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Comment by Karsteski | Hacker News Reader

Patreon exists, but I hesitate to contribute to projects/people through Patreon as I want to give them as little money as possible...

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There is always Liberapay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberapay

+1 for librapay

We ask our company to set aside of a small amount of money each year, and we distribute it among projects we most used that year on librapay.

I also feel that something like Patreon doesn't reflect the semi-decentralised way open source is built.

There needs to be features like feature/bug-bounties that you can trust even if you don't fully trust the repo-owner/maintainer?

I'd be more okay with donating via Patreon if they didn't do the thing where every internet platform that becomes successful feels the need to start going down the political route. I'm not sure if this is a more of an issue due to the employees, or due to social media pressure, or if it's just "keeping up with the times" but I hate it. And it's also so US-centric, which makes sense as they are usually US-based companies, but it just irritates me looking from the outside.

As someone who doesn’t follow the details of day to day Very Online politics-adjacent drama, I haven’t heard much about Patreon, so… they seem to be threading the needle well enough to stay off the radar of boring normies like myself. What’s their issue?

They started banning creators who made NSFW content a few years ago, might be that. They never allowed porn, but they started hammering down on all sorts of erotic material. I don't really care, but others do.

I think that was more at the behest of the payment processors, Visa and MC absolutely hate adult content-related stuff. Which is fucking stupid, IMHO

It's due to chargeback risk. A lot of times folks will be caught paying for adult content on a credit card statement by a family member. They'll just tell family that it was fraud and dispute the charge. This occurs frequently enough that Visa and MC aren't fans of adult content on their payment networks.

That won't be a problem once/if the US has more popular payment rails that don't allow chargebacks.

> They never allowed porn

WAT? I pay for porn on patreon and have for years. Maybe it's just live video porn that's banned? I have no idea. AFAIK the artists I'm subscribed to are not hiding their creations. In fact they're all over sites like pornhub, spankbang, etc with their patreon address in their videos. It's all CG or real time 3D but it's most certainly porn.

This seems like a natural outcome of running such a platform. The platform is trying to optimise revenue. They can choose which user complaints to support/reject but they can’t satisfy everyone.

opencollective maybe? They have multiple "hosts" that handle receiving the money, tax paperwork, and approve spending. So a project probably doesn't need too much trust if you trust the host... if I understand this right.

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