danShumway

I think it's great if reviewing code for you is faster than writing it.

I don't think reviewing code well is something most developers can do faster than they can write it. I think that's what Joel is getting at when he says that understanding code is harder than writing it. Harder in the sense of, it takes more effort and takes longer and you are more likely to make errors.

And that might not be true for you. But it is true for a huge number of professional developers.

And it is certainly not the case that understanding and reviewing code is both:

- more time consuming and more difficult than writing it and

- that it's faster to move your entire development strategy to one where you review existing code.

Those are incompatible claims. Pick one.

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I wouldn't normally quibble about something like this, but it does kind of rub me the wrong way when I hear AI developers talk down about this (and I'm sure it's not your intention to talk down). In your post, you write:

Figuring out how to patch fetch() like that is non-trivial—where I’m using the software engineer’s definition of “non-trivial” as meaning “I don’t know how to do that off the top of my head”. I’d have to do some thinking and research! I’m already tempted to drop this idea and work on something else.

If I responded to that by writing, "well, doing quick thinking and research is part of the job of being a professional developer and is a learned skill that you could get better at, so what's your problem" - I think you would very rightly say that's not a reasonable response.

So I think that "well, you're a professional, you should be faster at reviewing code" is similarly dismissive to a real conflict inherent in these tools that you are ignoring, and is the kind of dismissive response that I don't normally see from you. Especially phrasing it as, "they're both true".. I don't understand what that even means.

They're not both true, you're telling me right now that it's not both true - you are telling me that it is faster for you to digest code than it is for you to write it. So what is this "both are true" bullcrap?

You've said this a couple of times, but I don't understand what you're trying to say.

Yes, I can do frustrating things, I know how to review and vet code. I also know how to write boilerplate code. I also know how to research new tasks in areas where I have no familiarity that are poorly documented. I know how to do a lot of complicated, difficult things - all of which are part of being a professional developer.

The question is whether I want to use a tool that makes most of my job the difficult part.

The only way this makes sense is if you are somehow reaching a point where "doing the harder thing" is not the harder thing for you anymore - where reviewing code is easier for you than writing it. And maybe your argument is that you can get to that point with practice, or that LLM code is generally easier to review than other types of code, or that the problems it's tackling are so difficult that in those cases writing the code is harder than reading it.

But it's not that they're both true. "You should be able to do the harder thing" is not really an answer to "why are you selling me a tool that replaces an easy thing with a hard thing?"

There are many difficult things that I can do as a professional software developer. I can mentor junior developers. I can do detailed product design work with stakeholders and translate technical limitations into language that they understand. I can negotiate software deadlines with product owners. I can write interfaces for undocumented software and deal with undocumented bugs in 3rd-party code. I can step through minified code in production settings to debug problems. These are all difficult things that, as a professional developer, I am capable and willing to do, and often need to do. And yes, of course, I can review pull requests. I am not, however, generally in the business of adopting tools that force me to do that stuff more often than is necessary to get good results. I don't adopt tools that make my life harder, and I honestly think that's a big part of being a professional.

To be very blunt about it: "Buck up, you should be able to handle this" is not a sales pitch. I can also write with my non-dominant hand, but I'm not going to start taking notes that way. There's no intrinsic prize for making your life harder, the only way what you're saying makes sense is if it's not harder for you to read code than to write it.

LLMs (not even agents; LLMs themselves, intrinsically) use frameworks.

That's not what I see the parent comment saying. They're not saying that LLMs can't use frameworks, they're saying that if you have rote solutions that you are being forced to write over and over and over again, you shouldn't be using an LLM to automate it, you should use a framework and get that code out of your project.

And at that point, you won't have a ton of boilerplate to write.

The two sides to this I see online are between the people who think we need a way to automate boilerplate and setup code, and the people who want to eliminate boilerplate (not just the copy-paste kind, but also the "ugh, I've got to do this thing again that I've done 20 times" kind).

Ideally:

a common set of rote solutions to isomorphic problems

Should not be a thing you have to write very often (or if it is, you should have tools that make it as quick to implement as it would be to type a prompt into an LLM). If that kind of rote repetitive problem solving is a huge part of your job, then to borrow your phrasing: the language or the tools you're using have let you down.

