[Patreon] Siderea's Patreon Fee Fiasco FAQ

[siderea]

0. Siderea, what are you going to do?

No idea.

1. Are there alternatives to Patreon?

Yes and no. Mostly no.

See the rather out-of-date Great Snowdrift.coop List of Crowdfunding Platforms.

Also some leads at http://kittyspace.org/gettheshowon.pdf

If you are looking for an alternative for your own crowdfunding project, maybe one of those will work for you.

2. What about you? Are there any alternatives to Patreon that work for you, Siderea?

Not that I've found so far.

I use the by-work funding for a reason, as I explained on my Patreon page. It is what make crowdfunding plausibe for me. I simply cannot handle a monthly production requirement (nor any other fixed time frame), so the prevailing monthly model doesn't work for me.

Also, it is my educated guess that doing by-work is ultimately substantially more lucrative than by-month, for me, with my style of work, my erratic posting schedule, and how my patrons relate to my work. I very strongly suspect that if I went to by-month, not only would it completely stress me out, it would result in a dramatic net loss of income.

There are almost no platforms that support by-work, instead of by-period. Just three. One has a month embargo on your funds (you don't get your January pledges until March 1) and is in Euros, one is invite-only and I'm not invited (and also looks like a fiasco waiting to happen), and the other is Patreon.

There is a feature request over at Liberapay to add the by-work model. I'm not sure Liberapy would work for me for a number of reasons. I seems... kinda sketchy and ideologue-y. I'm not sure I would feel comfortable asking my patrons to entrust their credit card numbers to these folks; I'm not sure I would feel comfortable trusting my payment information to them!

3. Have you noticed that you're hard to support?

Yes, I've noticed.

In addition to the by-work requirement and the requirement that I be able to trust the transaction platform, there's also the requirement that the transaction platform doesn't map me. I need to be confident that if I sign up with a crowdfunding platform, they'll keep my wallet name confidential. It needs to be that paying me isn't a security loophole through which people can map me. Patreon mostly succeeded in doing this, though they did have a security breach. But it was never the case that someone could buy my wallet name from Patreon for the cost of a minimum pledge.

It would be also nice if the platform allows one person – with one legal identity – to have more than one account under different names, that are not connected. Not a feature I'm currently using, but one I asked about before signing up at Patreon so I could if I wanted to. (I was thinking that I might some day want to get back into the arranging early dance music business, or do that listening-through-history podcast idea I had, or....)

Comments

[miss_s_b]

This is all properly shitty.

[someonefromthewater]

Out of curiosity, what do you find sketchy about Liberapay?

[siderea]

A bunch of stuff, some of which may be out of their control.

But.

Looking through their directory of individuals, one quickly finds out that there aren't many people using it, and they are getting tiny amounts of money through it. This tells me two things:

1) Not many other people are chosing to trust Liberapay with their credit card info, on either side of the equation, and

2) Liberapay, as an organization, hasn't been tested by the kinds of problems that running at scale produces. Like, being a target for thieves. It sucked that Patreon got compromised, but now we know how bad it will be when Patreon gets compromised: despite the fact they have to store super-confidential information (SSN), it wasn't acquired by the antagonists in the breach.

I don't know that a little non-profit that looks like it's being run by hobbyists in their spare time is up to the rigors of handling highly confidential financial/personal information correctly. My concern is not their ability to, but rather their understanding of what the risks and threats are.

Crowdfunding isn't just ecommerce. It's finance. Developing for ecommerce is hard enough, but it's sailing in a harbor; finance is the open ocean, and there's a whole nother class of sharks out there.

I'm worried that Liberapay is basically a bunch of amateurs who don't know what they've gotten themselves into. Considering even the pros who are somewhat prepared for what this entails still enter this space not knowing what they've gotten themselves into, aeb all the horror stories.... I don't have a great feeling about this.

And I'm not just talking about "computer security" in the conventional sense. In fact, mistaking "computer security" – the sort of thing you can fix with proper use of encryption – for the whole of the threat space is precisely the sort of amateurishness I'm worried about. I'm talking about existential threats to the project/org, such as when one's credit card processor decides to cut you off because of something that's not even illegal, but they take exception to, like "snarry is child porn" (ETA: Which happens to ALL platforms that allow user content, SUCH AS THIS ONE); or when you find out a sizeable amount of your revenue is coming from actually illegal sources such as warez, and you can't keep the lights on if you expell it; or government agents burst through the door and seize your servers and the computers and the phones (ETA: NEVER FORGET); or when you catch a staff member embezzling; or when you're relying on volunteer labor and it dries up or has to go earn a living (ironically enough).

Any crowdfunding platform can be heir to these woes (well, volunteer labor is presumably specific to non-profits), but they vary in how well they're prepared to weather them. Liberapay gives me all the wrong signals. They seem to be ideologues, motivated by ideology. (Same problem with snowdrift.coop.) I might even like or appreciate their ideology, but long experience has taught me that ideologues aren't just people motivated by principles, they're people with dangerous blindspots.

I wrote a thing about this, and will try to dig it up for you if you want.

[someonefromthewater]

This is an excellent response; thank you!

[birguslatro]

When I first heard of Patreon's proposed fee changes, I looked around for alternatives and thought Liberapay looked like the best choice. (Except for its lack of a by-work funding option.) What I liked most was it's using Liberapay to fund itself. I can't think of a better way to understand your users' needs and be accountable to them. Note that this approach allows pissed-off users to punish Liberapay without having to do it through punishing other users, unlike with Patreon.

Whether a non-profit can make this work is of course the question. I see they're a fork of Gratipay, so at least know through hard experience of some of the risks involved. I would guess it'll depend on whether they can reach a level where they're funding the people needed to take care of the financial and other aspects of things before something major goes wrong. If they do reach that point, I don't see any reason why they shouldn't then survive long-term.

Anyway, it looks like they're receiving one kind of stress test at the moment...

https://liberapay.com/about/stats

Note the Deposits graph and its recent spike.

[siderea]

Heh! I wish them luck.

If they do reach that point, I don't see any reason why they shouldn't then survive long-term.

Really, what could possibly go wrong?

[ewt]

Thanks for this.

I got briefly excited about the one that's in Euros, which are really no worse to me than USD (and in some ways better), and then realised that it's basically a clone of Patreon and could run into similar problems with incentivizing paywalls.

(And if we're talking about the same one -- I found that website way, way more sketchy-feeling than Liberapay.)

[gatheringrivers]

Oooo, I didn't know ANY of those services would protect a wallet name. That's neat!

[mellyjc]

It figures I had basically finally decided to look into actually starting a Patreon account when I heard about all of this. Not sure it's worth the attempt now.