Can Patreon Fight Fire With Social Media Fire?  🔗 **Source:** [Can Patreon Fight Fire With Social Media Fire?](https://share.snipd.com/episode/033b7403-35ae-4193-b0ce-bb00804fada2) ## Highlights - **Patreon As An Index Of Small Business Media** - Patreon is now an index of small business media companies focused on helping creators reach and get paid. - Jack says the major shift is platforms moving from follower-based reach to interest-driven distribution that breaks creators' deterministic reach. Transcript: Jack Conte You know what's so funny, Eli? I think my answer to that is probably similar to your answer around the media industry. Because at the end of the day, Patreon is essentially like an index of small business media companies, right? Like that's what we are. We help those small business media companies thrive and get paid and reach their fans. And so when they're hurting, you know, we feel that burn as a business and we feel that burn for them as like our customers. And so like the biggest shift I would say over the last five years, the way I would characterize it is really what happened to, what happened UpFunnel, what happened with TikTok and YouTube And Facebook and Instagram. And the shift is really one main thing, which is the move away from follower-based paradigms from true subscriptions into an interest-driven distribution system. There are so many problems with that, so many problems. It's hard to even, like, outline all of them. There are sort of societal-level problems around mass polarization and addiction and loneliness and all the things that I think a lot of consumers are feeling. And then there's a bunch of problems on the creator side as well, which is when you move away from a follower paradigm, you ruin the creator's deterministic line of reach to their fans. And if a creator can't reach their fans, then not only can a creator not build true community around their work, but they also can't build a business around their work. The biggest shift in the creator economy that I think has been the most impactful for creators and for Patreon as a business is this shift of the internet, you know, away from follower-based Paradigms and into interest-based paradigms. And, you know, it's very similar to Google Zero. It's the same concept. It's when the platforms stop sending traffic to the people who have spent a decade plus building their followings, building their communities, using those platforms ([Time 0:04:37](https://share.snipd.com/snip/efd697d7-7a5d-46ad-a553-a4cf4dca947d)) - **Follower Graphs Versus Interest Distribution** - Moving from follower-based paradigms to interest-driven systems ruins creators' deterministic line of reach to fans. - Jack links this to 'Google Zero' and platforms stopping sending traffic to people who built followings over years. Transcript: Jack Conte And the shift is really one main thing, which is the move away from follower-based paradigms from true subscriptions into an interest-driven distribution system. There are so many problems with that, so many problems. It's hard to even, like, outline all of them. There are sort of societal-level problems around mass polarization and addiction and loneliness and all the things that I think a lot of consumers are feeling. And then there's a bunch of problems on the creator side as well, which is when you move away from a follower paradigm, you ruin the creator's deterministic line of reach to their fans. And if a creator can't reach their fans, then not only can a creator not build true community around their work, but they also can't build a business around their work. The biggest shift in the creator economy that I think has been the most impactful for creators and for Patreon as a business is this shift of the internet, you know, away from follower-based Paradigms and into interest-based paradigms. And, you know, it's very similar to Google Zero. It's the same concept. It's when the platforms stop sending traffic to the people who have spent a decade plus building their followings, building their communities, using those platforms as their top Of funnel. I think it starts to become very clear to everybody that these people were never our users. They were never our community members. They were never our fans. They were Facebook's users. ([Time 0:05:21](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b1ba510f-5d24-4437-ba3a-822d8e6004d1)) - **Build Your Own Top Of Funnel** - If a platform won't provide a top-of-funnel, build your own discovery and follower tools so creators keep deterministic reach. - Patreon added free memberships, ranked follower posts, native chats, and native video, driving 185M free memberships and large engagement. Transcript: Jack Conte Exactly. And that's the irony. The irony is now we have had to do that because what we've learned is if we don't provide our own top of funnel for creators, then we're just relying on Facebook to be the top of funnel. And that is not a good business strategy for creators or for Patreon. Essentially, the stage that we're in as a company now is for the last few years, we've been building a bunch of media tools, distribution tools, hosting tools. We built native video. We built chats. We built discovery. We built short posting tools. We built a