So as an example of what this could look like that would be convincing to me. I started out pretty firmly believing that Rust was a fad.

Then Mozilla and Google did things with it that I did not think were possible for them to do. Not "they wrote a bunch of code with it", stuff like "they eliminated an entire class of bugs from a section of their codebase."

Then I watched a bunch of essentially hobby developers write kernel drivers for brand new architecture, and watched them turn brand new Macbooks into one of the best-in-class ways to run Linux. I do not believe they could have done that with their resources at that speed, using C or C++.

And at that point, you kind of begrudgingly say, "okay, I don't know if I like this, but fine, heck you, whatever. I guess it might genuinely redefine some parts of software development, you win."

So this is not impossible. You can convince devs like me that your tools are real and they work.

And frankly, there are a billion problems in modern computing that are high impact - stuff like Gnome accessibility, competitive browser engines, FOSS UX, collaboration tools. Entire demographics who have serious problems that could be solved by software if there was enough expertise and time and there were resources to solve them. Often, the issue at play is that there is no intersection between people who are very well acquainted with those communities and understand their needs, and people who have experience writing software.

In theory, LLMs help solve this. In theory. If you're a good programmer, and suddenly you have a tool that makes you 4x as productive as a developer: you could have a very serious impact on a lot of communities right now. I have not seen it happen. Not in the enterprise world, but also not in the FOSS world, not in communities with lower technical resources, not in the public sector. And again, I can be convinced by this, I have dismissed tools that I later switched opinions on because I saw the impact and I couldn't ignore the impact: Rust, NodeJS, Flatpak, etc, etc.

The problem is people have been telling me that Coding Assistants (and now Coding Agents) are one of those tools for multiple years now, and I'm still waiting to see the impact. I'm not waiting to see how many companies pick them up, I'm not waiting to see the job market. I'm waiting to see if this means that real stuff starts getting written at a higher quality significantly faster, and I don't see it.

I see a lot of individual devs showing me hobby projects, and a lot of AI startups, and... frankly, not much else.

The YC acceptance number is a measure of how many startups YC has decided they can handle in a single batch.

Agreed.

I think percentage of accepted startups doing X carries more information than total number of startups accepted as a whole.

Disagreed, I think it carries almost no information at all. The only thing your analysis signifies is that companies believe that using AI will make YCombinator more likely to fund them. They are competing for a limited number of slots and looking for ways to appeal to YCombinator. And the only thing that signifies is that YCombinator, specifically, likes funding AI startups right now.

This is not surprising. If you're an investment firm, funding AI companies is a good bet, in the same way that funding Web3 firms used to be a genuinely good bet. Investors ride market trends that are likely to make a company balloon in value or get bought out by a larger company. Investors are not optimizing for "what redefines the industry"; investors optimize to make a return on investment. And those are two entirely different things.

But it's also not surprising given YCombinator's past - the firm has always kind of gravitated towards hype cycles. It would be surprising if YCombinator wasn't following a major tech trend.

If you want evidence that we're seeing an explosion of companies, you need to look at something much more substantial than "YCombinator likes them".

And that's especially given the case that OP wasn't asking "is the tech industry gravitating towards AI?" They were asking, "are we seeing an explosion of new economic activity?"

And frankly, we're not. There are a lot of reasons for that which could have nothing to do with AI (tariffs and general market trends are probably a bigger issue). But we really aren't seeing the kind of transformation that is being talked about.

Apple's policy was also the same for apps that you bought upfront. There are paid apps on the app store, they also were not allowed to link to payment methods in-app for things like DLCs, add-ons, etc...

Which noteably, Walmart doesn't restrict.

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Also not for nothing, but this was an impressively fast pivot you made from "well, Walmart wouldn't let you do this" to "Walmart is nothing like the app store" ;)

Like.. you asked the question. Would Walmart let you link to a competing store? Yes, and everybody does it. You are the one here who compared Apple to Walmart, I'm sorry if that comparison didn't go the way you wanted it to. If perhaps you want to suggest that Walmart is not like the app store.. well.. congratulations, you and the judge are in agreement on that.

Yes! Why do people keep on asking this? Yes, practically every single tech product that you buy from Walmart will include links to their online stores in the packaging. Including Apple products! And this has been the case for ages.

