Patreon’s CEO on the existential threat to creators no one is talking about
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It's this like mindless dopamine overload. It is starting to make us all feel tired and alone and broken and we don't f***ing want that.

Social media as we know it is in chaos right now. The landscape is becoming more decentralized and creators are facing more challenges than ever. On top of all that, the very notion of a follower is dying and there's uncertainty about what that means for the future. Jack Conte is the CEO and founder of Patreon. He's been talking about all these issues and more. My followers might not necessarily see my posts.

the channel of distribution is broken. Hi, Jack. Welcome to Power User. Thanks for having me. Psyched to be here. So you gave this talk at South by Southwest last year that I thought was one of my favorite pieces of content ever. I don't even know if it's fair to call it a piece of content, but it was just, it was so interesting and it was called the death of a follower. And you sort of talked about the way the web was changing and moving from this follower model. Can you give people who didn't see that talk kind of a 101 on what you've been talking about?

What's happened over the last four years to the web, I think a lot of people, because of the shift simultaneously to short form vertical first video, people just think that's what happened to the internet, that it really has been a shift to short form. But I think short form was really the red herring. Vertical first video was the

red herring. What's really happened is for the first 20 years of the web, 15 years of the web, it was really organized around this concept of the follower, which is an idea that emerged at the beginning of web two, right? You had feeds, you had publishing, self-publishing tools like Facebook and Instagram and YouTube, and you could follow somebody and build a community. And it

That was essentially a guaranteed line of communication to the people that chose to follow you. They basically, when they said follow, it was not just, I like you and I like your work. It was, I want to hear the things that you have to say in the future. That's what the premise of the follow is. And that's really what's shifted over the last four or five years. Specifically when TikTok came into the scene, they rebuilt the concept of the feed.

And rather than basing it around followers and having it be a list of people that you follow and posts from people that you follow that are ranked, which is kind of how Facebook and Instagram and Twitter have done it. They said, no, no, let's actually forget about this idea of the follow. Rather than showing you creators that you follow, let's put stuff in your feed that we think you'll like, regardless of if you've followed them or not, based on your interest.

interests. And what TikTok found is that worked quite well at maximizing attention. If the goal is maximize attention, optimize for human hours spent in your application, it worked really well at that for better or for worse, in a lot of ways for worse. The unfortunate thing about what's happened is it worked so well that traffic started being siphoned off of Facebook.

off of Instagram, off of YouTube, and toward TikTok. And so all the sort of legacy social companies had to compete. And what did they do? They adopted this concept of for you. Rather than architecting their services around the follow, they, I don't want to say abandoned the idea of the follow, but just about abandoned the idea of the follow. And now their algorithms for the distribution and ranking of media on their sites is more centered around marketing

interests and recommendations than it is around people that you follow. YouTube released shorts, Instagram released reels, Twitter launched a for you feed, X launched a for you feed, whatever we're calling it nowadays. And essentially what's happened over a four year period is the entire internet has shifted off of the follow graph and onto the interest graph. That has been successful at maximizing consumer attention. And it's been

really hurtful in allowing creators to run tight knit communities and businesses. Because if I'm a creator and I've invested in these platforms for the last two decades and built my following and community on these platforms, and now suddenly when I make a post, I can't reach them anymore. That's insane. I don't know how any of us are okay with that happening right now. It's

crazy that we're all just letting this happen and not doing something about that. That was sort of the premise of the talk. That's kind of like what I see as the problem. And I have a lot of thoughts on the solution and what Patreon is doing about that and how we want to contribute to solving that problem. But that is what has happened to the web over the last four years. And I can't emphasize enough how much that has

changed the landscape and what it means to be a creator on the internet. I think you're totally right. I feel like this is a complete paradigm shift that really has gone kind of under the radar and unnoticed. Like you're not seeing articles about it. Aside from you, I have not really seen people

talking about it. I think we see sort of the effects of things like this come up like VidCon a couple years ago when TikTok sponsored VidCon for the first time and they were having a lot of trouble getting people to show up for meet and greets to TikTokers because people just don't have that same bond with TikTokers as they do YouTubers and other people that they maybe have a deeper connection with. A thousand percent. That is exactly what is happening, which is that because the

the platforms have rotated so far toward discovery and time maximization, you end up having hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of weaker connections. Rather than spending more time with one individual and really understanding who this person is and what they have to say and finding those people that you really love in those communities that you really love online, you sort of have this

passive scrolling foot traffic-y fly by in the night mentality. And what that has done is it's essentially the way I like to think about it is the unit of value on TikTok is really the piece of content, the stop me from being bored for 15 seconds piece of content. And what that has essentially done is it's commoditized creators. It like doesn't matter if I get that content from this creator for that creator, that creator. It's just