feed. We have built all these new ways for creators to essentially start providing the growth for themselves, start providing a Topple Funnel for themselves, and for Patreon to have a a top Of funnel for our creators as well. That's the irony of all this. Now, that is the right strategy for us, given where the business is and where our creators are and the current media landscape. That was not our strategy six years ago. That's something that we've implemented over the last four to five years, and we've implemented it out of necessity. They're looking us in the eye and they're saying, we're going to kill you all. And I believe them. I don't want to wait for them to do it. I want to prep way ahead of time. And so the good news is, you know, a lot of this work has actually worked. So, for example, one of the things we built since we last talked is free memberships. What is a free membership? It's a follow. It's just a, it's like a line of deterministic reach to people who choose to follow you. You get the email address associated with the account that signs up for you. And, and then when you make a post to your followers, it gets, it triggers emails. And you also see those posts in feed, they get ranked above other posts to make sure that your, actually see your posts, which is very different than how other feeds work. And that product has been an amazing success, right? We've had – I think now we have 185 million free memberships on the platform. And that's up like 2x year over year since last year. So clearly there's like a lot of fan side demand, a lot of creator demand for a better follower system that is true to the actual word follower. We built native chats, which is also something like we didn't have before. We were relying on creators to have Facebook groups and to have communities on Instagram. And we were saying, hey, we're the payments architecture. That's different now. Now we have native chats on the platform. And so last year, I think have like something like 35 million chat messages that are sent back and forth. 110 million hours of video have been watched on Patreon. So like a lot of these tools and a lot of these experiences that were previously happening that, you know, we were relying on to, you know, well, we were relying on Facebook and Instagram And YouTube to do those things. We can no longer rely on them to do those things. And our creators can no longer rely on them to do those things. They need a way to reach people deterministically on the platform. And so we've invested heavily in a lot of those communication and media hosting tools, and they've been very well received, which is why we're seeing that kind of adoption on the platform. ([Time 0:13:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/93724a9a-efcb-49d8-b0f3-420731de3aad)) - **Run Meetings To Force Real Decisions** - Run meetings to surface disagreement, use strong pre-reads, name a decision maker, and state your leaning mid-meeting. - Jack asks early for strong opinions, requires pre-reads, assigns a DRI, and verbalizes his lean to surface risks. Transcript: Jack Conte Yeah. I was very bad at making decisions. And I don't want to say I've figured it out because I think that's the kind of thing we're always learning. But there have been like a lot of little things that I've learned that I'd love to share. I hear a lot of like heuristics that sound just like really great for decision making. You know, there's like, listen, decide, communicate. You know, there's all these like simple things. That's not what's been effective for me in making better decisions. So let me just give you like a bunch of like really tactical specific things that have helped me make better decisions over time. The first is when we start a meeting, like one thing that we're supposed to make a decision, one thing I like to ask is like, hey, does anybody have a strong opinion off the bat? Are there any strong opinions in the room? Does anybody disagree with the recommendation? Sometimes the answer is no. But sometimes somebody right out of the gate says like, yeah, I really disagree with the recommendation and here's why. And you just like saved yourself a half hour of kind of fluffy discussion at the top of a meeting. You sort of cut right to the chase. And if you really press somebody, why do you disagree? You hear like three or four maybe genuinely good points and then we can debate the merits of good points. And the whole room gets informed as you're making a decision like that. So I like to just sort of put some pressure at the beginning of the meeting to sort of cut right to the chase. So sometimes the decision will be, it'll come to the group, it'll be, okay, here's path A, here's path B, let's choose. And what I found is like, more often than not, it's not actually path A or path B, and sometimes it's not even a decision. That the decision was attempting to solve. So just like having a discussion where we get clear on what are the next steps. Sometimes it seems like half of path A and half of path B, but actually it's a more bespoke solution that is a better solution to a complex problem. Okay, another thing is like really great pre-reads. Man, you can spend 45 minutes just like context sharing. I feel very strongly about this. Meetings