Hey Saucy Ones,

So I've stayed the course on what we were talking about last week so I'm gonna talk about another problem I and other solo creators are having:

Patreon wants to be the everything app, creators be damned.

I'm sure you've noticed that Patreon has been adding a lot of new features over the last few years: individual posts can now be something you buy like a product, there are now "chats" where users can message each other like it's discord, we now have "Quips" which is like BlueSky but objectively worse in every way, and a bunch of other features that have been foisted on me and every other creator in such a rapid succession that I'm not sure anyone even uses them because when have we had time to learn how to use them??? Patreon is suffering from a bad case of feature creep and that presents new challenges to people like me.

I am a solo operation.

I have always been a solo operation save for some moderators on the discord but all the writing, proofreading, recording, audio editing, videos editing, making thumbnails, managing uploads and metadata/SEO stuff for the YouTube channel, promoting my stuff any way I can is all just me. I do not plan to take on employees to act as media managers because I can't think of anything more inauthentic.

For me personally the last straw was Quips. Quips are stupid, Quips are presently managing to be an even deader microblogging platform than BlueSky. It seems that every chance they can get, Patreon is telling me to do more Quips. For one, Quips is the stupidest name for this kind of thing I can think of and it makes me think of a universe written by Marvel executives. For another,

WHY ON EARTH WOULD ANY CREATOR WANT ANOTHER TWITTER-LIKE APP THEY GOTTA USE!?!?!?

I and every other creator I know hates that we have to do this stuff to stay relevant. I have also been in this racket long enough to where I can see the direct parallel between Patreon reaaaaaaaaly wanting to make Quips a thing and how YouTube forced Google+ on us a decade ago. It's just yet another plate that I gotta spin while trying to keep this thing going.

The Irony of it all

The most capital-I Ironic part about all of these features that I supposedly "won't be punished if I don't do" but am them told that they're an excellent way to grow my patreon and everyone else will be doing them (which real quick am I crazy or is saying that you won't be punished for not doing something but then implying that everyone who does will get a boost and that means you'll be left behind is basically saying you will get punished for not doing them by omission?) is that doing all this stuff will severely hinder my ability to do the thing that brings people to my Patreon in the first place!

It very much feels like Patreon is now exclusively listening to big corpo channels with dedicated social media people and where the people who everyone comes to see are people are basically just paid talent to them. This is not the Patreon that I and many others entrusted our financial wellbeing to a decade ago. This feels like a big tent that's so obsessed with being a big tent that they forgot to put anything inside that people would want to see. I set up my Patreon specifically to avoid having to play algorithm games as much and just focus on making the best videos I can, but here we are with another cruel and capricious algorithm we need to appease at the very place we went to escape that.

So what am I gonna do?

Well for one, I'm gonna keep making videos as always: fueled by your support and the power of my immense spite towards all the corpo goons that took the internet from us.

On a more practical note however, I'm gonna have play their stupid games and that means making cuts to other things to make room for Quips and whatever else they demand of me as I am just one man who would prefer not to die of exhaustion before they make it to 40. I've also started taking a day or two off on the weekend and I've grown fond of the practice. I'm probably gonna scale back posts like this to once or twice a month... and do those stupid fucking quips. Additionally, I'm going to be enabling YouTube Memberships on the main channel and working more to get the second channel monetized. If you're a patron, don't become a member. Memberships will just be a way for people who want to support me and get early videos but don't want to use Patreon for whatever their reasons might be; it will be cheaper to get early videos here than on memberships. There's other things I'm mulling over but for now, that's the plan.

Thanks for listening,

Stay Saucy.