
Against the Crowdfunding Economy - trop
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/05/crowdfunding-kickstarter-gofundme-charity-taxes/
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TulliusCicero
> Parker thinks Patreon works for some artists — like those who have heavily
> cultivated their social media presence — but the major drawback is that
> artists are forced to spend more and more time creating exclusive content
> for the highest-paying patrons to continue receiving funding. As she
> elaborates:

> They start to get pissy when you make art they don’t want. Like they have a
> right to be involved in your life.

Yes, how positively odd that after giving you lots of money, they want
something specific in return.

> Friendster seemed lucrative, so why not try something similar in Myspace?
> Facebook? Snapchat? They’re all variations on a theme.

I've noticed this attitude is widespread among marxists: glossing over
differences between businesses, or the products they offer. To a marxist, as
long as the high-level descriptions of two products are similar, the products
are functionally equivalent. That Myspace got crushed because its UX was
basically a dumpster fire means nothing to them, they just seem to view one
company winning over the other as the whims of unknowable capitalist
machinations.

They view business as a whole as essentially a big black box. This is not
because they are stupid, but rather because, to borrow a phrasing from Upton
Sinclair, it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his
ideology depends upon his not understanding it.

~~~
_ality
> Yes, how positively odd that after giving you lots of money they want
> something specific in return.

Sure. You could say precisely the same about a politician who accepts money
from a mafia or large corporation. What you are saying is not a
counterargument when the entire point of the article is a criticism of a
system based around this exchange (in the same way I imagine you wouldn't
defend political corruption).

~~~
TulliusCicero
Yes, because corrupting politicians with bribes is obviously counter to the
public interest and poisonous to democracy. The article does imply that
artists making things for their 'patrons' is bad, but it doesn't actually say
why. I mean yeah, it does say that what artists create is dictated by what
people are willing to pay for, but that's true of basically any business.

The argument they make later for why crowdfunding for paying for people's
medical treatment is basically sound: most developed countries have universal
healthcare, after all. One can intuitively understand the moral argument of
"people shouldn't have to go around begging for donations because they got
cancer". The article just doesn't say why that applies to artists, too. Unless
you want to just make the hyper-general argument of, "like, you shouldn't have
to _work_ for money, maaaan."

edit: basically it's hard to take critique of business behavior from marxists
seriously because 90% of the time it seems to come down to "profit is immoral,
full communism now", and unless you're willing to go for that, the arguments
they present are completely useless.

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xemdetia
I think the interesting thing about Patreon is I keep hearing of people who
individually found ways to create similar systems directly for a long time
(pre-Internet). It turns into a sort of mail order subscription service where
pay in for a future output of prints/some other output, or one-off buyers can
buy things that are surplus. They build this group over time and eventually
get to it full-time, so I think people just aren't used to this more modern
model of being paid for art. Most artistic output is going to be niche by
default in the general case, you have to find and develop your audience! It's
a business like any other if you want your art to support you.

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lowglow
For makers, inventors, and developers there is Baqqer[0]. Baqqer's focus isn't
just on the self, but also creating an open and transparent product while
building the supportive community that goes into making a product successful.

[0] [https://baqqer.com/](https://baqqer.com/)

~~~
bllguo
I'm not sure this is a smart promotional strategy