It's steel. It's rice. It's literally a commodity. With the follow, the unit of value is the relationship. It's getting to know a person over time, which is very different from the unit of value being the piece of content and then never seeing work from that creator again. And what is the material manifestation of that? It is exactly the phenomenon that you just discussed, which is creators show up at VidCon from TikTok and they're

There's no lines. Nobody knows them because it's not about them. It's about that one video that they made nine months ago that was big. And then nobody heard from them again because their next post got 200 views instead of reaching their followers again. And so what you end up happening is this sort of weakening, this broad weakening of communities and fandoms. And I think that's what we're really seeing. We're seeing like fandoms and communities become diluted over time instead of strengthening over time.

Do you think also creators programming increasingly for algorithmic driven feeds is leading to more extreme content because you have to get more extreme to compete in these feeds? A hundred percent. The system that you're posting inside of and the feedback mechanisms of that system, 100%

influence what you say and what you want to say as a creator. I think a lot of what we've seen over the last 10 years is not actually how humanity feels and speaks and what humanity wants to say. It's what we're being trained to say in order to get the reach and outcomes that we want as creators. That's a problem. Yeah, I feel like it's also, as you mentioned, it's happening across all apps because every app has replicated this system. I mean, I was on Twitter X, again, I don't know what to call it anymore.

And I opened my feed and I was looking at these people and I realized my entire like sort of first open view of my feed, it was not a single person that I followed. After watching your talk, I talked to a bunch of creators about this and some small creators. And one thing that some of them were saying is like, yes, it's frustrating because we have to sort of

programmed for an algorithm now instead of programming for our subscribers. But also, it was so hard before to get discovered. Discovery has always been a huge problem on these apps, especially for up-and-coming creators when the market like YouTube is so saturated. So how can they do discovery in a responsible way? Isn't this also kind of good for those smaller creators that are trying to build up the audience? This is the right question.

And a great question, because I think there's actually like a very nuanced conversation that we can have around this. It's not one or the other. That's a false binary, right? It's not discovery or being able to reach your followers. Obviously, there needs to be a balance. And I actually agree that the balance was off before, right? In fact, you could ask the question, why did...

did TikTok blow up so much? And I would say it is because they solved the problem that you just said, which was YouTube was like a brick wall. You could not break in as an up and coming creator. And then TikTok came up

with this system that allowed anybody to just like break in and get a foot in the door. I don't want to be like all negative on this. Like, that's a really beautiful thing. That's wonderful. I'm so glad that that exists, that element of it. Then I think the question becomes, okay, how do we solve the problem of discovery and give smaller craters a way to break in?

and still offer people a direct line of communication and relationship with their followers that allows them to build tight-knit communities and businesses. And again, I think it's a false binary to say that we can do one or the other. I mean, Patreon has algorithms. We're investing in our algorithms. Patreon has Discovery. Patreon has Explore. When a creator launches on Patreon now, over half of their memberships come from members on Patreon who already have Patreon accounts.

Like, there is discovery and a network happening on Patreon. But if you ask Chris,

creators on Patreon, do you feel like you can reach your followers? They all say yes. They say it is much easier to reach the people that you've chosen to follow on Patreon. And that's because of the way we've architected our systems. Now, we're introducing more discovery tools. We're introducing ways for creators to make posts and reach new fans, all different types of things. But the point is, we're doing it in a way that is architected around the follow, not architected around the interest. And that's a big difference. Now, we can afford to do that because

because our KPIs are not time maximization. We don't have to optimize for session time like these other platforms do because session time directly correlates with revenue. For us, there is no correlation between session time and revenue.

