I put forth that Wordpress, Peertube, Substack, and ActivityPub are all inspiration for what comes next (with Stripe, PayPal, Venmo, and Zelle support for patron payments/subscriptions). The primitives already exist.
https://taler.net/en/news/index.html
Having an external audit and a response plan is, helpful for finally solving the payment processor / money transmitter issue.
Though the real solution for Patreon, and so many other issues, is some kind of automated escrow service built on top of that, with a best case outcome of seller and buyer agreeing and a contested case of review by other registered entities in the service deciding the outcome of the contract.
GNU is pathologically incapable of coming up with appealing names.
Patreon is indeed a billion dollar unicorn not because it's immediately going to funnel money to shareholders… did Amazon?
Patreon is clearly the PayPal of… being Patreon. The network effects and defining of the brand have already kicked in. I'm pretty happy about it (but then I would be as I'm one of the more successful people on it) but, like I personally told Jack Conte and Sam Yam, I am also happy about what Patreon means TO that 'long tail', because some of the qualities that benefit me also benefit the small fry.
You can't live off a steady and ever-so-slightly growing $50 a month. That's the long tail: people not being discovered, who have only their little crews of supporters. There is no plan to make them all earn thousands of dollars a month because practically, that can't happen to all of them.
BUT, if you have a predictable slowly growing $50 a month (because it's not tightly tied to new product releases of yours, there isn't the feast-or-famine cycle of being entreprenurial in the traditional sense, which I have also done) that becomes a small supplemental income that you can depend on. The value of that is incalculable… certainly worth a billion VC dollars that Patreon means THAT to people.
An extra $50 can mean life and death to someone who is really on the edge. The example I used to Jack and Sam is a single mom with just a cell phone, who can livestream telling bedtime stories to her child. And other moms tune in, and support her and her stories for $50 a month: they can spare it, and that is now food for her child. It doesn't HAVE to make her J. K. Rowling, to count. It matters at all scales.
The creators I want to support are all on Patreon, so that’s the platform where I have account, but beyond setting up the subscription I new use the site. It’s a sad experience, slower than the Reddit redesign, it’s pointless to try to do anything meaningful on Patreon.
They need to invest in their site, but the valuation seem high for what they provide.