Well of Souls Forums

I am unable to support Arioch through Patreon or even donate something via Paypal but I still want to suggest to everyone who does support him to hold a 'wait and see' attitude on how things develop.

We'll have to wait and see how the change works out in actual practice. They're moving from a 5% take plus credit card fees to a straight 2.9% plus $0.35 per pledge. On paper it looks like small pledges are going to get hosed, but in practice it may be that the credit card fees on the small pledges are taking that much anyway.

Is there a way to collect pledges at the end of the month or something so you will get charged the fee once rather than x number of times?

Arioch still has his one-time sponsor thing on his page. You cam just use that to cut Patreon out...

Diodri wrote:Is there a way to collect pledges at the end of the month or something so you will get charged the fee once rather than x number of times?

Pledges are always collected in aggregate at the beginning of each month (which minimizes the credit card charges).

I think people are jumping the gun in panicking about this change. Let's see how it pans out. Encouraging people to withhold their pledges hurts the creators more than it hurts Patreon.

Krulle wrote:Arioch still has his one-time sponsor thing on his page. You cam just use that to cut Patreon out...

That's through PayPal, which takes essentially the same $0.33 cut of $1 donations that Patreon is talking about taking. So let's not jump to conclusions.

Instead of going per pldge, use higher single higher gifts....

Anyway, I dislike the behaviour of Patreon and paypal, hence I never subscribed to either anyway....
Sorry.

My understanding from various creators I follow talking about it is that after this change the charges won't be one consolidated thing every month. From then on everyone will be charged monthly on the anniversary of their pledges, to eliminate certain abuse cases. Less consolidated billing leads to more fees, so conceivably Patreon isn't increasing it's cut any, just passing on processing fees, though of course that's hard to say for certain from outside the company. They also say that the current fee structure, with creators getting a sizable chunk less than their displayed total pledge due to all the fees coming out of the creator side, has caused a considerable amount of dissatisfaction to date. Presumably, that's mostly coming from the creator side, and I guess I can see that perspective, but irritating pledgers seems as risky as irritating creators.

Personally the changes aren't going to make me stop or change any of my current pledges, though other factors in my life might. I can understand some of the upset they're causing. I also haven't spent a huge ton of time analyzing the problems Patreon claims it's trying to solve and figuring how I'd rather they address them. I could also be way off base in my understanding of what's going on to, I guess!

Patreon decided to not do that. There was a lot of outcry about the plans, at least half the creators I follow were talking about investigating other platforms. Guess enough noise was made overall.

Well, it's a good sign that they know when to back down.

edit: Okay, I finally understand what they were trying to do (it's amazing how unclear the last-minute information they sent out about it was): essentially pass the payment fees from the creator to the patrons with an ADDITIONAL fee paid by the patrons. I can't imagine how they thought that was going to just sail by without a massive outcry. Pissing off the creators is one thing, but pissing off the people who make the payments is just plain dumb.

Still, I think it's important that they responded to feedback and corrected the change.

Everything is back to "normal", for now. There is something in the French Constitution that makes clear any change must aim to a wider democracy (hence if you want to change how old you have to be to participate in a vote, the age lower limit can only go down, not up). So in a certain idealistic way, every system should function is to always increase the benefit of those the system serves, not the benefit of those who made the system.

Arioch, like everybody else in this forum I love what you create, and how you express it. You do something I can not (well, let's say that on the subject of drawing I am not even at the stick figure level…), and it makes me dream. While Patreon is not perfect, it is currently my only medium to reward you for your efforts. I just increased my pledge (I got a raise!!), you and the community deserve it.

Wishing you a happy end of the 2017 orbit!

E=M.C^2 wrote:Wishing you a happy end of the 2017 orbit!

Merci monsieur! For both the support and the kind words.