That's not how our business works. We're a consumer payments business. So I would argue we actually are probably more advantaged in being able to solve a more strategic balance for creators there. But I do think it is possible to do both. And that's very much how we're approaching it. We are building out our discovery muscle right now and giving creators ways to get discovered, giving fans ways to find new creators that they love and communities that they want to be a part of while making sure that we stay true to the priority of the follow.

What do you think for creators that do have to sort of operate on these platforms and they still want to use them to the best of their ability, but as you mentioned, the sort of community aspects being atrophied, what advice do you have for creators trying to navigate this like social web that's been so become so broken, I guess? Like how do you leverage these platforms for what you can to build a community so that you can even get them on something like Patreon? It's such a good question. It's really hard right now to be a creator on the web because

All of the pressure, all of the dashboards that we see, all of the pressure that we feel when we make a post and it doesn't perform, it all points us to optimize around these applications.

outcomes that we're seeing optimize around these metrics how do i how do i increase my ctr how do i make my videos longer so that i'm more favored by the algorithm because i want to increase my session time on my videos and then youtube will think of my videos as more valuable if i get people to spend more time anyway all of these things are really becoming sort of part of the culture of being a creator and i think the tendency and and the issue with that is it's it's

easy to as a creator to start being so outcome driven and so goal oriented that you fucking forget to be an artist that you forget to speak from your heart and be a full person and make mistakes and say things that are true to you even if they're unpopular and all the things that we we

love about artists, right? Like we love these things about art. Our favorite artists in history are the ones who were bold and fearlessly themselves. And I think we're sort of being trained to kind of not do that. That is the hardest thing for a creator right now on the internet is to make for the outcome as opposed to making for the self-expression. And so what is my advice to creators? A few things. One, be very aware of that tension and don't

over-optimized for the outcome. Don't forget why you got into this in the first place. Don't forget your craft and your love of your craft and your love of storytelling and art creation and process. Spend time on that. Feed your soul with those things. That's number one. Number two is use short form to

break in. If you are a new creator and you don't have an audience yet, you don't have like audience fit, use short form, upload reels, upload TikToks. Like I don't know another way to do it. I don't think you can break in on medium format right now. I think you have to use short form. So like break in on short form. I think that's the best, fastest path.

Then I think the job is once you've like found an audience, launch something long form because you're renting your audience on short form right now. Use your short form to bridge to a podcast or a YouTube channel or a newsletter or something where you can retain your audience, not just kind of

meet them once in a while when you have a banger viral video. Find a place where you can like nurture and build that community in a long form piece of content. Step four, build a community around that long form medium like you're doing with this podcast, right? Like a lot of creators are doing is like invest in like real togetherness. None of this. There's so many things that are like engage your fan base. Like don't do that shit. Have real community.

Have real discussion. See how people are feeling and doing and meet up in person and hang out with people. Have real human interaction and togetherness as much as you can. I remember when when Pomplamoose is getting started, we would do like things like they weren't like scalable or like they weren't going to make us a ton of money, but they were like nice things. Like we did a thing called Cookie Run where we would just tweet out, we're going to play a live set.

and we've baked chocolate chip cookies and we're going to give those cookies away for free and play you 15 minutes of music in the park. And by the way, it starts in 15 minutes. So come to the park for free cookies and music from Pomplamoose. And like 20 people would show up and we would like have a

fun, beautiful, little, wonderful thing. The more stuff you can do like that, that's building real community, the better. And then the final step I would say is there's a lot of ways for creators to get paid right now. The easiest one and the one that's kind of most in the zeitgeist is brand and advertising income. That is

is a good way to make money and i'm not saying creators shouldn't do that i think you kind of need to do that if you're a creator so so go for it do that pomplamoose runs ads over our videos too but don't forget about the other side of it which is a direct to fan consumer payments business now i'm biased so let's take everything i say with a grain of salt i run a company that helps creators accept payments from their fans but our research shows that it is over half of the creator economy like literally half of the little under half is brands and and and

brand deals and ad revenue for creators. The bigger part is consumer payments. And what does that mean? It means memberships, subscriptions, one-time payments for digital commerce, physical commerce, merchandise. It means courses. If you're a teaching creator, there's like a lot of different ways that creators are making money now. And I think having that

investing in the consumer payments portion of your business as a creator, in addition to having like an ads and a brands business helps you build like a really well-rounded diversified business as a creator that can catapult you into the long run and not just sort of be up and down flash in the pan, but it's like actually a more durable long-term business. So maybe that was a longer answer than you wanted, but that's just one of my five things that I would do as a creator right now. I think it's

