Patreon's new service fee spurs concern that creators will lose patrons - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/07/patreons-new-service-fee-spurs-concern-that-creators-will-lose-patrons/?hn=1 <comment><USER3> It's worth remembering that less than three months ago, Patreon raised $60M in a series C ([https://patreonhq.com/new-round- funding-816d5a592477](https://patreonhq.com/new-round-funding-816d5a592477)):

 _I've got some exciting news! Patreon has just secured an additional round of financing ($60M!), which means we will be scaling our team, building faster, and building more — all in service of getting you paid what you deserve to be paid, for the value you give the world. YESSS!_

So why is Patreon changing their fees now, when they just got a ton of money and can basically do whatever they want in order to grow? Their Zendesk article ([https://patreon.zendesk.com/hc/en- us/articles/115005631963](https://patreon.zendesk.com/hc/en- us/articles/115005631963)) isn't much help:

 _Q: Why is Patreon doing this now?

A: Patreon exists to allow creators to get paid what they deserve to be paid, for the value they give the world. This is awesome and to continue this vision, we need to constantly evaluate our processes. As we work to deliver bigger and better features for creators and patrons in 2018, we felt like sooner than later made sense to put this change into effect._

This doesn't actually answer the question: why do the fees need to be changed at all, whether sooner _or_ later? Were creators asking for this change? What was wrong with the way it worked before?

The obvious answer is that Patreon needs more money for some reason. But… they just raised a bunch of money. So I really don't understand how this change makes sense or helps anyone.

<comment><USER4> Patreon is a startup which is a conduit for and yet a leech upon the incomes of struggling people[0]. An service of its kind should not be a for-profit operation, the incentives are perverse.

Kickstarter is a Public Benefit Corporation, so I'm slightly more enthusiastic about the potential of their offering (Drip).

[0] [https://theoutline.com/post/2571/no-one-makes-a-living-on- pa...](https://theoutline.com/post/2571/no-one-makes-a-living-on-patreon)

<comment><USER5> Speaking of Kickstarter, do you think this change will push creators over to Drip[0]? Is Drip a PBC as well?

0\. [https://d.rip/](https://d.rip/)

<comment><USER6> > Ⓒ2017 Drip U.S., LLC. By Kickstarter, PBC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think the clearest explanation of the change is in this tweet: [https://twitter.com/TPRJones/status/938646263800705024](https://twitter.com/TPRJones/status/938646263800705024)

"The extra cost isn't tiny if you pledge small amounts to many creators. Pledging $100 to 1 creator will now cost $103.25 which is reasonable. Pledging $1 each to 100 creators will now cost $138 which is not reasonable"

<comment><USER8> $138 is unreasonable to me for one simple reason: When I pledge to 20 creators, Patreon batches my pledges based on arbitrary server-side criteria, such that they cannot guarantee how _many_ charges will be made to cover my pledges.

So typically I see two charges per month. They can't charge me $0.35 per charge because the # of charges varies without any ability for the customer to predict and cannot be defended reasonably to customers.

Instead of revamping their billing groupings to ensure that each patron is charged once per month, they are charging $0.35 _per creator_ , which is the absolute worst case scenario here.

So to me, the ripoff is that they charge me for two credit card transactions, but instead of $0.35 per transaction, they charge $0.35 per _creator_ within a single credit transaction - when that $0.35 is not charged to them by their merchant processor for those individual creators.

I would have been fine if they'd simply tell me "X creators = Y transactions @ $0.35 each + 2.9% of amount", where Y is virtually always some tiny fraction of X, but that they instead say "X creators = X transactions @ $0.35 each + 2.9% of amount" to avoid regrouping their billing is a misuse of the word 'transaction' as they implement it.

EDIT: If Patreon has been charging $0.35 per patreon to their creators, then this is not _new_ profit for them, but is instead the _same_ profit now collected from patreons instead of creators. It's still unacceptable to me, because they're charging the worst-case scenario (one transaction, per patreon, per creator) and then optimizing for less than that and not crediting the excess (Y-X) x $0.35 back somehow. If their 5% take isn't enough to cover transaction costs, hiding a profit in (Y-X) x $0.35 is not the correct way to solve that.

