Patreon Killed The Internet Star

Once there were blogs, rss feeds, and people who got into huge arguments with each other.

And that was actually cool. More cool than now, because although folks still get into arguments with each other, there's less in the way of hashing out ideas in real time.

But now, a lot of folks who sort of need the free-for-all in order to educate themselves put up a Patreon page and try to develop an audience.

This is creating a huge drag on the creative and generative nature of the internet. The first drag is Patreon itself, because it decides it doesn't like a person, and shuts that person down. If you aren't shut down, you will tread carefully around those topics you think might upset the corporation. The second drag are the fans.

Having fans, I have to agree, would be great. Especially those thousand true fans internet gurus like to talk about. But think from a quality perspective- if you put up a Patreon page and get fans more or less immediately, well, it's probably due to your attractiveness and gender rather than the intellectual content you put out.

So the fans end up being another drag, especially if you are young, poor, and desperately want to keep the few bucks being sent your way coming.

I've seen a few folks that I followed in the health/diet space go to Patreon and ditch putting their full blogs out. Knowing how they wrote before, I know it isn't valuable enough to go to Patreon and pay to read. The quality insights often happened when people clashed or collaborated in the comments, so their blogs would have to be out in the open for that to happen.

But no. Now we are up for a whole lot of blandness. Just like television. I know people got to make a living, but we need a better way.