It's phenomenal advice. I guess I'm thinking there's been so much conversation, especially lately around subscription fatigue around creators. It feels like we all just suddenly having to like manually pay for all of our favorite creators, which I love to do, but it is a lot. And I think it's hard and new creators, especially young people that I talk to now, it's like, well, it's hard to get people to

subscribe again because they're already paying for their top 15 people right on Patreon or any other platform. Also, you're seeing the rise of things like Substack, also other sort of subscription-based platforms around other different types of content. And then you have the platforms themselves trying to facilitate subscriptions. So how do you think of that sort of subscription ecosystem and where it's going? I think subscriptions are

a great way for creators to make money who make episodic media. If you make a thing a week, which by the way is not all creators in the world. There's like a portion of creators who release like one of their marquee things every week and that's usually some type of episodic media like podcasting or YouTube channels that have a

a show. If you make episodic media, subscriptions are really awesome. And the primary business model that we see around subscriptions is if you make four things a month, three of them are free. One of them is behind a paywall. That's like model number one. Model number two, that's also very popular is the first 30 minutes of the thing is free and on YouTube. And then

the next 30 minutes or sometimes the next hour is behind the paywall. So if you want like the deep dive with the guest, you can pay for it. But that allows creators to kind of put every piece of media out online and then they still benefit from sort of being able to monetize behind a paywall. That's one form that I think subscriptions or one hole that I think subscriptions really fill well. But what you said is correct and we see that too, which is that on the consumer side, not everybody wants to pay with subscriptions. In fact, our

our data shows that over half of like even super fans just for whatever reason don't want to pay with a subscription payment. They don't have the money to do that or they have subscription fatigue or they don't want to make the commitment or they kind of want to try before they buy. And so I think it's important for creators to have other ways to make money. And so, you know,

That's obviously very important to us. Patreon launched to solve this problem specifically for creators. We launched a one-time payments product and that product has grown 4x in just its first year of development. Four times the payments in one-time payments to creators over the course of the year. That's because there's so much demand for it on the fan side and on the creator side. So I think it's really important to introduce new lines of revenue for creators to offer their fans. And what are those? Again, the big categories are like

merchandise, digital commerce, like one-time payments for wallpaper or your illustration book or your a specific episode. Then there's collections of videos like courses, back catalog of 200 videos. Some creators have like really high price points for like back catalogs of videos like

like 1200 bucks for like the last three years of educational media on like how to illustrate in this specific style. And there's actually more, there's things like ticketed live streams. There's like a whole bunch of things. And those are all a piece of like Patreon's present and future, right? Like we launched one-time payments. We acquired a ticketed live streaming company. We have done multiple ticketed live streams over the last few years. There are a bunch of ways that fans want to pay and that creators want to be paid that are not subscriptions. And that's a really important piece of the creator economy.

What do you think for just back to this concept of sort of like the follower that are the death of the follower, right? Do you think ultimately that it's better for users? Like, I guess one thing that I think it's harder for creators, right? It's worse for the fit or it's worse for the community. It's more like people are not feeling that sense of community. People are not in their

But it also have to say like TikTok is also entertaining and I like not having the commitment of having to follow someone just from a user perspective. What do you think from like the user side? Because I feel like a lot of people listening aren't creators themselves and they're probably thinking, well, I like that. I don't want to have to subscribe to someone and then I'm getting everything that they post or most of what they post. Maybe I'll go do that on Patreon. But like I want these apps to continue to lean into algorithmic discovery.