EDIT: It's possible that Patreon was censured by Stripe somehow and is going to stop batching charges period full stop come January, and so then Y=X for all cases, at which point this all starts to make a lot more sense.

<comment><USER7> Do you know why they batch the pledges into several payments and not just one big payment?

<comment><USER9> Money laundering rules

<comment><USER10> Can you go into some more depth?

<comment><USER11> Hadn't thought of this reason, but that _might_ make sense - in essence, the standard AML rules have always required specifying the final beneficiary of a payment if you pay money to someone who'll hand it over to them.

If Patreon is being treated as or claiming to be a payment service provider (i.e. it passes money through to authors without owning it in between, the only revenue on their balance sheet is the fee they take) then it'd be wrong to state that Patreon is the beneficiary of a particular payment, since it's not; and they'd be required to list all the _actual_ beneficiaries on every payment, which can't really be done for reasons, so they need to charge many small separate payments.

On the other hand, if Patreon is being treated as or claiming to be selling a service (i.e. it takes all your money, and pays it out to authors as a business expense) then that has major tax implications, namely, _all_ the amount (as opposed to just their fees) is their revenue and thus subject to various sales taxes and VAT worldwide. This seems to be the current option, since they're charging VAT on the full amount for EU patrons.

It might be plausible that they're currently switching from option 2 to option 1 for financial reasons, and this precludes them from batching in the future.

<comment><USER10> > _they 'd be required to list all the actual beneficiaries on every payment, > which can't really be done for reasons_

How so? If they can list the beneficiaries on the _individual_ payments, why can't they lump them into my single-payment?

<comment><USER11> They can list _a_ beneficiary on the payment, not an arbitrary number of beneficiaries. They can list _a_ beneficiary tax residence on the payment, and that'll apply for the whole payment. Two beneficiaries means two amounts (you have to specify how much goes to person A, anyway), and thus two payments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Patreon has just updated their blog with the rationale for the change: [https://blog.patreon.com/updating-patreons-fee- structure/](https://blog.patreon.com/updating-patreons-fee-structure/)

Unfortunately, changing the payment structure to what they're proposing - while easier to understand - removes any payment-processing value that Patreon was providing. Putting the friction back into these kinds of micro-donations.

Seems like a bad business move to me. The hard problem here was making micro- donations cost-effective, not creating a website where creators could host links to content.

Edit: The relevant paragraph.

> To do that, we need to move our payments system to treat your pledges like > any other subscription service. In other words, we need a system that > charges patrons at the time of their initial pledge, and on the anniversary > of their pledge each month thereafter.

So every individual monthly pledge will result in a CC transaction now. I'm guessing in cases where two pledges fall on the same day Patreon will still do one CC transaction and pocket the $0.35 they saved?

<comment><USER13> Ok, that link makes things clearer, and I can understand their position a bit more.

But they missed the BIG OBVIOUS solution: charge a pro-rated "first month" pledge, then combine all subsequent pledges like they do now.

For example, if I become a patron at the $10/month level, on the 15th of the month, they can charge me $5 immediately. Then the $10 gets added to my regular charge on the first of the month, and everyone saves in processing fees.

As a patron, I would much rather get one charge per month on the first. The current schedule works great.

<comment><USER14> There are often privileges and perks associated with being a patron of a certain creator. These perks aren't pro-rated, thus subscribing late in the month for a day or two might be a viable way to cheat this system. Personally, I don't think this is a huge deal, and, if this is their reasoning, it's a mistake.

<comment><USER15> You could even do it where you pay the full cost immediately, but the difference between that and the prorated cost counts as a credit to the next start-of-month payment. eg. If there's a $100 reward tier and I sign up 60% of the way through the month, I immediately pay $100, then at the start of next month my $100 pledge is discounted by the $60 I overpaid for the previous month, so I only pay $40.

Effectively, it flips the first two months so you pay the full amount immediately but if you stay on for at least two months it all balances out in the end.