I remember buying DVDs from Walmart and opening them up and the first thing you would see is a slip of paper telling you in giant letters to use some reward program or streaming service rather than buying the DVDs physically.

If you buy an iPhone from Walmart, there will be a link to the apple store in the packaging. If you buy a Switch, there will be promotions for digital downloads that directly compete with Walmart in your packaging. It's not just digital links either, when I bought a Roomba it came with instructions about how to order future purchases, filters, and parts directly from the manufacturer.

Apple bans developers from including links to alternative stores in bundled manuals and help pages. I can not think of a single physical store that does the same, and I can't think of a single tech company including Apple that doesn't link to competing storefronts in their manuals and packaging inserts.

Apple is worse than Walmart on this issue.

Like standing it's original idea

Patreon's original idea included the features you're calling antifeatures.

You are imagining a fictional version of a platform that has never existed and getting mad that the real platform has lost its way from the fictional platform that only lived in your head.

The original idea that you're upset about Patreon abandoning existed only in your head. It has always been a platform for both pure donations and for transactional subscriptions. It was never the idea to serve one of those communities exclusively. That is a thing you have imagined.

No one is telling anyone what to do.

if you want to sell stuff you better look at Etsy or whatever fits your niche

Sure.

But there are good reasons Patreon may choose to not offer you that feature.

Patreon offers the feature. This is a conversation about whether Apple might remove a feature that Patreon chooses to offer.

I don't know how to make that clearer? Again, the platform you are imagining does not exist; there is no version of Patreon that was positioned against creator services or the ability to pause transactions or per-creation payments. Yes, Patreon could choose not to offer these services.

But they did choose to offer them.

And only one person here showed up and got really mad about the fact that Patreon used the word "patron" in relation to a service they have as far as I can tell, always offered.

Like not turning creativity into a service business.

Some hustlers or professional artists may want it, but most don't want it (even if they don't realize it because they didn't think about the implications)

I don't know if you get to tell people to chill at the same time you're calling anyone who uses Patreon in a way you don't like a hustler, accusing them of ruining creativity, and questioning their ability to know what they do and don't want?

And again, only one person here is mad that Patreon is... doing what they have always done, under the direction of a community that wants them to do it, despite what people who are not part of that community want. Only one person showed up in an unrelated comment thread and said, "stop calling it patronage if a creator chooses not to take someone's money for a month."

I mean, yes, it is irritating and frustrating to hear someone who's not using Patreon as a creator badmouth a significant portion of the community that is doing stuff that people love, and to belittle them and tell them that they don't know what they want or they're hustlers and shouldn't be on the platform. If it means something to you that it's irritating to hear that, congrats! That is irritating and annoying to hear. I'm not sure what that proves, but yes, good job. Belittling creators will make people mad at you, you have cracked the code.

It is also a better end user experience.

If this was clearly true, Apple would not forbid apps from telling users that other payment methods exist. You don't have to hide alternatives from a user if what you're offering them is the obviously superior service.

It's fairly safe to say that Apple doesn't believe that their user experience is obviously superior. At least, not so obviously superior that customers are willing to pay a 30% surcharge for it. Apple isn't confident that if Patreon told users at the time of checkout, "heads up, this is going to cost you 30% more because you're using the app" that those users wouldn't jump-ship to the browser.

Apple phrases this as the price of iOS overall, that this is the most convenient, user-friendly way to collect a payment that provides value to every iOS user. But again, if they believed that, they wouldn't need to hide it from the user. Apple's policy is not that you can't collect payments through Safari and you have to use an app. Apple's policy is that you cannot tell users about surcharges on the iOS store or advertise lower prices through alternative payments.

This is not the policy of a company that believes it is acting everyone's best interests.

they can push for services to be unbundled, but not that a company otherwise charges too much for a nonessential product.

I don't know what regulators can and can't force; that depends entirely on the countries and jurisdictions involved. But I do know that as users, we should view a 27% tax on every subscription paid to indie creators as evidence that something has gone wrong with this platform.

It is weird that Apple believes that their ecosystem provides more value per-transaction to indie creators than the actual platform that those creators are using. I know that creators don't agree with that assessment, they're telling users to stop using the app. And it is weird that Apple is not giving Patreon the choice to opt-out of the supposed value that their platform is providing by disabling transactions in the app. I don't know what line you personally use to decide when something becomes rent-seeking, but saying "the platform provides value" isn't enough of a justification; every single rent seeking behavior on the market from every company can be justified by saying "we control access to a valuable resource, we're providing value by providing access."