are not for information transfer. They are for debate and discussion. And so if we find ourselves spending 45 minutes in a meeting, literally sharing context with each other, that's wasted time. And also we're going to make bad decisions if people don't, you know, if people have, you know, information asymmetry, then no wonder we think, you know, one person should take path A and another person thinks we should take path B. Like that's because we don't have shared context. So getting everybody to have shared context is huge and pre-reads are a great way to do that. Okay, let me give you a couple more. Naming that there should be a decision maker. Oh my God, I'm still learning how to be better at this. Sometimes I find myself in a meeting where we're all just arguing with each other. And then it's like, Hey, who is the decision maker here? Um, who's actually making this? So having clarity around who the DRI is for that decision, I think can be really helpful. Um, okay. Nilay Patel Directly responsible individual. Jack Conte Right. Exactly. Um, and then let me give you one more. About halfway through a meeting, I like to tell people, like if I find myself starting to be swayed in one direction or another, I just name that. And I say, hey, team, like, here's what I'm thinking so far. Here's where I think we should go based on the conversation we've had, based on what I know. Like, if you think that's wrong, tell me why. And what often happens at that moment is someone brings up three or four, like, really good points for, you know, risks of taking that path that we hadn't named before. And saying we're going to go in this direction is what surfaces those extra risks and that extra click down in like the, uh, in the debate and the, um, cause it starts to become visceral If people feel like, oh, we are going in that direction. And so then we can spend the next 30 minutes talking through those items and realizing like, okay, do we want to build mitigation plans for those risks or do we want to, you know, choose Path B instead? Um, so, like telling the team where I'm thinking and where I'm leaning in real time, I found has created a little bit of pressure to like get the real conversation out and to identify more Problems with the path as we go. I have a bunch of more lessons, you know, that I've learned over the years, which I'd be happy to share. But honestly, I keep these lessons like at the top of a dock when I'm having a meeting so that I can just like remind myself like, hey, do these things in a meeting to help drive it to conclusion. ([Time 0:22:21](https://share.snipd.com/snip/0f2fe71e-a7a0-47f4-8799-3d3fc77a3b81)) - **How Discovery Emerged From Tests And Teams** - The strategic pivot to discovery combined top-down leadership with bottoms-up learning over two years. - Teams pushed for native video because tests showed identity-only discovery failed to convert without free media to fall in love with. Transcript: Jack Conte For the bigger decision around this adjustment to Patreon strategy, the truth is there is some element of top-down decision-making associated with a change like that. And there is some element of emergent strategy that comes from the organization. That's like, I think necessary to embrace and even put some kindling against to get it to be more holistic and full bodied. You know, it started in 2020, probably with bringing in more of like a consumer product leader who was thinking more about consumer experiences, less of, like, kind of a SaaS-focused Organization, less of the kind of B2B2C go-to motions, and more of the, like, consumer, you know, product motions and talent and, you know, teams and company structures. And, you know, that was a big shift in and of itself, just like bringing in that leadership and honestly, just a lot of learning for me because, you know, this is my first job. This is literally I've never worked at another company before, right? So, in some ways, I don't see the water. I don't see the air around me. And so, there was a lot of learning for me. It's like, okay, how does this look different? And then as we were doing that, teams are suggesting things that we want to do differently. And a lot of that is coming up, you know, coming bottoms up. Okay, we need to have, you know, before we were against native video, okay. But if we're going to be, you know, if we're going to have discovery for creators, we need to have free accessible media on the platform. You can't have identity-based discovery. We've run those tests. They don't work. If you land on a creator's page and there's no free accessible media, you're not going to pay that creator. You have no reason to. You don't know who that person is. You have never fallen in with their work. You need a way to fall in love with their work, which means you need free accessible media on the platform. That was an emergent piece of the strategy that came from the organization. It wasn't just like, ah, let's turn on discovery and put different creator profiles in front of everybody's page. We tried that. We tested that. It didn't lead to conversion. The organization learned. We had systems to make sure that bubbles up to PMs and product leaders and me and to the executive team. And then you kind of keep chipping away at