EDIT: Ninja'd by sibling comment

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> $0.35 fee on a $1 donation is a lot of friction.

The $0.35 / donation fee doesn't make sense to me. It sounds like a credit card transaction fee. But Patreon charges my CC once a month. So why not charge me the $0.35 once a month? Why once per donation?

The 2.9% part seems fine to me. So does shifting the costs to the donators. But why charge me per donation instead of per credit card transaction?

 _Edit_ this article has a nice analysis: [https://www.pretty- terrible.com/funny-money-patreon-style/](https://www.pretty- terrible.com/funny-money-patreon-style/)

<comment><USER17> Exactly. If you support 10 creators they get to keep 90% of the 10x$0.35. The argument that it's for payment processors is utter bollocks.

<comment><USER18> Why do you think it's bollocks? It makes perfect sense. A transaction fee + % is common with payment processors. Couple that with new rules coming down the pipeline (as well as common sense when it comes to processing transactions for other people), nothing about the pricing is unreasonable. Quite the opposite, in fact.

<comment><USER19> The entire point of Patreon is to spread the transaction fee across the people you are backing at $1/month or $1/post.

If they had this 2.9%+$0.35 fee get charged when they charge my card, I would be fine with it. Its the per creator charging of it that is ridiculous. Most of the people I back is at the $1 level, which would be not viable with the new fee.

There is no good reason for this, as even paying to the creator should be lump sum via ACH, rather than hundreds of $1 transactions. ACH (a electronic check system in the us) charges a very minimal amount for a connection to the network to cover admin costs. Current fees[0] are $264/yr+$0.000185/transaction. Even with paying ACH fees for both ends (creator and the patreon) and refusing to aggregate, ACH fees are still a rounding error.

What they should be doing is offering you to pay via ACH to reduce fees so the creators can actually get a bigger share of the $1 you spend.

[0]: [https://www.nacha.org/ach-network/administration- fees](https://www.nacha.org/ach-network/administration-fees)

<comment><USER18> > The entire point of Patreon is to spread the transaction fee across the > people you are backing at $1/month or $1/post.

That's decidedly false. The entire point of Patreon is to support creators, and to make it easy for creators to get that support.

> There is no good reason for this,

There are. Legal reasons. Banking reason. Simply put, lumping together transactions is dangerous. Dangerous for creators, dangerous for patreons, and dangerous for customers. I'm surprised they did it this long.

> as even paying to the creator should be lump sum via ACH,

What does this have to do with the majority of people paying via CC?

<comment><USER19> > There are. Legal reasons. Banking reason. Simply put, lumping together > transactions is dangerous. Dangerous for creators, dangerous for patreons, > and dangerous for customers.

You still keep records of who paid who (eg: This dollar in creator X's account came from backer Y), they are "lumped" as far as the CC processor is concerned so you don't have to pay that per-transaction fee for each creator backed. Basically, as long as the transactions are internal to Patreon, the transaction fees should be inline with the cost of a few rows in a database.

> What does this have to do with the majority of people paying via CC?

If they really were interested in reducing fees, they would let people pay via ACH, which it currently does not look like they do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> So patrons will now be responsible for covering the Stripe fees, and Patreon is still taking an _additional_ 5% for their services.

The Stripe fees were previously taken out of the creators' portion, so it made a big difference to a creator whether they had one patron for $100/month or 100 patrons for $1/month. But that was hidden from patrons, who could easily and happily pledge $1 to a dozen creators.

Can I now pledge 63 cents, so that the cost to me is $1?

Also, I'd be shocked if me pledging $1 to a dozen creators resulted in a dozen Stripe charges. Clearly Patreon should run those charge once, so my $12 costs only 70 cents from Stripe.

<comment><USER21> Patreon _wants_ us to think they're Stripe fees, but they're not.

When I pay $17 for my monthly pledges, that comes out of my card as one single transaction, with one single $0.30 Stripe per-transaction fee.

Stripe also offers high-volume clients a discount on the 2.9% rate, which Patreon must be big enough to get.

