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Our Dark Lord of Crowdfunding, Ur-Patreon!
8 months ago
Recently, I toyed with the idea of a compromise.
I decided to look back into Patreon - the EA of crowdfunding, the Comcast of fundraising. They're an awful, miserable company for many, MANY reasons, the most notable of which (for those who hadn't heard) was their decision to grab their ankles at the whim of credit card companies and ban NSFW creators who refused to give them private information that they, as a glorified middleman, do not need. In a shocking turn of events, they exploited user information (violating federal law in the process), and now they're set to pay out millions to creators they harmed (myself included). When I get the check in the mail, I'll have to give it some real thought on what I'll spend it on, but we'll cross that bridge when we get to it.
Even still, I sat and pondered on the situation and their crazy demands for a scan of my face and pictures of my driver's license, after seven years of using their platform without prior incident, and I came up with a whacky idea - what if I just covered up all the info on my driver's license, except my face and date of birth, with strips of paper in order to fool their system? An impromptu redaction, and an acceptable compromise.
Turns out that actually works. I passed verification and my page is now visible again. I legitimately couldn't believe it.
As of right now, I can immediately go back to doing what I did normally a year ago... though there was a caveat. Since I had used Patreon for seven years prior to their crack down, I had "Founder status", meaning Patreon only took 5% of my supporter's hard-earned cash as the cost for my use of their service. But in a true blue scumbag move, Patreon quietly (and permanently) downgrades all users out of Founder status if their page is unpublished, therefore allowing them to scrape up a larger cut of the funds with no justification whatsoever. Give in to our creepy and unnecessary demands, and then you will pay us more for the trouble.
I was really, truly considering giving Patreon a second chance, letting bygones be bygones and let them have my face and date of birth and get back to making art for my community whilst letting Patreon take fair compensation for their service, but after receiving a series of fluffy boilerplate copy-paste nonsense from an intern effectively saying "fuck you, pay us more", I knew I wasn't going to get anywhere. I made as much of a compromise as I could, but it's clear that Patreon considers their smallest users less than trash, and treats them as such, and I refuse to be treated that way.
I don't judge other artists for using Patreon, there's a nearly non-existent percentage of artists on planet Earth that can support themselves with their work, but it's a damn shame how low standards are for crowdfunding sites, and how vanishingly few alternatives there are that people will even consider using to support their favorite creator with. Making art and getting fan support should be easy with how advanced we are in the modern age, it really should be, but shithead corporations will do everything they can do within legal limits (and beyond!) to screw it up.
So I'm right back at square one again. I'll keep re-strategizing how I structure things going forward until a plan finally sticks, if one ever sticks. SubscribeStar seems to be the only noteworthy Patreon alternative, but they're particularly lackluster in their features, and it almost seems like the platform does its absolute hardest to let smaller creators fall through the cracks (i.e. they don't send payments until you've reached an accumulated total of $150, they won't automatically bill supporters until you have five or more concurrent users, etc). Discord has a similar crowdfunding feature that frankly sounded promising... there's just one itty bitty stipulation: you have to convert your Discord server into a "Community", which will automatically enable their anti-porn bots to completely sterilize every bit of visual media posted there. Don't forget that NSFW art is literally the devil and should be expunged from our fair society, good citizen!
I'll keep trudging through the mud until I reach dry land in the mean time.
I decided to look back into Patreon - the EA of crowdfunding, the Comcast of fundraising. They're an awful, miserable company for many, MANY reasons, the most notable of which (for those who hadn't heard) was their decision to grab their ankles at the whim of credit card companies and ban NSFW creators who refused to give them private information that they, as a glorified middleman, do not need. In a shocking turn of events, they exploited user information (violating federal law in the process), and now they're set to pay out millions to creators they harmed (myself included). When I get the check in the mail, I'll have to give it some real thought on what I'll spend it on, but we'll cross that bridge when we get to it.
Even still, I sat and pondered on the situation and their crazy demands for a scan of my face and pictures of my driver's license, after seven years of using their platform without prior incident, and I came up with a whacky idea - what if I just covered up all the info on my driver's license, except my face and date of birth, with strips of paper in order to fool their system? An impromptu redaction, and an acceptable compromise.
Turns out that actually works. I passed verification and my page is now visible again. I legitimately couldn't believe it.
As of right now, I can immediately go back to doing what I did normally a year ago... though there was a caveat. Since I had used Patreon for seven years prior to their crack down, I had "Founder status", meaning Patreon only took 5% of my supporter's hard-earned cash as the cost for my use of their service. But in a true blue scumbag move, Patreon quietly (and permanently) downgrades all users out of Founder status if their page is unpublished, therefore allowing them to scrape up a larger cut of the funds with no justification whatsoever. Give in to our creepy and unnecessary demands, and then you will pay us more for the trouble.
I was really, truly considering giving Patreon a second chance, letting bygones be bygones and let them have my face and date of birth and get back to making art for my community whilst letting Patreon take fair compensation for their service, but after receiving a series of fluffy boilerplate copy-paste nonsense from an intern effectively saying "fuck you, pay us more", I knew I wasn't going to get anywhere. I made as much of a compromise as I could, but it's clear that Patreon considers their smallest users less than trash, and treats them as such, and I refuse to be treated that way.
I don't judge other artists for using Patreon, there's a nearly non-existent percentage of artists on planet Earth that can support themselves with their work, but it's a damn shame how low standards are for crowdfunding sites, and how vanishingly few alternatives there are that people will even consider using to support their favorite creator with. Making art and getting fan support should be easy with how advanced we are in the modern age, it really should be, but shithead corporations will do everything they can do within legal limits (and beyond!) to screw it up.
So I'm right back at square one again. I'll keep re-strategizing how I structure things going forward until a plan finally sticks, if one ever sticks. SubscribeStar seems to be the only noteworthy Patreon alternative, but they're particularly lackluster in their features, and it almost seems like the platform does its absolute hardest to let smaller creators fall through the cracks (i.e. they don't send payments until you've reached an accumulated total of $150, they won't automatically bill supporters until you have five or more concurrent users, etc). Discord has a similar crowdfunding feature that frankly sounded promising... there's just one itty bitty stipulation: you have to convert your Discord server into a "Community", which will automatically enable their anti-porn bots to completely sterilize every bit of visual media posted there. Don't forget that NSFW art is literally the devil and should be expunged from our fair society, good citizen!
I'll keep trudging through the mud until I reach dry land in the mean time.