I don't think it's all or nothing. I don't think that's the solution. I also don't think the social platforms are going away, nor should they go away. I think there's room for what they do. But I don't think that's the right, healthy, positive thing for humanity over the next 10, 20 years. I mean, I just don't. So I hope...

we get something else other than like time suck maximization every hour of my it's bleak like it's bleak and you know what people are feeling it there's a bunch of stuff in the zeitgeist people are using the word slop they're calling it brain rot like there's a feeling that we're all having which is like the doom scroll it's this like mindless candy dopamine overload that's the equivalent of smoking two packs a day and like we're i think we're

approaching a limit of that being effective it is starting to make us all feel tired and alone and broken and we don't fucking want that we don't want that so i don't think that's gonna be how it scales and works i think like look at the emergence of blue sky and like what they're doing is like oh god it feels like such a breath being over there and the community is so excited it feels like

2008 all over again. There's something really beautiful and emergent about what it feels like to be there right now. And part of it is because of the openness of the ecosystem, the fact that it's open source, the fact that other people can build different feeds. They use algorithmic curation, but they don't overuse algorithmic curation. The fact that it's built on top of a protocol. I think AT Protocol is really cool. I love that they're lighting a fire under their own asses to do right by creators.

If they don't, like your accounts on AT Protocol, like whatever else uses AT Protocol, people can go to. They know that. And that's a signal to the market that like they're going to do right by us. And if they don't, they're holding themselves accountable for it. That's beautiful. That's so beautiful. That's the way the Internet should work. It's the way I want the Internet to work. So like that's why Patreon gave creators email addresses. We were one of the first company, maybe the first company I think ever to do that.

When fans signed up for a creator's Patreon, we just included the email address and we gave it to creators. And I remember when I was like raising money for Patreon, there were some VCs that were like, hey, you're by doing that, you're sort of like reducing your switching costs. And you're like maybe like making your potential for network effects worse. And I was like, yeah, like

Like we're holding ourselves accountable to like doing right by creators. I think the companies that embrace that are going to win over the next 10, 20 years. Largely, I believe power is shifting away from institutions and toward individuals. And I think if companies try to fight that, they're just going to be left in the past. I was kind of wondering kind of like what your thoughts are on the 2025 social landscape. Because also, as I totally agree with you, I feel like we have reached peak brain rot. And even though it feels so good in the

moment to scroll these algorithmic feeds, you end up feeling so much more drained as opposed to, I feel like watching YouTube even five years ago or something, it was this more sort of direct experience or you felt a little bit different. What trends do you see going into 2025 in sort of the online content world? What platforms are emergent? What formats are

merging because I feel like that's another thing that's changed in the past few years is just the many, many ways you can post. It's not just short form. It's medium form. It's text-based. It's like status. There's just an endless array of formats and platforms. So what do you see as ascendant in 2025? And what do you see as sort of atrophying in 2025? I'm really excited for where we are right now. I know it can feel bleak and

I'm sort of it does feel bleak my optimistic nature is shining through right now I I'm not like trying to be optimistic I think I actually just am optimistic about this I think humanity has had a very odd but predictable entrance into the information age and I think the

The last two decades have been tough on us. It's been hard for humans to figure this out. And I don't think we're going to figure it out anytime soon. Maybe that's the sad part. Oh man, these are hard problems and content moderation and trust and safety and policy and free speech. I want to get into some of that stuff in like a little bit too, just like the content moderation of it all.

These are hard problems and they're not going to be solved over the next five years. They're going to take us a little while to figure out and it's going to shake things up. It's a disorganizing force right now for culture, for the world, for governments. It's a disorganizing sort of push toward entropy, right, for the world. And so I think we're all, we're feeling that.

Yeah. What do you think in terms of like when you look at the social landscape, though, in 2025, are there any platforms or formats that you predict like will grow in 2025? And are there any like which do you predict will sort of fade away? I'll tell you mine. I think short form is like maxing out.

out. And I do notice that like some of they're making it more like medium length, even on YouTube. Like I feel like we peaked short form content. And I also see a lot more people like I see live streaming gaining a lot of time. I don't know if it's just like Kai Sinatra just finished writing about him, but like it does feel like people are spending more time in live stream. So I don't know. I'm just curious kind of like what your thoughts on the ecosystem are and like what

formats you're seeing take off? I think a couple things. One, we're going to see further fragmentation. I think the idea of the single public square is kind of like a phase one of Web 2.0. And I think we're going to see fragmentation of communities and software. And we're already starting to see that.

We're seeing communities segment and develop by politics, by interests, by a number of different ways that you can slice communities. I think we're going to see further fragmentation. I do think we're going to see a push toward ownership and control. That could manifest in a number of ways. I think a couple of years ago we had a head fake with crypto, but I do think the principles of that

are starting to come true with other technologies right now, like Blue Sky and AT protocol. I do think that's not a flash in the pan. I think that's part of a longer term trend toward control and ownership and transparency of data and owning your network graph. And honestly, I think that's one of the reasons that newsletters have become so popular is because of the fact that that's on email, which is a protocol, right? And people may not know that, but I think intuitively they realize that.

