holiday hypothesis for you to mull re: Patreon... aggregation is “bad” if all you’re doing is aggregating an audience with cultural curation and no real tech leverage. Bad in the sense of leading to toxic cultural dynamics. Either aggregate with tech or not at all.
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Oh I think I missed that issue... don't follow the real estate subplot but yeah makes sense that Zillow is a real-estate media company the way Patreon is a... something media company.
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do we need aggregation theory for this? or just theory around strength-of-communication channels and relative ease to mobilize mobs?
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Maybe a cultural-aggregation theory. Rent-a-mob. A crowd which owns its creators is basically a stable echo chamber of mutual reinforcement. It's a thing worth owning, but there's a cultural cost to extracting a rent from it. It's a pump to extract trust from commons.
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Isn't aggregate with tech saying don't take a moral ( falsely /signalling / whatever ) stance? And does that not force a broad market gotomarket strategy
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That's a weirdly negative way of putting it. It's not a "don't", it's a "do." You actually need to do some invention to not default to the cultural option. It's not false or signaling, it just is. Crowds on a medium acquire a cultural character.
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I think the "leverage" is amortizing the transaction cost from donating a small amount to many creators. I agree though, Patreon should be more like Stripe, i.e. something you embed into your existing site rather than a standalone product. (Doesn't solve censorship issue though)
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It's another way of saying it's a content curator, not a tech platform. Therefore, undifferentiated & difficult to defend when curation derails.
Even if they were to embrace their editorial nature, aggregation is the least manageable way to achieve it.
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How not to run a "platform"
As @MLChristiansen's video sharply demonstrates, @Patreon is an editorial entity, not a technology or payments service, and must be treated as such.
Essential reading for all creators: 'Surviving Platform Risk' ideafaktory.com/platform-risk-
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