Do you love beautifulfiction’s ‘Sherlock’ (The Guilded Cage
and CatLock) stories. Have you read and wept over The_Kingmaker’s
‘The Riven Crown’? Then you have to get on board this Patreon
account of B.D. Strike.
Our favorite author is moving toward publishing their original
works as well as more fan fiction. (Another CatLock is up on AO3!).
Support an incredible author, who’s writing needs to be read.
Her stories are vivid, poetic and sweeping in scope. Support her
future works.
We’ve heard you loud and clear. We’re not going to rollout the changes to our payments system that we announced last week. We still have to fix the problems that those changes addressed, but we’re going to fix them in a different way, and we’re going to work with you to come up with the specifics, as we should have done the first time around. Many of you lost patrons, and you lost income. No apology will make up for that, but nevertheless, I’m sorry. It is our core belief that you should own the relationships with your fans. These are your businesses, and they are your fans.
I’ve spent hours and hours on the phone with creators, and so has the Patreon team. Your feedback has been crystal clear:
The new payments system disproportionately impacted $1 – $2 patrons. We have to build a better system for them.Aggregation is highly-valued, and we underestimated that.Fundamentally, creators should own the business decisions with their fans, not Patreon. We overstepped our bounds and injected ourselves into that relationship, against our core belief as a business.
We recognize that we need to be better at involving you more deeply and earlier in these kinds of decisions and product changes. Additionally, we need to give you a more flexible product and platform to allow you to own the way you run your memberships.
I know it will take a long time for us to earn back your trust. But we are utterly devoted to your success and to getting you sustainable, reliable income for being a creator. We will work harder than ever to build you tools, functionality, and income, and our team won’t rest until Patreon is making that happen.
Thanks for continuing to create. We are nothing without you, and we know that.
If you haven’t sent us a note yet, or if you don’t see your concerns listed above, please leave us your feedback here.
Jack.
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Please no one make fun of or criticize Patreon for doing this. The customers complained and the company fixed the problem. That’s what we want companies to do, preferably without having to campaign for it first.
I’m seeing so many people being snide and shitty about this and honestly miss me with that shit. Even if them losing money was a deciding factor in this retraction, they didnt have to go back on it. Patreon makes enough money from big subscriptions in the long term, that it could have afforded to let the little creators die. And the majority of bigtime creators would have let it happen too. Don’t forget there are big names on patreon, who would have ultimately continued to thrive and keep patreon afloat while the rest of us drowned.
What we have here is a company making an ill thought out decision that primarily would have affected the little people, and the company taking note of our rightful outrage, holding their hands up fully accountable and saying “we’re sorry, we wont do that.”
And it wasnt a non apology either, it was a seemingly sincere mea culpa with a direct follow through on Not doing the shit thing which would have cost us all more income the moment it launched.
Guys, this is how we want businesses to work. We want them to be held accountable, we want them to apologize when they do wrong, we want them to listen to us and work with us and do what is right. And I dunno if it was driven by financial loss or ethical business concerns, possibly both. But the point is they did it. They were held accountable and corrected their actions. A little too late perhaps for some of our liking, but all the same it’s a good positive step not to be downplayed by fatalistic cynicism about how everyone is ultimately evil and greedy.
This is a good thing that is making many of us breathe a sigh of relief. Stop trying to detract from that. We know the world is dark and full of terror, we don’t need to be reminded of that. But sometimes we need to be reminded of the light.