and the second for seeing the new stuff that month and ongoing.

https://twitter.com/Kavaeric/status/1352662048103084033

No replacement system has been communicated for this. With the new changes it seems to just eliminate the idea of needing to compensate to access years of Patreon exclusive content. Which, you know, was the WHOLE POINT of the double-charging.

No, we can't do that, because that would be sensible and require fixing the website's horrible interface.

https://twitter.com/pandoras_foxo/status/1352668188283084801

The point is: it's not "double-charging" because what you are paying for are two separate things, and that this system of being charged upon initialisation was @Patreon's OWN suggestion, and so them framing their own solution as a problem is just downright absurd

So to sum up this whole @Patreon change will make it
- an accounting nightmare for both patrons and creators
- another separate nightmare for creators with exclusive rewards
- solves a problem that was never a fucking problem in the first place and was intentional behaviour

@Patreon Oh, hey, you're still here, want to know why this explanation being screenshotted is just two paragraphs written entirely out of red flags? Come with me

https://twitter.com/Onyrica/status/1352574666020417539

@Patreon Red flag #1: Aforementioned opaque communication. No creators or patrons I know were aware of this let alone asked if this was a good idea or not, but that's old news because Patreon just does whatever it likes now I guess.

Red flag #2: Aforementioned system of why the upfront charge exists (to pay for backlog access). They've managed to completely ignore the possibility to allow patrons to just opt-out which would be far simpler to implement. But I get the feeling there's another motive at play

Red flag 3: @Patreon connects behaviour of fewer patrons signing up at the end of a month + cancelling at the beginning with "being double charged" which is absurd. Cancellations of subscriptions happen around due dates. It's the same for newspapers or software or anything.

Again, if patrons were being worried about being "double-charged" (which I repeat is not actually double-charging), you would imagine we would see an increase of pledges right at the beginning of the month to avoid being charged twice only a few days apart.

Nice of them to omit that kind of information, by the way. Real classy.

If the motive was to reduce payout transaction fees, spreading out payments into a little tiny ones is the last thing you'd want to do because fees are applied per transaction, especially if you use a direct bank deposit which charges flat per transaction.

So to summarise, @Patreon is proposing a solution to a problem that doesn't exist (because said problem was Patreon's own solution to another, more real problem) that will also not only reintroduce that original problem but also make everything worse while simultaneously >>

defeating the purpose of using a platform like @Patreon to consolidate and manage pledges for you.

https://twitter.com/orinoxide/status/1352668659085402112

Congrats, you did a kickflip and an ollie on a garden rake, landed gracefully, stepped on it and smacked your face along with everyone else's face all around you.

A big fucking 'round of applause for you from artists all over the net for trying.

Anyway, consider giving money to your favourite creators' Ko-Fi or something, because I guess I give @Patreon a cut of /my/ income in order for /me/ to do /their/ communication on their behalf.

I still haven't showered or eaten this morning.

@Patreon My piece on their feedback thread
patreoncommunity.com/t/we-want-and-…

still going

I am writing way too much for someone I think is just intentionally here to tick me off