Hacker News Reader

Comment by bobitsaboy | Hacker News Reader

Giving the creators a week or less notice and demanding such a sharp increase in fees is nothing less than a shakedown.

Had they given them a 30 day heads up, I can't see much room for criticism.

The scenario with Channel 5 was even more silly, since Vimeo was just a service that Patreon was using. This not only looked like a shakedown, it was from a hosting platform the group wasn't even directly using.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/vimeo-is-holding-61514364

As I understand it, Patreon creators explicitly sign up to a paid Vimeo account and link that with their Patreon account, and then can upload to Vimeo through the Patreon posting UI. E.g. the post says they "tried to log into my Vimeo account".

Interesting. There's one Patreon I subscribe to that used Vimeo. I didn't realize it was what Patreon apparently exclusively used? This sounds like a BIG problem for Patreon, then.

This may be a much bigger issue than I thought...

Patreon video has 2 solutions, Vimeo, and URL. If you use vimeo you can upload videos to vimeo right through the patreon page (though that stopped working for me some while ago so I started just using vimeo directly). For the URL it doesn't want like, a link to a video file. That will result in the patreon page just having a download link. But if you provide it with basically the same thing vimeo does (a whole ass player through the page's meta information) it can embed the video just fine, same as Vimeo.

I had planned to switch off Vimeo anyway because of the weekly upload limit being so low for my tier (I could tier up but my patreon income is like, 7 dollars so it wouldn't really be worth it). And this is pretty much the motivation I need. It's something I had already messed around with, for the purposes of embedding a custom HLS livestream. And since the only real security Vimeo offers is an unlisted URL and a domain whitelist, my plan was to require actual Patreon Oauth to watch the videos.

I think that’s the point. If you are running b2b services it’s a shakedown of small business clients

I think a lot of people here offer b2b services that are not shakedowns.

You misunderstood. The small b2b are the ones getting shook down. Small b2b content providers are getting hit with huge cost so they can buy time to migrate off

If you meant that Vimeo is shaking down small business clients, that might be true. But the way you phrased things it sounded like you were saying small business services in general are a shakedown, and Vimeo was just another example of this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com