I'm sorry for anyone that actually reads this... I'm tired and generally stupid so most of it will probably sound dumb.Stranger wrote: ↑Sun Dec 10, 2017 5:18 amMy understanding is the Patreon changes are better for everyone involved but are just weeding out the, "I'm gonna give one dollar," and, "I'm going to cheat the system for free reward perks," right? It's one of those changes that you need to let simmer a bit before you see the good coming from it, or something?
I've said some of this in another thread, but I'll repeat it. And earlier I was assuming some things that were wrong. I might still have some shit wrong though, I only glanced at the pictures of the post explaining the changes because I can't read.
If anyone actually reads this, keep in mind I don't pledge to anyone (I did pledge a couple bucks to someone for a couple months but stopped over a year ago) and I don't receive any pledges, so I don't have a stake in this. I just like to sperg out when people do stupid shit shit I think is stupid.
I'm too lazy and tired to go through this and fix it, but where I mention "transaction fee" I'm specifically talking about the $0.35 set fee, not the 2.9% variable fee.
I don't know why they would want to weed out people who just give $1, unless they're just giving $1 to one person. If they did want to get rid of people just giving $1 to one person, because it was "costing them money" due to fees, they should've modified the change to charge a fee to those people or switched to "you fund a patreon wallet in chunks and then pay people with that" system. Before the change, if someone is giving $1 to 20 people, then patreon should just be charging that person $20 a month so they'd only be paying one transaction fee.
Getting rid of the "pledge, get reward, remove pledge, and never pay" cheats. Absolutely, they mention that was a reason for the change. Everyone is on the "charge when pledged" system now and there is no "double charge" scenario that would occur if someone pledged on the 30th and then were charged again on the 1st.
The problem is that they aren't going to group charges now. So if I pledged to someone on the 1st, someone else on the 2nd, and someone that is "pay per post" on the 3rd, my credit card will be charged every month on the 1st, 2nd, and every time the "pay per post" person makes a paid post.
I wonder how they process the transactions for people that makes multiple pledges in a single day. If I pledge to 20 different people in a single day, they shouldn't be making 20 transactions. If they are, they are fucking retarded and needed to spend a little more time on their processing system.
Another thing... How are they going to charge current pledges? Their blog posts make it sound like current "per month" pledges will all renew on the 1st, in which case why are they charging a transaction fee per pledge when they should just be doing one transaction for the whole amount. If they're not just doing one transaction, again, they're fucking retarded.
The thing that seems dumbest to me is making the person giving the money pay the fees.
The only time I can think of people doing that is some gas stations would have different prices for cash vs charge, but it's been probably decades since I saw that.
It seems as stupid to me as if Amazon charged you their card processing fees, but not only that, they charged you a transaction fee on each item you buy in the same order. Now, I know they do make you pay it by baking it into the price of whatever you buy, but it's dumb as fuck to make it that transparent. Obviously there is no "item" to bake the price of transaction fees into, but that's why the fee should've been kept on the creator side. Sure, creators would've still bitched if they were paying 38% in fees for the $1 pledges, but then at least it would've made more sense. Plus it would've incentivised creators to make people want to donate more.
EEVblog made a video about the change and I noticed he had about 1300 pledges. For December, his pledged amount was about $4400, of which he got about $3900. So on the old system he paid $500 in fees. If they would've kept the fees on the creator, on the new system he would clear about $3600, so he would be paying $300 more in fees. Still, the stupid thing is, why is patreon charging people multiple transaction fees when they're making (or should be making) only one transaction for all pledges that renew on the same day?
Now, in the video he says he only lost about 20 patrons so far. So, assuming more people don't jump ship, he is making more money losing a couple people than if they kept fees creator side.
Though, for all I know they will only charge one $0.35 set fee for all pledges that renew the same day. If so, I wasted a shit ton of time writing this.
TL;DR
My issue with the situation is:
Patreon is stupid for charging fees to the people paying money. It should have been kept creator side.
Patreon is stupid (or shady) for charging multiple $0.35 set transaction fee for a single transaction containing multiple pledges.