<comment><USER22> > Stripe also offers high-volume clients a discount on the 2.9% rate, which > Patreon must be big enough to get.

Yep. They pay 1.9% (source: [https://patreon.zendesk.com/hc/en- us/articles/204606125-How-...](https://patreon.zendesk.com/hc/en- us/articles/204606125-How-do-you-calculate-fees-))

Also, Paypal offers a 5 cents + 5% micropayments rate that they take advantage of.

The 35 cents plus 2.9% is clearly designed to make you think that they are processing fees and I'd be very surprised if Patreon wasn't putting at least half of that into their pocket.

<comment><USER23> 5 cents and 5% is ridiculous if it is cost-plus, but if it is indeed a flat rate, considering how small some of these microtransactions can be, and the overhead involved for a transaction of any size, it starts to make sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I cancelled all my pledges over this, it's a huge breach of trust IMO. I set things up to authorize Patreon to charge me $X per month. They unilaterally decided to use that authorization to charge me $X + service fees per month going forward. They announced this by sending me an email that takes several minutes and multiple paragraphs for me to understand that the cost to continue my Patreon subscription would go up next month.

I don't give authorization for recurring charges to companies that unilaterally decide to foist price increases on me.

<comment><USER25> Agreed, I've similarly cancelled all my pledges and I am very disappointed that Patreon has done so without a clear email and explanation of why to boot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Since the graphs is Patreon's own blog post are so grossly misleading, I made my own: [https://mneme.dedyn.io/shiny_users/ryan/patreon- fees/](https://mneme.dedyn.io/shiny_users/ryan/patreon-fees/)

Not surprisingly, the look nothing like Patreon's graphs. For any pledge of $4 or less (and probably a lot more than that), Patreon is now taking more of the pledge for themselves. Since this likely represents the vast majority of pledges, Patreon is effectively raising their prices without admitting that that's what they're doing.

<comment><USER27> probably because your `Patreon_Old_Max_Fee` and `Patreon_Old_Min_Fee` are wrong. The portion taken has _never_ been as low as 2% on a $1 pledge. From their old FAQ: "Stripe charges 1.9% + $0.30 per transaction. PayPal charges 5% + $0.05 per transaction."

So, under the old fee system, for a $1 pledge, the service fee was either $0.32 for Stripe or $0.10 for PayPal. On a $10 pledge, it was $0.50 for Stripe and $0.55 for Paypal.

<comment><USER26> I just went based on the information given in their blog post, which said "an additional third party processing fee that ranged from 2% – 10%".

Edit: I'm not exactly sure how to calculate the fees based on the info in their FAQ. Taking Stripe as the example, they say the fees are 1.9% + $0.30 per transaction. So if I pledge $10, I guess that means that Patreon charges me an amount $X such that X * 1.019 + 0.3 = 10? And if so, do they take their own 5% cut out of $10 or out of $X?

Edit 2: I took my best stab at it and replaced the min/max with specific entries for Stripe and Paypal.

<comment><USER27> > I just went based on the information given in their blog post, which said > "an additional third party processing fee that ranged from 2% – 10%".

that's probably because the average pledge size is probably much closer to $10 than $1

> I'm not exactly sure how to calculate the fees based on the info in their > FAQ...

What you're guessing seems spot on. If you pledge $10 under the old system, then Patreon took a 5% cut of $10, and Stripe took 1.9%*$10 plus 30¢. So, the patron paid $10, Patreon got 50¢, Stripe got 49¢, and the creator got the remaining $9.01.

<comment><USER26> The average might be close to $10, but I'll bet the median pledge is much closer to $1.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'm a creator who uses Patreon. Most of my support is $1 pledges; I have a couple small pledges I make to other creators, as well.

I heard about this entirely through people talking about it on Mastodon. Didn't get any email from Patreon about this, not even lost in my spam folder; the only email I have from Patreon going back for a while is "hey you got paid", "someone made/changed a pledge", and "someone commented on one of your posts".

