What an absurd posture. HN is full of people endlessly harping about the shitty quality of free, ad supported SEO-rigged mill content that sucks, but then a site that allows often hard working creators to ask for very modest donations so that you can view their material is labeled as "exclusive" and implicitly elitist. The people who try to make some money on Patreon don't owe any special favors to children without credit cards or to people in other countries without applicable payment methods at their disposal. They owe themselves a living, and their sponsors a decent presentation, nothing more. There are still plenty of free alternatives out there, instead of harping about one person hoping to earn some money for all the work they put into their videos/creativity.
The club is affordable. What makes it exclusive is the intellectual alignment required to unlock the value of the information. Not everyone has that. If you have it, consider joining the club while you are still alive so you can enjoy the benefits of membership and fraternity with people like you. After that brief period expires, the club will be truly exclusive for a long time.
For the donation of a single dollar, you are given access to all of his videos. I would not describe that as "exclusive," although I understand what you are saying.
It’s pretty alienating to the vast majority of underage minds who don’t have their own credit cards, as well as a tremendous amount of people outside the US who have different payment systems.
Personally, I use it to support public content, because I have the means to do so now, and because I didn’t always.
Probably some kind of interpretation of AML obligations. One could setup their own Patreon and pay themselves via cards in ways that banks, payment processors, and possibly law enforcement would rather you didn’t.
I come across this a lot when trying to pay for things with Cash App or Coinbase Card, as they are both classed as prepaid cards for reasons I don’t understand.
It would be interesting to see real-world numbers on the prevalence of money laundering via $1-$10 monthly payments to Patreon, compared to other online vendors who accept legally-permitted prepaid card payments. Most prepaid cards are limited to relatively small amounts anyway, precisely to make them less usable for money laundering.
> secret documents leaked from FinCEN, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, a unit of the U.S. Treasury. The documents “show that five global banks — JPMorgan, HSBC, Standard Chartered Bank, Deutsche Bank and Bank of New York Mellon — kept profiting from powerful and dangerous players even after U.S. authorities fined these financial institutions for earlier failures to stem flows of dirty money.”
In comparison to 7 figure flows, Patreon restrictions on already-limited prepaid cards are AML theater.
I love this conversation. If anything, I feel like I’m late to this party, and I’m not even trying to do anything that isn’t expressly allowed.
To your point about small amounts, I think that is also monetizable with fake/stolen accounts cashing in on referral and promotional “free money,” combined with widespread flip/swap scams. I wonder if patio11 could enlighten us with some hard numbers on the dollar values of attempted fraudulent purchases. I suspect that actual card swipe fraud to be high dollar items sent to dead drops, and low dollar fraud utilizing unauthorized access to others’ accounts and money transfer apps, and so-called “friendly fraud.”
On a related note, scam rap is so lit right now. I’ll just leave this right here. Teejayx6 really gets the subculture, and as a child who grew up learning how to hack in the wild 90s, he speaks truth. He may have created the subgenre, but raps about ill-gotten gains are as old as soul music.
> I just made a fake GoFundMe someone send donations
I can't afford to be a patron for all the channels I like. Maybe I'm in the minority for my salary but $100 or $200 / month is not a thing I can afford, or even half that.
It was always meant for people to be patrons of someone, like artists were back in the Renaissance. It's simply a way for people to be paid for their work, and what better way than exclusivity? That's basically the same as being able to use software only if it's paid for, like most SaaS these days.