that flywheel. And over a period of two years, you start to hone in on precisely what the right strategy is. So yeah, there's some amount of top down push that comes and there's some amount of bottoms-up strategic emergence that comes from the organization. ([Time 0:32:59](https://share.snipd.com/snip/09a5693f-b891-4645-ae36-c372f1802827)) - **Holding Two Minds About AI** - Jack holds a conflicted but pragmatic view on AI: it's both magical and destructive when models use creator work without consent. - He published a 45-minute video laying out techno-legal cycle concerns and argues for regulation and creator advocacy. Transcript: Jack Conte Has been really challenging, especially in the sort of modern environment of the internet. But I'll tell you what I did. What I did was I just said what I really thought. And I spent a long, long time putting together my full thoughts. It took me, the end product is 45 minutes of me talking through these issues. And then I posted that. And it is self-conflicting, and I'm holding two opposing beliefs at the same time, and I'm terrified and I'm excited and I'm really pissed at how all this has been rolled out and how little Agency creators have gotten through this process. And also, I find the technology magical. There's a piece of like, for me as a creator, I've always been interested in new technologies that helped me accomplish my goals as an independent creator i remember when the first dawes Came out you know digital audio workstations um in late 90s and 2000s you know tools like pro tools and i learned i could record a i could make a record at my house in my bedroom you know that Led to the emergence of pomplamoose which was you know, my band. I was obsessed with that. Now, there are a lot of, you know, analog recording engineers at the time who hated the idea of a DAW. They thought it was like it sounded cold. It wasn't warm. It wasn't analog gear. You're not respecting the technology of, you know, of recording, you know, the skill set, the craft of recording. The same thing happened with YouTube and distribution systems when, you know, we started uploading to the Internet. There was this whole backlash around, you know, that not being the real way to do music. The real way to do music is to sign a record deal and go on tour. And, like, Pomplamoose didn't do that. We just distributed our own music through YouTube and sold MP3s on iTunes and made enough money to buy a house, literally off of MP3 sales. And so there's always been this piece of me that embraces new technology so the truth is like i am holding like all of these ideas in my head at once and i myself feel very conflicted about It at the end of the day though here's what i think is happening the algorithms and social media platforms are so good at polarizing humanity sorting and filtering us into one of two camps On basically every issue, whether it's politics or news or technology or anything. The algorithms just push everybody into one of two camps and they push us so far apart. That is absolutely happening now with AI. And I'm not saying there aren't serious drawbacks and concerns that I'm not seriously angry about it. I am. But I think it is such an important time for artists to have an open conversation around these technologies right now. Like everything is changing for people. This is going to be a transformative shift for artists, for employees, for humans. And I think we're at this place where boycotting AI, that's like boycotting the internet. You know, like it's not a good, that's not a good strategy. I don't like what Instagram has done. I disagree with a lot of their decisions. I still have an Instagram page. I still post and reach my community. I don't like what Apple has done, especially to Patreon creators over the last year. I really disagree with those decisions. I don't think they're fair for creative people. I think they're hurtful for creative people. And here I am on my iPhone. I don't like what my federal government is doing right now on so many dimensions. And I still pay my taxes and I still live in the United States. Sure. Nilay Patel I get it. I mean, I understand the sort of yet you live in society argument, and I find it very frustrating, too. You know, I used to read Guitar World when I was a kid, and I'd read the angry screeds from analog recording engineers about Logic being cold and fine. But I had a cassette 4-track at that time, and I was like, this thing sucks. I would much rather use my computer to record my music. It was just very obvious, but that didn't have, like, Logic hadn't stolen all of the music in the world to make Logic. And in fact, it was very obvious that people behind Pro Tools and Logic and whatever else had a deep and meaningful appreciation for the music industry, and they were trying to make tools For musicians. The internet and social media had huge stacks of problems, and maybe they needed to be addressed in different ways. But the value exchange of Instagram, I think, is reasonably clear to people. You run a lawn mowing business. You can go find some customers on Instagram, and you're good to go. If you just want to post dance videos on TikTok and reach an audience, maybe that's the easiest thing that's ever been in world history to do. The