At a certain point, you have to look at some of this through a the lens of just human sensibility and say, is this what we actually want a phone platform to look like? Do we want a phone ecosystem where 30% of every dollar you donate to some starving creator goes to one of the richest companies on earth? Is that actually representative of the value Apple is adding via iOS, or is it a parasitic, rent-seeking behavior from a platform that uses its userbase as a bargaining chip to extract value from unrelated services on an ever-increasing level?

Of course Apple will tell you that everyone owes them 27% of their revenue regardless, that this is just the easy way to collect it. Literally any company in their position would say that, regardless of what they were doing or why. The question is whether anyone believes them. The question is whether we believe that it's an accident that they've priced their agreements in the UK to be so arduous that you are guaranteed to lose money by leaving their ecosystem. Is that actually unbundling, or is it punitive fees designed to shut down competitors.

Only regulators can decide, but normal people can guess.

difficult as possible for the user to circumvent.

But not as difficult as possible for the user to be aware of. If an antivirus installed itself on my computer without my knowledge and hid the fact that it existed from me, we would call that malware.

Apple doesn't have a provision that makes it difficult for the customer to use other purchase methods, it has a provision that makes it difficult to inform the customer that alternate purchase methods exist.

And again, there is no reason for Apple to care so much about that unless they think it's beneficial to Apple for the customer not to know what choice they're making. Apple's policy is not the equivalent of an antivirus program or a security measure, Apple's policy is the equivalent of a car salesman trying to make it impossible for you to comparison shop or look up competing prices.

Because "you'd have a worse experience" if you used a competitor. Sure. That's definitely why Patreon can't inform users in the app that they're paying 30% more per-subscription. /s Also I'd have a worse experience with another Internet provider and that's why Comcast needs to make it difficult to compare price rates with other companies. Come on.

I doubt a significant portion of this niche is “being kept unaware” that Patreon has a website.

If this was true then Apple wouldn't have provisions against informing them.

People keep on saying that this is some informed choice. It's not. If it was an informed choice, Apple would not have a policy against informing them.

A better question to ask is how satisfied are Apple’s users compared to users of other competing products, and what can that be attributed to?

We don't know how satisfied they are compared to others, because Apple has a policy against informing them about competing products.

This is an apple-to-oranges comparison. If your grocery store charges you $10 for a loaf of bread and the store down the street charges $5 and you don't realize that you could get the bread for $5, then you'd probably be satisfied with your purchase.

It doesn't mean you're not being exploited.

but I suspect it's a niche that Patreon is very interested in (both because Patreon can't engage them through any other channel, and because they probably have above-average discretionary spending).

It's interesting that the existence of this supposed niche is entirely contained within the larger group of people who are kept unaware of the choice being made. Makes it a little hard to estimate or talk about what that niche actually is since they're always going to be an invisible subset of the users who are unaware of other payment methods or of the increased fees they're paying, and who are by Apple policy not allowed to be informed.

You might as well say that an operating system implementing memory protection is "protecting users from themselves."

I guess readers can decide for themselves whether a store banning telling consumers about an alternative payment method is the same thing as memory protection.

I would suggest that one key difference between antivirus/memory protection and Apple's app store policies is that antivirus doesn't need to desperately try to hide the fact from me that it exists.

I'm a creator, not on Patreon due to sanctions and I have a dayjob for now.

Great. Not to be blunt here, but if you're not on Patreon then who the heck cares what your opinion is on this? I feel like it's kind of reasonable to care more about the opinions of the creators using the platform than the creators not on the platform.

As far as I can tell, this "anti-feature" has existed for the entirety of Patreon. Features like pay-per-post are not new, they're not Patreon expanding or losing its way. Quite the opposite, Patreon has tried multiple times to get rid of some of these features, and they were stopped because of creator backlash. Learn the culture of the place you're criticizing.

And maybe this just isn't the platform for you? But it's a wild thing to go to a platform that has always worked in a certain way -- a platform that you are not using as a creator -- and to say, "oh, this is an anti-feature." Who are you to decide that?