And so I think we're going to see more pushes toward ownership and control, ownership of data, control of distribution and audience data and all that kind of stuff. The other thing I think we're going to see right now, we're already essentially the web is being fragmented into premium and freemium. A lot of media companies over the last two and three years especially have segmented their offerings into free and paid.

biggest media companies in the world have now done that. Apple News, Apple News+, Netflix, the ad tier. Whether you started with paid or whether you started with free, they're adding the other half of the offering. And so all properties, all media properties are developing both an ad-supported tier and a consumer payment-supported tier. The next step is

creators are going to follow that model, right? The big media companies did it and now like individual creators are going to do it. They're going to segment their offerings strategically into free and paid. And we're going to see the like further normalization of consumer payments around the premium portion of any creator or media companies offering. In terms of short form, it's weird. I don't know that I would say it's peaked, but there's fatigue. I can feel it.

setting in it feels like empty calories we saw in the last election right like long form conversations where there's depth and time to settle in with a person and hear their three hour point of view not just like a 30 minute point of view I think we're gonna see a

an increased demand and hunger for more depth and nuance and detail. And I think that's going to manifest in terms of medium and long form media. Speaking of that long form media, I mean, you mentioned podcasting, obviously Spotify is pivoting to video. This video podcast is probably going to be up there. It seems like all of podcasting, as you mentioned, used to be this sort of like open protocol thing. It was built as this before the social web, right? Now it seems like

all of every single podcast in order to be successful has to be video. And you see a lot of the economics of online videos being replicated in the podcast space. What are your thoughts on that shift? I think it's probably inevitable. I prefer for podcasts

creators to own everything themselves as much as possible. And so there's a piece of me that's sad to see that happening. But there's demand for it on the fan side and on the creator side. So I understand that. I hate it. I feel like I guess there is a demand, but part of the demand seems manufactured. Like, it's just so hard to tell, like,

How much do people really want everything to be video? And how much do these platforms just want everything to be video? I don't know. By the way, the reason I think we're starting to see every podcast do video and essentially be chat show episodic media, like the reason that that's happening is because the shift to short form has created this amazing opportunity for chat shows to clip down into 30 and 60 second nuggets. And you're right, like podcasts did not have discovery before. And so that has become the discovery layer for podcasts, which means you have to

have video on your podcast, like you may as well record video. And then as soon as that becomes the thing, you may as well, not just you may as well record video. If you don't have video, you can't get discovered. So you have to have video if you want discovery. And then once you have video, you may as well upload to YouTube, which is not RSS. And then you're sort of done with the idea of RSS because I'm uploading my videos to YouTube and I have a YouTube channel. I have a chat show. And then like

The original idea of podcasting is really evolved now. When people say podcast, they don't mean RSS. 10 years ago, if you said podcast, that meant RSS. That piece of culture has changed.

for sure over the last five years especially. Yeah, I don't think it's going back. No, it's not going back. Last point on that, like what I want is for platforms to give you both, which is what Patreon does. And maybe that's like trying to have your cake and eat it too. But like we integrate with RSS. And if you want to use RSS, great. You can use Patreon and you can own all of your stuff and you can have your RSS feed. And if you want to upload native audio, we're not going to stop you from uploading native audio. We're not going to stop you from uploading native video. But like

If you prefer to have RSS because you want full control, you can do that. I think giving creators choice and agency is so important at the end of the day. One thing that I've covered a lot of is the rise of this sort of right-wing creator ecosystem and a lot of these big creators on the right that were ultraprocessing

ultimately deplatformed for misinformation. Some of them, they're definitely more kind of like extreme content. Not all of them are necessarily overtly breaking terms of service, but they're not necessarily, some of them are not great for the world. And not to just call out right-wing creators, there's obviously problematic creators across the political spectrum. But as

How do you think about sort of content moderation and the creators that you choose to allow on Patreon? This is such an important question. And it's one of those things that I didn't even know that existed when I started Patreon. I was coming at this from the perspective of a creator. So I didn't even know that this was a thing. I very quickly learned this is a thing and it's a big thing and it needs a lot of diligence and care and time and attention. You have to be very thoughtful and principled about it.