value exchange for AI, I think, is so much more diffuse that people hate it. But you're a musician. I know tons of musicians who are like, look, AI is everywhere. Suno is everywhere in the music industry. We just had Harvey Mason Jr. On the show. He runs a recording academy. He's like, it's everywhere. And our line to give you a Grammy award is you have to be mostly human. And that is as fuzzy of a line as can possibly exist. So you're saying you're sitting in it. And I think I have the exact same kind of conundrum as you do. I love new technology. We have an audience of people who love new technology. We're going to post this clip on the internet and people are going to tell you, of course, it's clear that you should hate it. And that makes no sense to me, because those same people are probably using it in some way. But you're sitting in it, and you run a software company that services the needs of creatives who hate it. There's no doubt in my mind that the software company side should be in full embrace of AI, and maybe the creative services part of the company, which is what the software makes, should Not. And can you smash those together? Are you just trying to keep those far apart? Jack Conte No, no, no. You nailed it. And this is the core of our approach. Before I even get into that, let me just say, what ultimately is happening to creative people right now is disgusting. It happens every 10 years. There's this techno-legal cycle where tech companies build some type of new technology and it breaks the current systems. It usually uses creator work without consent, compensation, or credit. And then the tech companies claim that, well, it's this new technology and it's either fair use or copyright doesn't apply because it's transformative in some capacity. This was the Google Books case. This was the YouTube case, when Viacom sued YouTube for a billion dollars. And then there's sort of like industry mayhem around that. And that's where we are now. We're in the industry mayhem part of this cycle. We should be there. There should be a lot of lawsuits. And in my opinion, there should be regulation to prevent this type of thing from happening with regard to AI. ([Time 0:36:31](https://share.snipd.com/snip/1e3a9c75-c60a-4999-a879-6a1d4b0c9110)) - **Use AI To Power Platform, Not Replace Creators** - Embrace AI internally for product and operations but avoid imposing creative AI on creators' core work. - Patreon uses LLMs for engineering, org summaries, packaging tasks, marketing automation, and business tools, not to create artists' art. Transcript: Jack Conte So I'll tell you, it's like a very practical approach, which is if Patreon does not fully embrace these tools as a product and engineering company, we are ultimately a product engineering Company. If we do not fully embrace these tools and use them to give the power back to creators, we as a company will be dead in three years. Look at what happened with the mobile shift, right? These platform shifts are material. They have a massive impact on the people who are playing in these ecosystems. And if the companies don't keep up with these new technologies, they will die. Patreon is much more useful to creators if we are alive, if we are shipping more valuable products at a faster clip that are higher quality. And so we 100% are embracing these tools internally. And I've told our creators, we are embracing these tools internally. We are using LLMs to write more features, our engineers are using LLMs when they code. We're using LLMs to organize the team. We're using Notion agents to crawl through pages, you know, our own internal documents and create summaries and help teammates understand who to talk to for which sorts of problems. Like, we must embrace those tools. That is not a choice that we have because I want us to be a powerful product company that fights on behalf of creative people. So what we have done with our product strategy, and here's how we've, I don't know if you want to say resolved the tension, but this is how we thought of it, is, you know, there's a lot of Companies that are sort of going to market loud and proud with, now we're an AI company. Creators don't want us to be an AI company. And they don't need us to be an AI company. Like, we don't need to build a whole bunch of forward-facing features for creators. If you look at what a feed on Instagram looks like now versus two years ago, it looks pretty much the same. There's not a whole bunch of changes because of AI. Like there's a consumption experience. There's a community experience. In many ways, Patreon is similar. There are some experiences that are different. And the way we think about where to use AI is if you imagine a bullseye diagram, at the center of the bullseye is creators making their creative work. And what creators have told us is, Patreon, get the fuck out of the way. Let me make my work. Don't give me script ideas. Don't build me an agent that helps me come up with a video thing. Don't title my post for me. Let me do the making. Get out of my way. So we get out of their way on, like, creators making things. And then one rung out from that bullseye is the packaging of that material. Now, creators to us have been a bit more open to using AI to package their works. And