Most creators I support just have different text on them and no other difference.

Great. That is a thing that creators are allowed to do. It is not representative of the entire platform, and it's kind of gross to dismiss the concerns of creators who don't work that way.

Using Patreon as sales platform is a cheaty workaround to save on fees.

What in the heck does it mean to "cheat" on fees? Patreon works great as a subscription platform, and people have used it that way for years, and both creators and fans benefit from it. This isn't a sport, it's not a bad thing for creators to be able to support themselves. I am genuinely thrown off by the idea that someone would look at a creator building things that an audience loves and say, "but they didn't do it fair."

Thanks but I don't have a responsibility to create. If you feel like I have

Very literally nobody has said that you do. What I've said is that other creators do not have a responsibility to ask you how they should create or how they should engage with their fans.

They don't have that responsibility. You can go off and create however you'd like. You can even use Patreon and not pause your service. Patreon has zero requirements to send regular updates. I follow and support creators who put out one update every year. I kick a few dollars a month to a creator who has not posted an update in nearly two years. Do what you want, but stop getting mad at other creators because they're using a platform in a way that has always been officially supported and allowed by the platform.

If you want to sell stuff you better look at Etsy or whatever fits your niche.

Or -- and this is going to be difficult to hear -- creators can do what they want because they don't answer to you. It is wild to me that you are trying to dictate who is allowed to use Patreon as a creator... as someone who is not even on Patreon. Since when do you get to decide who does and doesn't belong inside of a community that you are not even a part of?

Nah. Only when you call it "patronage".

I don't care what you call it, I don't think quibbling over semantic definitions matters more than people's livelihoods.

By definition not. [...] Patreon is focused on one specific model.

I mean, no, objectively not, given that Patreon supported exclusive tiers and rewards from the very beginning. I'm sorry if you thought it was focused on something different, but creators on the platform have literally never universally treated it as a donation model. Your idea of what you'd like Patreon to be has nothing to do with what it has always been. Of course, Patreon can be treated as a pure donation platform, and many creators do. And of course, some creators who do treat it as a donation platform still choose to make use of paused payments or pay-per-post, and have written en-length about how that's better for their personal creative process.

Again, I want to point out how incredibly wild it is to walk up to a community that you are not a part of, that has always included a particular set of people, and to point at them and say, "they don't belong there, we're by definition not supporting them."

As patron I hate "pay per post" bc I have to do some math to even tell how much I'm paying you.

Set a maximum pay-out, this isn't hard. As a patron, you should use the tools available to you to control your spending rather than requiring creators to fit into your model. I feel like for all the nobility you're ascribing to being a "patron" of a creator, asking you as part of that to accommodate the preferred donation styles of creators you support is fairly reasonable.

Nobody is forcing you to support creators who use pay-per-post. But they don't have an obligation to you to handle their funding in the way you like.

As creator, see above.

As a creator not on Patreon. And that's fine, there's lots of spaces that you can be a creator. But it doesn't particularly matter what your opinion is on what a separate community from you should and shouldn't allow.

but someone apparently thinks they should.

To be 1000% clear, the someone who is demanding this feature... is creators. This is a feature that creators heavily use, by their own choice, because it helps them psychologically or because they prefer this style of interaction with fans, or for whatever reason because they don't have to justify their decisions to anyone, least of all commenters on HN.

Patronage is a specific thing.

Patreon has not been a donation-specific platform since tiers were invented; and this kind of control over payments was always part of the platform for both creators using it as a sales platform and to creators using it as a donation platform. Patreon hosts a wide variety of creators who approach audience interaction in a variety of ways. This has always been the case.

It's wild to me that you're going to jump on here gatekeeping creators off of Patreon, and to act like it's somehow improper for me to suggest that the significant portion of the creator-base on Patreon that uses the platform in a way that makes them happy... should be allowed to keep using it that way.

People have this weird habit of taking creators who are making in many cases at or below minimum wage doing things that they love and subjecting them to purity tests about whether or not they're living up to some platonic ideal of what some random person on the internet personally believes fan-creator relationships should look like.