I'm not anyone huge, I make about $800 a month on a really productive month, and I don't make videos which is sometimes all Patreon seems to care about - <USER2> quit subscribing to their creator newsletter because it was nothing but chirpy articles on why and how you should be making video content!!11!! - but I kinda feel like, I dunno, maybe I should have had, like, some email in my inbox about this?

\----

I really hope that everyone (including me) is misreading the detailed explanation of How This New Fee Structure Works, because it sure does sound like they're going to be imposing a 2.9%+35¢ transaction fee to every single pledge _before_ they add up all of the pledges you've made to the dozen creators you might support on Patreon, instead of _after_. Which adds up _really quickly_.

If this is the case, I guess I get to see if being a Featured Project twice on Kickstarter is going to be of any help in getting into their new invite-only Patreon-alike d.rip...

edit: They updated the FAQ page on the new fees to address the concerns of the per-thing creators like me. [https://patreon.zendesk.com/hc/en- us/articles/115005631963](https://patreon.zendesk.com/hc/en- us/articles/115005631963)

>Q: How does this impact me as a per-post creator?

>A: As a per-post creator, your patrons will see the 2.9% + $0.35 service fee added to _all paid posts_. For example, if you are a per post creator making two paid posts per month, your patrons will be charged 2.9% + $0.35 for each paid post.

(Italics mine.)

are they, like, completely unbundling all of their charges from each other now? Why are we even _using_ Patreon any more if that's the case?

<comment><USER29> Here's the email I got at 11:23AM this morning:

"Dear patron,

Your support is truly changing the lives of creators around the world. You give creators a reliable paycheck that enables them to do their best work. Thank you thank you thank you.

In order to continue our mission of funding the creative class, we're always looking for ways to do what's best for our creators. With that, we're writing to tell you of a change we're making so that all Patreon creators take home exactly 95% of every pledge, with no additional fees.

Aside from Patreon's existing 5% fee, a creator's income on Patreon varies because of processing fees every month. They can lose anywhere from 7-15% of their earnings to these fees. This means creators actually take home a lower percentage of your pledge than you may realize. Our goal is to make creators' paychecks as predictable as possible, so we're restructuring how these fees are paid.

Starting December 18th, we will apply a new service fee of 2.9% + $0.35 that patrons will pay for each individual pledge. This service fee helps keep Patreon up and running.

We want you to know that we approach every change with thoughtfulness for creators and patrons. By standardizing Patreon's fees, we're ensuring that creators get paid to continue creating high quality content. If you have questions or would like to learn more, please visit our FAQ here.

Sincerely, The Patreon team"

<comment><USER28> thank you <3

it's good to see how they're pitching this to the patrons, I've mostly just seen fellow creators running around with their hair on fire about this.

<comment><USER30> If you have pledges yourself, shouldn't you have gotten this email too?

<comment><USER28> Yeah, I do and I should. But I didn't. Which perturbs me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I just cancelled all my pledges. This is absurd.

The whole point of Patreon was to bundle small charges to avoid these fees, and to hopefully make support more reliable/consistent for creators. If they're going to fail outright on the former pledge, then I want nothing to do with them.

I strongly urge others to cancel pledges, as this is the strongest feedback we can provide. There are many ways to support creators.

<comment><USER32> The really sad part is that they tricked people into potentially leaving their job and then ripped the carpet out from under them.

I'm really thinking of dropping pledges and simply mail them some cash but I'm afraid I'd skip the last step and hurt the creators I love in the end.

<comment><USER33> I dropped my pledges off the back of this news. I was only supporting one creator, so it wasn't that dramatic. Also, I left a comment before I cancelled indicating I was only leaving because of Patreon's business practices, and suggested I'd like to support the creator again if they open up an account with a competitor. Liberapay would be my preferred choice but as long as Patreon get the message and the creators don't have to suffer, some good can come out of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> This is pretty crazy of Patreon. I mean - they can easily bundle pledges on charge. I don't understand why they'd drop a separate charge for each one, except for "fuck it, they won't care, right?".

<comment><USER35> They can bundle the charges to the patrons to reduce cost to themselves, while still charging fees as if they were making individual transactions.

I'm inclined to believe they're already doing this.

