every month since I started using Patreon, after payout day I see a substantial drop in subscription totals, a few hundred bucks worth. I always figured this was because people get charged on the first, then go "oh shit Patreon I forgot to cancel" and then go cancel. A week later it's back up to normal levels, and I assumed this too was just due to subscriber churn.
The thing is, patreons website is so bad, so unbelievably shitty and counter to anything anyone wants it to be, that there's simply nowhere you can go that will let you answer these questions. There should be a single page that simply lists all signups and cancellations; there isn't. You have to synthesize this info manually from six different sources, which I've also learned can just be wrong. So the data doesn't exist, and all you can do is float in limbo and hope you're right about next months rent
As a separate issue, I realized a couple months ago that if you go into your list of patrons and filter by tier, it shows you cancelled patrons. I've been delivering benefits (minimal though mine are) to people who cancelled a year ago. You have to manually select "Active" under sub status. Again, this website does absolutely nothing the way anyone would want it to.
Yesterday I put these facts together at last and realized that patreon is subtracting the fucking declined payments from my subscriber total. Yeah, declines, the thing that VERY REGULARLY happens on automatic payments and usually gets resolved within a couple days? Yeah that. Patreon stops counting them as subscribers and makes you think you just lost a ton of RECURRING revenue due to a fucking TEMPORARY PAYMENT FAILURE
this website is run by ghouls
As someone who is closer to the ivory tower than most, in terms of having things pretty easy financially while not being independently wealthy, i am always thinking about how our society and economy don't work even if you play the game "right"
worked since i was 17. got hired off the street at minimum wage, learned on my feet, got promoted. moved to a new job, got a little more to do slightly more skilled work. moved to another job that paid more using my prior experience in the field. used connections to get my foot in the door for an entry-level position in a more upmarket business, then worked my way up the ranks by working harder than I was asked to, getting noticed, etc.
this narrative is left over from the 1960s, it doesn't work anymore. i managed to make it work better than most... except the whole time i was living with roommates, and never made more than 2/3 of a rent check.
health insurance is my go-to for how much "The System" doesn't work. one of my favorite events in quitting my job was finding out that I had $500 in medical bills that my insurance had just been silently refusing to pay, for months, for no obvious reason. i don't even know who my provider was in the end; my employer switched at least five times.
i played the game, i did what i was supposed to do, and I didn't even get functioning Employer Health Insurance, the thing that's supposed to be Endgame, that's supposed to qualify you as a real citizen. literally every single time I tried to get health care in that whole decade, every single time, i handed the card to the lady behind the desk and she punched in the numbers, frowned, then said "so these aren't coming up..." Every single time I got on the phone with anyone they would ask me for my subscriber ID, and I would give the only two numbers from my card, and they would tell me there was supposed to be a third one. It never, ever worked without a dozen stupid phone calls over a week or three.
okay, so, I quit my job and strike out on my own. i'm doing it baby! let's be REAL capitalists, none of this "what if we didn't force people to run as fast as they can just to stay in place" shit. i'm gonna be an Entrepreneur, I'm going to self-promote, self-motivate, and design my own future. let's get REAL fucked over when the bottom falls out #GRINDSET #NOSAFETYNET
i tried to sign up for health insurance the other day, and found out that if you aren't trying to take government subsidies, they just don't want to hear from you. if you just, straight up, want to buy health insurance at sticker price, there's just... no way to do that, that I could find. i tried googling health insurance companies and all I got were WAHealthPlanFinder, fucking Healthcare.gov, etc. and every single one tries to put you through a workflow that assumes you are trying to get government subsidies.
the government should pay for all healthcare, but that's immaterial: they don't, and I don't qualify for any discounts. i am self-employed, no student loans, no dependents, making over $100k a year - I know I'm just going to pay sticker price. i just wanted to go to a site and put in my visa number.
i spent a solid hour trying to make it through the stupid fucking workflows over and over. even when i tried to just buy insurance on a provider website, it didn't work. i would answer the up front question about where I lived, then - bam, I'm on fucking WAHealthPlanFinder, which thinks I must have a military discount or a dependent or something. otherwise, why would I be there
in the end i gave up in disgust because i simply couldn't figure it out. a week later i got a letter from a dental plan that I apparently signed up for?? nobody asked me for any money, i have no idea how to pay them except by paper check. i still haven't heard word one from the health insurance company that i had selected at the same time. i tried signing up on their website but it takes about six clicks on tiny little links to find out that the only way to do this, despite the fact that i just fucking ordered health insurance online, is to wait for them to mail me a piece of paper with a login on it. i have no idea if this is coming, or when it will arrive, and i am past the legal cutoff date for not having insurance. i have no idea what happens if i get hit by a car tomorrow.
but hey, i'm an entrepreneur, right?? i'm playing the game, Hoo Rah, America, i'm gonna buy stonks at any moment. i'm fucking, propping up this shitheaded house of cards by smooth talking 1200 other people into pay my rent a buck at a time.
whoops, turns out there's no way to do that EITHER that isn't some kind of fucking grift, some kind of shell game. we all knew when patreon started that their goal was to rugpull, and the rugpull has been visibly approaching for a year. they floated an ENORMOUS survey like 8 months ago asking about a ton of incredibly worrying shit that clearly indicated they were preparing to Pivot. sure enough, we're now seeing that, INCONCEIVABLY, they think they're going to turn Patreon into the primary site you go to in order to be entertained. the video player they've released is like an HTML5 demo from 2006 and doesn't support chromecast, rendering it useless for 95% of users. $20 says they never fix this.
we all know that when this fails, and it will fail HARD and FAST, they will close the entire company virtually overnight. the CEO will take every penny and put it in his own account, then have the company declare bankruptcy and walk away to start this whole process over again. every single person making a living on this will be left broke and desperately scrambling to reach out to their supporters (with no contact list, since the fucking website will be shut down before the announcement is even made) to beg them to move to something else, which will invariably be even jankier and will probably evaporate within a few months. soon the patrons will tire of this routine and stop even bothering to re-sign up. and then a lot of people will be fucked, for the crime of... doing what the mythology said they should do. trying to be Good Americans, and not Depend on anyone.
every time patreon makes the website 15% stupider, i know it's because they're actively trying to push people away from paying me money to do what i'm good at, in an asinine attempt to get all of us to do something we have already made vocally clear we do not want to do. i can't wait for this to collapse for no reason.






























