RE: This is gonna be the thread where we talk about stuff
05-06-2014, 08:07 AM
(This post was last modified: 05-06-2014, 08:16 AM by Jacquerel.)
In an ideal world everyone would receive food and board and power and water and heating and healthcare for free and nobody would be forced to work eight hours a day five days a week to earn things which are actually required to stay alive, functioning and properly connected.
We don't live in that world right now. Money is unfortunately very important and this obstructs people from doing what they want to do, we don't have the automotive capability to replace manual labour that people probably wouldn't do with no incentive and currently there's a pervasive climate that giving anyone anything for free is inherently evil and should be avoided at all costs.
Patreon is not "legitimised begging", it is people trying to make money back for investing significant, enormous quantities of their own time into their passion. That is a perfectly reasonable thing to want to do. If you've been living your life thinking that you need to spend 40 hours of your own time per week doing something you quite possibly don't even like that much in order to provide things you should be entitled to just by virtue of being alive, then someone tells you that actually you could be making some of that by doing the thing you love doing, damn right you are going to seize that with both hands.
In a capitalist society, time equals money and people who spend significant amounts of time producing content that significant numbers of people enjoy are perfectly entitled to feel like it would be cool to get some compensation for it. Most people do not want to just straight up charge their users, not only because that wouldn't work but because it's nice to be able to let people see stuff for free. Advertising is also not a viable tactic for making sure you can live off your passion, not only do most of your fans hate it, at least two thirds of them will also just run adblocking software.
People who do creative works in their own time have a major tendency to undervalue that time. You can see this in people's commission prices, and the prices of tiny indie games made by groups of people who all have other full time jobs, and the fact that it's a shared feeling often turns pricing into a "race to the bottom". I've been to talks about this, people who make indie games often feel like because they are doing something because they enjoy it, in their free time, then it's ok that it is costing them money and then price their finished product accordingly. It's not.
People destroy themselves doing this. They can ruin their own lives pursuing their passions because people tell them over and over again that because they do this thing as a hobby then it isn't important enough to validate their existence on its own. It's awful.
Anything that makes people more able to earn a living through what they love is a good thing. Patreon is a fairly unobtrusive way of doing that, which allows people to keep providing things to you for free, on the backs of the more generous fans who don't think someone being paid for devoting hours of their time to making stuff for you is stupid. It is explicitly not the same as a subscribed service that requires every reader to contribute, unless that is what the author wants it to be (and most people don't, because that still results in unbridled hostility from their former fans and because they too have been brought up to treat asking for money as a dirty thing that should be avoided despite the fact that it's simultaneously extremely important to their actual lives).
If they can find an audience for it, everyone should have the chance to make a living out of doing what they love.
We don't live in that world right now. Money is unfortunately very important and this obstructs people from doing what they want to do, we don't have the automotive capability to replace manual labour that people probably wouldn't do with no incentive and currently there's a pervasive climate that giving anyone anything for free is inherently evil and should be avoided at all costs.
Patreon is not "legitimised begging", it is people trying to make money back for investing significant, enormous quantities of their own time into their passion. That is a perfectly reasonable thing to want to do. If you've been living your life thinking that you need to spend 40 hours of your own time per week doing something you quite possibly don't even like that much in order to provide things you should be entitled to just by virtue of being alive, then someone tells you that actually you could be making some of that by doing the thing you love doing, damn right you are going to seize that with both hands.
In a capitalist society, time equals money and people who spend significant amounts of time producing content that significant numbers of people enjoy are perfectly entitled to feel like it would be cool to get some compensation for it. Most people do not want to just straight up charge their users, not only because that wouldn't work but because it's nice to be able to let people see stuff for free. Advertising is also not a viable tactic for making sure you can live off your passion, not only do most of your fans hate it, at least two thirds of them will also just run adblocking software.
People who do creative works in their own time have a major tendency to undervalue that time. You can see this in people's commission prices, and the prices of tiny indie games made by groups of people who all have other full time jobs, and the fact that it's a shared feeling often turns pricing into a "race to the bottom". I've been to talks about this, people who make indie games often feel like because they are doing something because they enjoy it, in their free time, then it's ok that it is costing them money and then price their finished product accordingly. It's not.
People destroy themselves doing this. They can ruin their own lives pursuing their passions because people tell them over and over again that because they do this thing as a hobby then it isn't important enough to validate their existence on its own. It's awful.
Anything that makes people more able to earn a living through what they love is a good thing. Patreon is a fairly unobtrusive way of doing that, which allows people to keep providing things to you for free, on the backs of the more generous fans who don't think someone being paid for devoting hours of their time to making stuff for you is stupid. It is explicitly not the same as a subscribed service that requires every reader to contribute, unless that is what the author wants it to be (and most people don't, because that still results in unbridled hostility from their former fans and because they too have been brought up to treat asking for money as a dirty thing that should be avoided despite the fact that it's simultaneously extremely important to their actual lives).
If they can find an audience for it, everyone should have the chance to make a living out of doing what they love.