so what does that mean? Like automated chapter markers and things like that. Cutting long form podcast episodes into clips. One rung out from that is like marketing. So helping a creator, you know, like with automated, you know, email flows and things like that. And then one rung out from that is managing my business. And creators have even more openness to using AI tools to help them manage their business. And so the best quote we heard from our user research interviews was, hey, I have a million ideas for new videos. I don't need AI to help me make more videos. I need AI to help me do my taxes and clean my toilet. And that is our product strategy. Our product strategy is help creators do their taxes and clean their toilet using AI. But we're not going out and saying we're patreon.ai now and everything is going to be an AI feature. So I've explained all this to our in this very long 45-minute video. ([Time 0:44:42](https://share.snipd.com/snip/76de1187-07a6-4031-900e-1a32eb1c055b)) - **Apply AI To Packaging Marketing And Admin** - Apply AI outward from the creator's core: avoid intervening in creation, help with packaging, marketing, and business operations. - Users asked for help with taxes and admin; Patreon focuses AI on chores like clips, chapters, email flows, and accounting. Transcript: Jack Conte And what creators have told us is, Patreon, get the fuck out of the way. Let me make my work. Don't give me script ideas. Don't build me an agent that helps me come up with a video thing. Don't title my post for me. Let me do the making. Get out of my way. So we get out of their way on, like, creators making things. And then one rung out from that bullseye is the packaging of that material. Now, creators to us have been a bit more open to using AI to package their works. And so what does that mean? Like automated chapter markers and things like that. Cutting long form podcast episodes into clips. One rung out from that is like marketing. So helping a creator, you know, like with automated, you know, email flows and things like that. And then one rung out from that is managing my business. And creators have even more openness to using AI tools to help them manage their business. And so the best quote we heard from our user research interviews was, hey, I have a million ideas for new videos. I don't need AI to help me make more videos. I need AI to help me do my taxes and clean my toilet. And that is our product strategy. Our product strategy is help creators do their taxes and clean their toilet using AI. ([Time 0:46:39](https://share.snipd.com/snip/65b1378b-b792-48e1-b426-8f2d7f178d5b)) - **Tackling AI Slop Requires New Trust Work** - Community asked how Patreon will prevent being overrun by AI-generated 'slop', prompting accelerated trust & safety work. - Jack notes detection and labeling are hard; one alternative is labeling human-made work as a positive signal. Transcript: Jack Conte Yes. One of the things that came up in that process in a lot of the comments were around, okay, but Patreon, how are you going to prevent the platform from being overrun with slop? What are you doing from a policy and trust and safety standpoint to make sure that Patreon just doesn't get clogged up like other platforms are getting clogged up? And that was amazing feedback. We had already started thinking about that, but we accelerated those work streams. Actually, I have a meeting next week with a team that has a draft proposal for that. And that's a really hard problem, right? Actually, YouTube made an announcement about that this week. But the problem there is like, how do you, what do you label? Or do you label? Yeah. And how do you even detect it? And how do you detect it? And like, and if you can detect it now, what makes you think you can detect it a year from now, right? There's no canonical system that, there's no API you can call and say with certainty whether something is AI generated or not, right? Like that's not – that doesn't exist. And even if it does, somebody's going to build a tool that breaks that. Nilay Patel Our poor reporter Jess Weatherbed is – her beat is AI labeling systems. And she's like, what are we doing? She's been on the show and she's like, we keep pretending that these are going to work because we have to. Jack Conte But there's no evidence that they ever will. And, and so then, then there's the reverse, right? Um, which is, okay, maybe, maybe you label human generated work. Um, you know, I remember, I remember in growing up in the eighties and nineties when, you know, manufacturing shifted to Asia and, and there were all these made in the USA stickers, you Know? Um, and that became sort of like a hallmark of like, hey, this is like you should buy this thing loud and proud. You know, you're voting with your dollars here. And so I can imagine some type of future where something is labeled as human generated. And that's like a loud and proud moment for people. So that's another way to solve the problem. Actually, Howtown, you know, Joss Fong, who used to be at, you know, Vox, made an amazing video about this, just flipping the labeling game on its head by labeling human-made work. There's a bunch of different ways to solve it. Anyway, we're thinking through all those problems. That was a