Are you seriously offended that some creators like having the ability to choose when they charge their patrons?

doesn't get the idea behind patreon

The idea behind Patreon is that creators should be able to make money doing things that they love in a way that is comfortable to them. Your aesthetic attraction to the idea of a donation platform is not really relevant to that goal. You're not sticking up for creators if you gatekeep how they interact with fans. And your ideal of how patronage is defined has never been the exclusive model for how Patreon as a platform has worked -- nor is it consistent with the model that Apple is forcing creators into.

Patreon does not require creators to pause payments when they go on break.

But that should obviously be a choice that is available to creators, for a variety of reasons. They might be treating Patreon more like a subscription service than a donation platform. They might have personal psychological hang-ups (read about why per-creation pricing is so popular with some creators). I would criticize Patreon if it forced creators into that decision. Forcing them out of that decision is also worth critiquing.

It ought to be a creator's choice when they do and don't charge their patrons. It is not Patreon or Apple's job to decide with that level of detail what the relationship between a creator and their fans should look like. And creators who voluntarily decide (for whatever reason) to temporarily pause charging fans are not doing anything wrong.

But the dev agreed to basically pay Apple an origination fee to publish an iOS app in their store.

This is its own can of worms, but doesn't really change much about what I said above.

That might be exactly your point though? That Apple has multiple tools to leverage to make sure that it's impossible to compete with their payment processor if you're building an app? Sometimes I misjudge the intent of a comment.

Apple's restrictions on origination in places like the EU reinforce that Apple does not see these price increases as a tradeoff for quality that customers are willingly going along with, and does believe that if customers were able to be informed about alternative payment methods that already exist that are cheaper, they would take them. In instances where it can't hide alternatives from users, it imposes fees at the point where users are informed about those alternatives: fees that make it impossible for alternatives to be cheaper than Apple's own inflated cost.

Apple's origination fees are a lot less about compensation and a lot more about making sure that on iOS, a less expensive payment option will never be offered. This is not the action of a company that believe that it is adding value to the purchasing experience, it is the action of a company that believes that its purchasing systems would not be chosen by many customers if they were fairly stacked up against existing alternatives.

Currently the majority of Apple's Safari revenue comes from Google search deals.

Do you believe that if Apple got rid of those deals, it would be justified in applying similar restrictions in Safari to support development of the browser? What incentivizes them to build a functioning browser? Is it feasible to have an Open web while incentivizing the massive amount of work required to build browsers and web APIs?

And if so, what is different about native APIs?

Is it allowed to put a notice that Android and web users are given a 30% discount on the normal prices

No. You are not allowed to provide customers any details about other payment options. Apple has provisions that basically say, "you must not encourage the user to use a different payment option." And Apple can interpret that quite broadly; telling users that another platform has a discount would be treated as a violation.

"See here to find out if you are eligible to discounted prices!" to a link to the web site.

This would be a violation of Apple's policies.

I sort of understand why people have a hard time grasping this, and I don't think it's through any fault of their own. It's because it's such an obviously anti-consumer, anti-competitive policy that I think normal people assume "it cannot possibly be the policy that Apple has."

There's almost a defense in audacity: Patreon must be lying about its options because, come on, Apple wouldn't seriously ban links, right? No company would be that bold, right?

The policy is so blatant that people assume there must be something they're misunderstanding about it.

and likely have been advised they need to enforce it uniformly due to regulatory scrutiny.

I'm not certain what the category difference is between Patreon subscriptions and Youtube/Amazon/Spotify subscriptions, all of which don't allow payment through the app.

This is actually something I would really genuinely love Apple to clarify because Patreon's statements on it are surprising; why is Patreon not allowed to stop offering payment options at all in the app. Are they lying about that? Why wouldn't they be allowed to turn it off when other companies clearly are?

as written,

That being said: if their policy as written has these terms in it, then that doesn't make me feel better about Apple. I would still question why Apple is so scared of consumers being notified about payment options across the board.

An abusive policy designed to give customers less information about their purchases is still abusive even if it's applied uniformly. It still speaks a lot to Apple's priorities and about whether they are genuine when they say that they believe customers prefer their pricing schemes. You don't have to hide things from customers that they prefer.

Sure, I suppose.

I do want to re-state that if the majority of Patreon users (not creators but users, subscribers) agreed with you, Patreon already wouldn't exist. There is no conspiracy among creators to keep the platform afloat, they are constantly criticizing it. There are alternatives. Many of the alternatives have their own problems; the actual competitive coverage in this space is very low. But the biggest problem that all of them have is that they have a fraction of the userbase that Patreon has.