So, I mean, I can tell you a little bit about the journey there. We first learned that it was that we needed to like have teams and processes and systems around this in 2014 when a site launched on Patreon that was funding their, they were funding their operations and their servers and they were allowing really awful shit on their servers. That was like not just stuff that's a content policy issue. It was like stuff that's illegal. And so we very quickly like had to act and not only act against like taking down that

that particular page from Patreon, but we had to think more systematically about what is and isn't okay on Patreon, which is a very different problem. I guess I'm wondering like if that's changed though recently, I feel like there was this, as you mentioned, like early 20, early 2010s, like, oh shit, we have to do content moderation. The second half of the 2010s was like,

aggressive content moderation, I'd say, or at least like people realizing, right? And I do think that in the past couple of years, I mean, Facebook is a good example of this. There has been a rollback where people are like, okay, actually we moderated a little too far. Facebook, for instance, restricting all information around social justice issues and even the word vote ahead of the election, right? Like, and that's,

Not necessarily deplatforming content. Obviously, it's different. You guys are not an algorithmically distributed social platform. But I do think norms around these things change. And I do think people have a lot more permissible attitude than even a few years ago. So I guess I'm wondering, has your thinking evolved on any of that? Yes, it has. And it should, by the way.

Content policy is a reflection of culture and culture evolves. And so content policy that stays still while culture evolves is poor content policy. Content policy needs to keep up with changing culture, changing technology. So content policy should, what we always say inside the company is content policy is a living, breathing document. Like it should evolve with culture. And so, yes, my thinking has changed.

And it changes every quarter, every half. Like we've now had to write a whole bunch of like policies on AI and AI media and deep fakes and non-consensual deep fakes. And like there's a whole bunch of stuff that like were not problems three years ago. They were not things. And so we had to evolve our policies to keep up with that.

And I think what you're talking about specifically, though, is like the sort of the correction and then overcorrection and then swing of the pendulum in terms of aggressiveness of content moderation. I do feel like they've shifted and evolved. And the vibe right now is away from the stricter moderation that I think we saw earlier.

in 2019, 2020. It's got to be done better. Honestly, I think there's very few companies in the world that are doing this well right now. And I think we're going to see content policy and trust and safety teams evolve quite a bit over the next 10 years. I think that's correct. I want to ask you one last question before we just do a couple of pickups because

I know you have to go. You spend so much time on Patreon, obviously. I'm curious, what interesting creators, like, do you see creators make it on Patreon? Like, is it possible? Are there any sort of like truly Patreon born creators? Or do you think that you have to make it big on another app or another platform and sort of like Patreon becomes this layer? Or have you, I don't know. I'm just interested if you're seeing any up and coming people like natively on Patreon. So as we're

adding more discovery, I anticipate that's going to happen more. For the first chapter of the company, we were not trying to solve discovery. We weren't trying to match creators with audiences. That's changed over the last couple of years. We introduced Explorer in 2024. We introduced like creator recommendations in 2024. We introduced some algorithmic discovery in 2024. So like

We are starting to work on discovery now and there is a network forming on Patreon in terms of the way people talk about YouTubers or TikTokers. Are there Patreoners? I think we're going to see some Patreoners in the near future. But but yeah, I mean, it's historically you have needed to have an

audience from some other platform that you've then brought to Patreon. That was kind of the first chapter of the company. And the next chapter very much is about like helping creators grow and find audiences. And that's a lot of the stuff that we're going to keep rolling out. We need a better word than Patreoners. Patronites. I don't know. Patrons, I guess. Well, patrons are the people that subscribe though, no? I was going to say patronauts. Patronauts. I like it. Yeah. Well, Jack, thank you so much for chatting with me today. This was great. Thanks for having me. Really fun to talk to you, Taylor.

All right, that's it for the show. You can watch full episodes of Power User on my YouTube channel at Taylor Lorenz. Power User is produced by Travis Larchuk and Jelani Carter. Our executive producer is Zach Mack. If you like the show, give us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. And don't forget to sign up for my weekly tech and online culture newsletter, usermag.co. That's usermag.co.