2y ago

Patreon having issues again causing thousands of people’s payments to be declined

Many creators mentioning they lost hundreds of their patrons suddenly and patrons confused as to why their payments are being declined. Patreon is such an old company that hasnt done anything to improve their service for years while the CEO makes youtube videos and seemingly nothing with the company. I hate how much of a monopoly they have in the space, they clearly have no vision for improving their website or app.

41 comments

I hate how much of a monopoly they have in the space
https://liberapay.com/
- I hate their entire policy around what you can and cannot say or do, on their platform or somewhere else.
  
  When you use Stripe/Paypal as your payment processor you have to be willing to accept whatever demands they (and the banks backing them) decide to make on any given day.
  
  Can you elaborate?
- A number of these alternatives exist but the reality is that if a creator advertises Patreon vs advertises Liberapay (or another alternative) you get more people signing up for the Patreon because it has better name recognition / marketing / whatever. In my opinion they got to their dominant position mostly because "we" let them, and they also stay there because "we" let them.
  And partly because they were one of the earlier platforms (but by no means the first option for crowd-sourced financial support for creators), and they also started with lower fees than they have these days.
- I've also bought "coffee" for someone on ko-fi before. I think that's a different concept though.
  
  Nope, same thing, different words used
  The idea is it's more personable, instead of subbing to a Patreon or doing a one-time PayPal or what have you, you "buy them a coffee" or "buy them a pencil" or some other low-cost item that most people both understand helps people AND are cheap/something they might get themselves, so they're more likely to donate
  Also I'm p sure Ko-Fi has a better revenue split with those who use it than Patreon does
- Is it actually better? There are things like open collective and GitHub sponsors too... Choices are great, but the choices aren't clear
  
  Is it actually better?
  No idea, I don't use either. I don't even know what you mean by "better" in this context.

Huh, I was wondering why 10% of our patrons disappeared overnight. It's normal for a drop-off at the start of the month but not normally such a large one

I hate how much of a monopoly they have in the space...
It's not necessarily Patreon that's the root problem here. The problem is the foundations of the financial industry (banks, credit card companies, etc) have complete control over the content and products you can exchange for money.
If Wells Fargo decides that your product or content has offended some random executive, they will call up your payment provider (like Stripe) and tell them to close your account. And the payment provider will do it because they don't really have a choice.
- "complete control over the content and products you can exchange for money"
  This suddenly aligns with which creators had failed in my attempts at individual payment where the monthly bulk had failed (maybe due to including the ones which failed). One, an RPG supplement creator, has me scratching my head. I saw recently that the art of some of these has caused CC companies to deny payments. F that.
- A rejected payment method leading to losing your subscribed list is 100% a Patron problem.
  The issue at hand is not (just) rejected payments, they can be fixed. Its the inability of creators to keep their subscribers after it's fixed.
  
  Agreed, I wasn't necessarily speaking about this specific issue, just about the broader issue of Patreon and the lack of good alternatives.

- He regularly releases songs with Scary Pockets

Floatplane gang rise up

Mine went through just fine - I'm curious what subset of users this affected.
Regarding the list of who you supported, Patreon has sent me monthly "Your Patreon receipt is here!" emails that list out each supporter and the tier. I don't believe I explicitly enabled these emails - they just started coming one month, so presumably one would have needed to specifically turn them off to not get the receipts.
- Patron affected here, though not same as article image experience.
  I tried to individually re-establish each creator to which I had subscribed. Some went through and some keep erroring. Using the FAQ for declined payments, I keep seeing this blue "1" in a box before the page loads completely (like an unread 'flag') so I think something has failed during that load which might have helped with everything.
  The FAQ also mentions that they re-try payments "throughout the month" while keeping you a member, though denying access to paid benefits and posts. So, I had decided to wait it out. Though, after seeing this, something more widespread has happened.
  
  Meant to add, their help and support doesn't offer much. I have two tickets with numbers, but no idea how to check status.

https://status.patreon.com
As of August 3rd, 07:10 PDT
"Identified - An unrelated issue is causing a slightly higher-than-normal number of patron payments to be erroneously flagged as fraudulent by their banks. We’re sorry for the inconvenience this may cause creators and their patrons. We are working diligently with our partners to resolve this."

Had the same thing happen to me. I got texts about fraud from my bank and an email saying I needed to update my payment. I was wondering what prompted this cause I've been using patreon for years and never once had an issue like this.

I know some creators that are moving to Substack and it really seems like a good way forward for certain content. I can't blame folks for leaving, I'd be pissed if a platform caused me to miss out on income.

Wild how we even need a middleman like patreon to receive money.
- You don't need it, but its a convenient website to let people save their info and support people financially across multiple professions all from one account
  Many creators use PayPal or similar to let people just one-time pay through said creators site or app, but Patreon/Ko-Fi/etc. Allow a little more without needing to do all the work yourself
  
  You gave another corporate middleman as an alternative to needing a corporate middleman.

Mine looks ok so maybe it doesn't affect everyone? I'm just a patron though.
- As a creator, it doesn't seem like I've lost any of my patrons. Someone new even joined last night

Oh, hey Wong; I still miss PWOT.
- ?
  
  The dude tweeting used to run a site called Pointless Waste of Time under the pseudonym "David Wong." Had a bunch of funny articles and the forums were great. Ended up going away when he became the (I think) chief editor at Cracked (before it was all list based) and they merged the forums.

Patreon always has some lind of problem every now and then. To this day I haven't been able to even create an account there because they won't let me.
Are there no other services that creators/donators can use (apart from Liberapay that I see a bit lower in the comments)?
- There's Subscribestar.com (and subscribestar.adult for the more spicy content) but they don't support PayPal.

41 comments