I'm not accusing anyone of anything, as far as I know you already use alternate services and you already support creators directly through other means. This is not an accusation against you, it is a general encouragement to everyone who dislikes Patreon, to please very literally put their money where their mouth is and go subscribe to creators on other platforms.

So... they would give Patreon money by going to their website?

Is this a niche market that would never have been available to Patreon that Apple is helping Patreon access, or is this Apple needing to en-mass protect its users from themselves as a result of them being too.. I don't know, weak willed(?) not to pay for Patreon using another method?

It's not both.

Not infinite value, just any value versus 0 value.

I'm not a fan of Patreon by any means, but it seems pretty silly to me to argue that Patreon offers literally zero value to consumers. Patreon's interface is still better than using Paypal to subscribe to a creator. Patreon still offers me as a user a modicum of privacy, I don't have to give my billing address to every creator that I support.

You don't have to like the platform, but zero value? Do you really believe that?

but you personally can’t force creators to drop Patron which is why they can be so toxic.

I also want to push back on this a little bit. I know creators on Patreon, and most of them don't like the platform. You know why they use Patreon? Because it's the only place anybody goes to subscribe to content. If you set up a Ko-Fi account as a creator, you will receive a fraction of the subscriber-base that you'll receive on Patreon.

I'm not saying this to say that Patreon is somehow justified in its abusive behavior, but it's kinda silly to argue that the only reason Patreon is popular is because creators prefer it. Subscriber preferences play a huge role in this, and the fact is that most subscribers refuse to use alternatives.

If creators felt confident that they could move to platforms like Ko-Fi, Gumroad, Subscribestar, Librepay, etc without permanently losing all of their subscribers, they would. They'd leave in a heartbeat. Fewer fees, better websites, less VC-weirdness: creators don't really like Patreon. And many of would be able to move if it was worth their while; Patreon doesn't (as far as I know) have any restrictions on joining parallel donation platforms. But every time I've seen a creator do that, the majority of their revenue continues to come through Patreon. Subscribers refuse to leave the platform even when other options are being advertised to them.

There is a little bit of a chicken-and-egg problem in that some creators end up only using Patreon because it's the only platform that brings in enough revenue to make it worth their while, which in turn means it's the only place to subscribe to them -- and yes, that can help reinforce network effects as well. But the biggest thing keeping creators on Patreon is consumers themselves.

If you want creators to leave Patreon, you do actually have at least a small amount of agency over that: find the creators you follow that are on multiple subscription platforms, and subscribe to them on those alternative platforms. By and large, most consumers are not willing to do that.

Sounds like a fun experiment. I'd be interested in Apple allowing Patreon to test that theory by disabling purchases within the app. Is this really about access to a niche user group of users who would never sign up elsewhere?

Apple seems to be very invested in forcing Patreon to either not be in the app store at all (and given the limitations of web apps, this is a significant penalty), or offer exclusively Apple payments in the app. Then Apple goes a step further with rules blocking Patreon showing links to other purchase methods in the app. These are not the actions of a company that believes that its users can be trusted not to make a purchase elsewhere.

If these users would never give Patreon money by going to Patreon's website, Apple wouldn't be scared of a link to the website payment options inside of the app. But they are scared of that, because they know that many of their users would choose to pay less online if they were informed about the choice or if Patreon decided not to offer payment options in the app.

I think the fact that Apple is (according to Patreon) not offering a choice of whether or not to accept payments in the app pokes a lot of holes in the idea that iOS users would never use a website to subscribe.

If we were having this conversation in the late 1800s I'm pretty sure that you would be arguing to me right now that the trans-continental railroad provides "tremendous value" to shippers.

It's become an increasingly common argument in discussions about Apple to phrase their value as one of "distribution", or sometimes less subtly as "access." But no one would ever credibly argue that the actual physical distribution costs, hosting, and bandwidth of the Patreon app is more valuable than the entire platform itself. That would be absurd. Instead, what people actually argue is that access to Apple users is the value that Apple quote-unquote "creates"[0].