<comment><USER36> > I'm inclined to believe they're already doing this.

AFAICT (from my charges) they have indeed been bundling charges. Charging the %+constant fee for _each patron_ given that there is _no individual_ payment- processor action for each patron on the debit side is absolutely nasty.

I'm not asking them to eat payment-processing fees, I'm not asking them not to make a profit, I'm simply asking them to _not charge for fees for transactions that never happened_.

I hope Hatreon (or any other patreon clone) steals half of their userbase because they absolutely deserve to be punished and chastised for this manipulative nonsense (along with their banning legal-but-NSFW content producers); because nothing else but people exiting from Patreon will make them feel _anything_.

<comment><USER34> Hatreon's a platform designed explicitly and specifically for white supremacists, so _maybe not them_.

<comment><USER37> I think Hatreon was just designed to not censor things. At the moment that happens to be appealing to white supremacists and right leaning content creators, but I wouldn't be too shocked to see NSFW creators moving there soon.

<comment><USER34> The name is literally Hate-reon, my dude. Its audience is well-defined.

I can definitely see a Patreon alternative that might do better by folks getting some traction--Kickstarter as a PBC is interesting, I actually didn't realize Patreon wasn't. But I know a decent few NSFW creators and I can't imagine _any_ of them going to where the Daily Stormer and Richard Spencer gets their funding.

Conflating self-declared Nazis with pornography is exactly what those Nazis would like people to do.

<comment><USER37> Conflating Nazis with pornography wasn't really my intention - I just meant that a site founded due to Patreon no-platforming people might also be a destination of NSFW creators when Patreon starts cracking down on them.

As for the audience of Hatreon, I guess I was just taking their about page [0] and community guidelines [1] at face value.

"Hate speech is protected speech. Hatreon exists in reaction to politically motivated no-platforming at sites like Patreon. Always consider your local, state, and national laws, but the site stands for free speech absolutism and will protect creators' interests against sovereign and corporate threats. Do not abuse this protection."

In other words, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." \- which is a sentiment I can get behind.

[0] [https://hatreon.net/about/](https://hatreon.net/about/) [1] [https://hatreon.net/guidelines/](https://hatreon.net/guidelines/)

<comment><USER34> That's one way to look at it, and that's the only remotely defensible way one can wash their hands of aiding Nazis.

But it's dishonest. Taking money for Nazis is not the same as ensuring their right to speak. It means you're doing business with them. You are providing them aid and assistance, not even merely a place to speak (which no private citizen is obligated to provide and no private citizen should be removed from judgment for so doing). That's money that doesn't go merely to "speech" at all.

In no place and at no time in history has enthusiastic, freely undertaken business with Nazis made you freedom-loving or high-minded; it has only and ever made you, in the best light of history possible, a sucker and a sap (if not a collaborator). But it might make you money, so...

<comment><USER38> > In no place and at no time in history has enthusiastic, freely undertaken > business with Nazis made you freedom-loving or high-minded; it has only and > ever made you, in the best light of history possible, a sucker and a sap (if > not a collaborator). But it might make you money, so...

Read more history. The tangent you're rambling on about both muddies the discussion and falls short of factual accuracy.

A man named Oskar Schindler enthusiastically and freely undertook business with actual Nazis and even became a member of the Nazi Party. His actions saved the lives of well over a thousand Jews and cost him all the money he had amassed prior to the war. Hatreon has _nothing_ to do with this history and Patreon's poor terms even less so.

<comment><USER34> Psst. Schindler was not merely a collaborator, _he was a Nazi_. You know the whole story there, yeah? That he campaigned for Jewish labor _because it was free slave labor_? That he had an attack of conscience and reached minimally- decent-human-being status is certainly a thing--but all that enthusiastically- and-freely-undertaken business was _Nazi-ass Naz business_ until his conscience, a notable omission in heildudes like Richard Spencer, made him confront that Jews are, y'know, people.

It is, perhaps, not exactly the hill you want to die on to go "b-b-b-but Oskar Schindler!". Stormfront wants heads on sticks and burning crosses on black folks' lawns. They don't care about Oskar Schindler and they don't care about the plausible deniability that Hatreon really wants suckers and saps to buy into. They know. They know it's there for them and only for them.

