“Can Patreon fight fire with social media fire?”
This week’s Decoder is probably my favorite episode so far. It is a really thoughtful conversation with Patreon CEO Jack Conte, discussing what’s changed for that company in the past five years. One of the really interesting bits is right up front when they discuss how the platforms have shifted from a subscriber-centric model to an interest-driven one. This shift has pushed Patreon to pivot from being a payments enabler to be more of a full stack platform for creators with features such as discovery, video and audio capability, and more. It will be interesting to see how Patreon can shake that previous brand and re-establish itself in this new light—it seems like a big lift.
Another interesting segment discusses how Patreon has to straddle the line between being a software company, where AI has radically shifted how work is being done, and its creator base, who generally loathe AI.
The episode is good stuff, and worth a listen.
Can Patreon fight fire with social media fire?
Patreon CEO Jack Conte on contending with AI slop, combating Apple and social platforms, and the future of the creator economy.
Patreon and The Online Photographer
I really only thought of Patreon as a way to pay creators I really liked and wanted to contribute to. I previously lamented the demise of the blog, The Online Photographer, and its rebirth under Patreon, but I sort of get it a bit more now: If you think of Patreon as more of a competitor to Substack and the like, it seems like a more natural fit for TOP. That’s especially true when you consider that TOP and its audience were burned pretty badly by TypePad’s demise.
Still, I don’t like reading it there. It doesn’t have RSS feeds for posts, and I have to feed the newsletter version through Feedbin to make it appear in my RSS reader instead of email. I’m glad that Patreon is enabling TOP as a going concern, and I like its mission to be an alternative to the toxic social media platforms that force it’s transformation.