I think a lot of people look at this and see it for what it is: rent seeking. But it's a marvel of the modern tech landscape that we've trained so many people to not only accept that they are the product for the platforms they use, but taught them to be proud of being a product. We've gotten people to come around to the idea that companies have done such a good job turning them into a product that the companies now somehow deserve some kind of special reward for doing so.

Excessive use of customers as bargaining chips inevitably creates bad incentives for companies, which become increasingly defensive of their "assets" and increasingly more and more hostile to consumer choice and freedom to move from ecosystem to ecosystem. These negative effects play out again and again in multiple industries both inside and outside of tech, to the detriment of both consumers and the overall markets. But when tech companies come up (whether we're talking about Apple, or Steam, or Nintendo, or whatever) -- for some weird reason people suddenly become very defensive about the rights of companies to treat them like cattle.

TLDR, no, access to iPhone users is not Apple providing value to app developers. It's just rent seeking.

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[0]: As if iPhone users would somehow stop using smartphones now if the iPhone went away.

Does Apple's change do anything at all to help alleviate any of the concerns you have?

You have fewer subscriptions options for creators (1st-of-month billing and per-release billing is going away, despite the fact that creators regularly use them to simplify the experience for subscribers). You're going to pay more (I promise you, creators on Patreon are not rich enough to swallow a 30% transaction fee on iOS subscriptions). You're going to use the same app that you were using before. And this will change nothing about when Patreon cuts off service when you unsubscribe (incidentally, I'm pretty sure this is a creator decision and creators can choose to extend benefits to the end of the month).

What is Apple doing that is making any of this better for you?

Maybe you sort-of marginally have an easier time unsubscribing? But it's not hard to unsubscribe from a Patreon tier, and it's difficult to argue that Apple is providing infinite value by organizing your subscriptions into a list.

What are you actually paying this fee to Apple for? They're "on your side" except in the sense where them being on your side creates any tangible or significant change in your experience using Patreon. Seriously, what about the iOS experience using Patreon is better (or even different) than the experience elsewhere?

I hate when companies try to draw out or sidestep attempts to unsubscribe, it's a huge issue with subscription services. I'm really encouraged about recent pushes to ban this kind of behavior.

That being said, I've just checked and Patreon does not appear to block or sidestep attempts to unsubscribe from a creator. It's two clicks, you hit "cancel membership" and then the confirm button.

I'm open to claims that Apple's system might still be marginally more convenient (you do have to go to the actual creator page in order to unsubscribe, which is a little inconvenient, I guess).

But is it so much more convenient that most users would literally pay 30% extra on every one of their subscriptions in order to use it? And even if it is, isn't that something that users should be able to choose as an educated decision instead of it being Apple policy for Patreon to not be allowed to tell users in the app that other payment methods exist?

Fair enough, we might be aggressively agreeing with each other. Apologies if I misunderstood you.

Huh, that's interesting. I've never really looked into them before, but could be. Might also be speaking style or which articles we comment on.. I don't really know what metrics they look for :shrug:

Apologies, I misunderstood what you were saying. Generally good reminder to me to regularly take a step back and try to figure out when I'm reading more into a comment than what was intended.

I'm agreeing that the PC being "open" isn't what makes the difference.

This is a good point, but I do think the "open" part is possibly a pre-condition to making a difference. But that's kind of squabbling over details, I completely agree that iOS being open to sideloading would not be enough to change the dynamics.

And we know this because... well, Android exists. Android is a really good example of how sideloading is great and something that I love, but also not sufficient on its own to curb anti-competitive behavior.

I wonder why Patreon isn't hammering this point more if that's the case. This seems to me to be an almost bigger problem than the loss of the per-creation billing.

Not that losing per-creation billing is good, but Patreon has been threatening it for a while, and there are ways it could in theory be simulated. But this makes it effectively impossible for creators to go on vacations, take a sabbatical, whatever... without continuing to charge patrons. It's a really commonly used mechanism from what I've seen, this would be a loss of a really important flexible tool for creators.

I'm not distrusting you, I just feel like I'd like to see some confirmation from Patreon before I start making accusations about it. Maybe they have some deal or know something about a future unreleased API that I don't know?

But losing the ability to pause a Patreon page would be a very, very big deal. Arguably even a bigger deal than the 30% tax, since I assume this change would affect everyone regardless of where they subscribe from. That's something that people should be talking about if it's the case.