result of feedback that we got from the community as we rolled out some of this thinking. ([Time 0:48:23](https://share.snipd.com/snip/77dadf7f-cb3a-466a-82e3-7908183fa33a)) - **Build Swappable Payments To Gain Leverage** - To survive payment-policy pressure, align content policy with processors and build swappable payment rails for leverage. - Patreon co-iterated policies with processors and created hot-swappable payments so it could move volume and negotiate terms. Transcript: Jack Conte Was not a way to push back in the early days. And, you know, I think we're far enough down the road now. I sent many 3 a.m. Emails to CEOs begging for them to reconsider. Nilay Patel And that's like the CEOs of Stripe? Jack Conte Of payment partners and processors. Actually, never Stripe, but other payment processors. That was a real challenge for us, Neelai. It's a challenge because if they're threatening to not be a partner to us anymore, it's not just that one creator's income that's at stake. It's the $10 billion that we've processed on behalf of creators since the company was founded. We're processing over $2 billion a year now. That's a lot of income that we need to be a rock for those creators and make sure that that income is protected for them. And so these issues are really serious. So we did a couple things. One, over the years, we worked very closely with payment processors to understand their content policies and their constraints and make sure that content policy was acceptable to Them. And we co-iterated on those policies together, and we also continue to co-iterate on them because culture changes, right? Content policy is a living, breathing thing. It has to change as culture changes. It has to change as the internet changes. You know, now there's, you know, non-consensual AI-generated nudity. That was not a thing that platforms and payment processors had to worry about, you know, four years ago. Now you have to worry about it and you need clear policy around it. So one is we, like, worked with those partners to make sure that we had, like, parallel content policies. The second thing that we did is we built hot swappable payments architecture so that as the company got bigger, we could just unplug one processor and plug in a different one. And what that did is it gave Patreon a little bit of leverage, not a little bit, a lot of leverage in those conversations. Because we're processing billions of dollars annually, you know, those processors want that volume. And if we can hold back volume from them because we're not happy with their content policy decisions, that helps us. That helps us fight on behalf of our creators and have the right content policy that we want for us. So it gives us some negotiating leverage in those conversations. Now, sometimes it's not even the processors themselves, it's the banks behind those processors or the acquiring banks behind them. This stuff goes like all the way up the chain. I wish it didn't work this way, but this is how it works. And so, you know, we've had to both be more collaborative and also build some systems that give us more agency like this swappable payments architecture to kind of solve that problem Over time. ([Time 0:58:53](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f713f552-c51b-448c-9fc2-fa28559e469f)) - **Nuanced Adult Content Policy With Clear Definitions** - Patreon maintains an 18+ category allowing nudity but bans pornography, using detailed legal-style definitions to ensure consistent moderation. - Jack emphasizes policies written so multiple humans reach the same conclusion and that the platform supports edge-pushing artists. Transcript: Jack Conte Yeah, we do. We have an 18 plus category. We don't have porn and our content policy does not allow porn. There are people who say you can't define porn. That's not true. You can define it. And we have. And we've done that. What's your definition of porn? But we have detailed that. Oh, like pedantically, like in legalese. Because the point of content policy, you want 10 humans to be able to look at a policy and look at a piece of media and then have nine of them make the same decision, right? Like that's how we try to write our policies in terms of level of detail. And so we do have that level of detail baked in and we know like this is pornography, this is not pornography. And so one of the things we want to allow for is like, we're an arts platform. Like we have to have free like human expression in some capacity. And so we allow nudity, we allow, you know, there's like marijuana creators and there's people who talk about whiskey and there's like people, you know, there's all kinds of stuff. I want that stuff on Patreon. I want artists on Patreon. I want people who push the edge. I want people who expand the Overton window. I want people who are out there. You know, I don't want people who are just in the center of the bell curve. I want the people who are on the edges. Like, those are the people who push society forward. And so we have, like, in some ways, we have, like, a liberal content policy, and that's important to me on some dimensions. So, yeah, I want all those things. We've built policies to allow for those things, and now we have the payments architecture to support it as well. ([Time 