I welcome the resurrection of 3D logos, flat logos look nice but start to bore me. This blob, however, is just weird and not really unique in the sense that I would mentally link it to the platform.
Patreon is struggling financially (at least compared to the level of growth the VCs want to see), and is likely going to fully enshittify before long. It sucks because they provide a super valuable service for creatives.
On a related note… I went to cancel a membership a few weeks back, and the site displayed a message “you don’t have an active membership to cancel”. I thought it was strange, so I checked out the network requests being made, and turned out the cancel API call was getting blocked for “security reasons”. Nothing else on the site was blocked for me, just the cancellation endpoint.
I opened a ticket, and it took them nearly 2 weeks to respond, and there was zero acknowledgement on why cancellation would be blocked.
Not sure if it’s a purposeful dark pattern, but it sure seems like it!
Maybe, but it would also be very easy to blame on misconfiguration / mistake. Honestly, it wouldn’t surprise me if the behavior itself isn’t purposeful, but ignoring / not fixing it is. I’ve definitely seen such behavior at other companies, where they drag their feet on fixing a bug that is bad for the user, but helping them.
It was a server-side block, from Cloudflare (security rule specifically). I’m very familiar with it, having used the same service over a decade. They are able to tweak the overall security level, or specific WAF rules for the endpoint in Cloudflare. They also have analytics that will show them exactly how many cancellation requests would be blocked. The fact that they totally ignored these details in my ticket, is concerning.
I mean there’s a lot of substitutes right? I feel like every YouTube video I watch there is a plug for their patron, kofi, buy me a coffee, podia. Hopefully they can compete to be not awful in the long run.
Personally I hope Nebula takes off. I signed up for a perpetual account recently and it’s great, but a bit limited in terms of the selection of creators.
Notjustbikes turned me onto it, but legaleagle is another good one on there. I wish more creators would look into it. I’m a big fan of Kyle Hill, and his content seems to be exactly the sort that would fit there, but he isn’t on it.
Patreon is one of the few companies I really like right now. They are helping creators get out from under the boot of every other damn online platform.
My reaction to this is still - how the hell did they need close to 500 people?
This kind of service should be a very thin layer between the creator and the viewers, there is no need for any additional crap that a middleman company tries to provide. Plenty of other services can do the same for much cheaper.
I can see how creators who are solely on Patreon will benefit from the additional features, but I’m curious about how widely they’ll be adopted by those who post on multiple platforms. If you have a YouTube channel and use Patreon for members-only content, for example, using the Patreon chat feature would exclude the non-member portion of your community from those conversations. While this is a good alternative for those who specifically want member-only chat areas, I don’t see it replacing tools like Discord any time soon.
Also, having the member profiles on by default definitely made me pause when I got the email a few weeks ago. I know some people will enjoy that feature, but I personally went in and immediately turned it off.
It really doesn’t look good. It’s too basic to be recognizable and too weird to be interesting. I had to wonder if this is a teardrop or a bean at first, turns out it’s neither. The backdrops they have for it look almost AI generated too. Not sure what they were thinking with this one.
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