1:01:58](https://share.snipd.com/snip/57761890-fb68-4f68-be45-30a037b1582b)) - **Give Creators Their Emails To Preserve Agency** - Patreon has long given creators their fans' email addresses to ensure creators own relationships and reduce lock-in. - Jack describes this as an early decentralized spirit and a deliberate choice to keep creators empowered even if they leave Patreon. Transcript: Jack Conte It bringing more content onto the Patreon platform? How should this work? It's creators owning their audiences. That's the benefit. When we launched in 2013, we gave, I think we're the first platform that gave creators the email addresses of their fans when they signed up. And we did that despite advice that we got when we were raising money. You know, people were saying like, hey, this sort of reduces switching costs. Like, why would you let creators be able to, like, why would you give them emails? Because then they can just like email their fans and tell them to go to some other platform. And our whole point was like, yeah, that's exactly why you should do it. Because that lights a fire under our ass to build a product that's valuable enough to keep creators and to keep their trust. And so we, you know, that was part of the V1 of Patreon. It's been in the product since. So sometimes I like to say we were, Patreon was the original Web3 before Web3. Like we were trying to do things, we had the spirit of building things, you know, in a decentralized way using protocols. Nilay Patel You got to be careful of that because that definitely sounds like you were doing crypto scams. Jack Conte No, no, no. I was robbing you blind before any of these NFTs ever showed up. No, but seriously, like the spirit of it was like emails based on a protocol. And there's something really beautiful about that. And so we want to make sure that we can pull that into Patreon as much as possible. And so, yeah, what is the benefit? The benefit is creators having confidence that the platform isn't going to fuck them, that the platform, even if the platform changes or and shitifies or does something that is abusive To their users, they can then take their audience elsewhere and use some different front end to interact with their network. That is ultimately the benefit. That's a signal that the company believes that power is shifting away from institutions and towards individuals, which I believe. And I believe that companies that embrace that over the long run are going to be the companies that empower that movement and are chosen by people and used by people. And the companies that fight that ultimately, I think, will lose. And so I think it sends a very powerful signal to the market that we want to treat people well and that we want you to own your data. We want you to own your social graph. We want you to own your relationships, not us. And you can hold us accountable for building a great experience because if we don't, you can just choose somebody else. ([Time 1:10:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/66057fca-a07c-4aa4-b5bb-516196db5d25)) - **Three Pillars For A Better Social Internet** - Jack outlines three architecture changes needed for a healthier internet: new optimization functions, people owning network effects, and stronger governance. - He argues platforms must stop optimizing for watch time, give users data/social graph control, and adopt durable governance systems. Transcript: Jack Conte It's three things. The business model and the optimization functions of the platforms. Like, are you optimizing for watch time? Are you optimizing for things that are actually in concert with human flourishing? The second thing is, does the platform own the network effect or do the people own the network? Do you own your own data? Do you have access to that data? Or are you blocked into a walled garden? And then the third thing is governance. Governance that keeps platforms focused the mission and the customer in a way that I think they're not right now. Case in point is Twitter. There needs to be more structural integrity around governance systems for companies over the next phase that pushes them to do right by users and the people that make the product what It is. And there's a guy named Eric Ries who wrote this book, Incorruptible, who's talking a lot about these new types of governance systems. And the book is amazing. I think his thinking is amazing. I think it's actually a very big idea. I think it's one of the best ideas in the field of economics that I've heard in like the last, well, certainly since I've been alive. And I think it could potentially change the way companies are organized and structured. So that's kind of like the third leg of the stool is like governance that is robust and allows a company to be true over a long period of time. If you do those three things, like different business model and different optimization functions, the people own the network instead of the platforms and then the right governance To keep the platform true to its mission and customers over the long run. That, I think, is a pretty good bet for the next two decades of networks. Like, I think that will do a better job than the last two. ([Time 1:13:56](https://share.snipd.com/snip/72e2da73-9360-47fe-86da-568a187d8682))