Don't use Patreon _if_ you don't like their terms. Don't use Hatreon _because_ they're for Nazis.

<comment><USER38> > Psst. Schindler was not merely a collaborator, _he was a Nazi_.

Psst. Had you grown up in that time and circumstance, you undoubtedly would have been, too. And it's unfathomably unlikely you'd have joined him as the second of only two ever to be honored with a burial on Mount Zion and visited by survivors for decades.

I see Hatereon and particularly Stormfront as grave threats and it pains me to see people such as yourself strengthening both through relentless snarking and bigoteering. You need only look in the mirror to understand why your society is where it is and why the politics has grown so rancid. And it's not just your society affected by your culture wars. American-style intolerance is threatening to boil over into the rest of the world, too. You are a wealthy and influential person, almost certainly in the 1% of the developed world, and the second order consequences of your actions matter.

Setting all of that to one side, speaking of "dying on hills" and trying to put a stutter in someone else's mouth is damned childish and more than a bit irritating.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> No one has mentioned [https://liberapay.com/](https://liberapay.com/) ?

They seem to deal with this problem by letting you fund a donation account and then disburse funds on a periodic basis. This is also similar to donor advised funds so I'm not sure why Patreon is doing this when other alternatives are available.

<comment><USER40> I just cancelled my two pledges on Patreon, and migrated them to Liberapay.

The process was surprisingly smooth and easy. We'll see how it works on the long run, but for now Liberapay looks like an excellent alternative. (Also they don't take automatic fees for their own finances; tip is on a voluntary basis).

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> This should be at the top of HN. A tech company just cut the livelihoods of artists and many other important groups of people all over an artificial fee. This is disgusting and I hope a competitor beats them out ASAP.

<comment><USER42> It is both outrageous and unsurprising. This is how these companies ("tech" startups) are incentivized to operate. It is awful to watch this cycle happen over and over and over.

<comment><USER43> It also smells like another example of how taking VC money is going to ruin a startup that could otherwise have grown organically.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Let's run the numbers: [https://blog.patreon.com/updating-patreons-fee- structure/](https://blog.patreon.com/updating-patreons-fee-structure/)

For a $1 pledge: previously creators took home 85c at least, so Patreon was maxed out at 15c. Now they will charge the patron 37.9 cents and the creator an additional 5c. So now they are maxed out at 42.9c. If 15c was enough to break even this means 27.9c of pure profit. That's a _very_ nice profit rate! (The rent seeking is too damn high.)

Let's presume patrons decrease their patronage so they pay the same as before, so if they paid x before now they pay 1.029y+0.35=x ==> .97x-0.34. The patron takes home 95% of this, .92x-0.32 Previously they took home at least .85x. So we are looking at 0.07x=0.32 ===> 4.57

So if you were pledging below 4.5USD (let's be realistic: 5 USD, noone pledges cents, not sure the platform lets you) and drop your pledge such that Patreon charges you the same, then this hurts your creator. And many won't react rationally and do the .97x-0.34 calculation, just cancel because hot damn, did a company I authorized to charge me X amounts just unilaterally decided to charge me more without proper clear notice (I just checked my home page and I do not see a big read warning this month I will be paying more either on the home page or the pledges page.)

Oh and many creators have various perks at 5USD which now they need to drop to 4.52 USD (again, does the platform allow for cents?) and encourage their patrons to drop to that level. Patrons in this case pay 5 USD still and the creator takes home 4.29. Previously, the creator took home 4.25-4.65.

</comment><comment><USER45> I can't really make sense of that article:

>That changes on December 18, when patrons will start paying 2.9% plus 35 cents for each individual pledge

Then:

>With this update, creators will now take home exactly 95% of each pledge with no additional fees

Suppose you're donating $1, the .35 fixed "service fee" alone is 35% of the pledge, not even counting the 2.9% variable amount. I don't understand how they end up with the 95% figure.

<comment><USER46> Previously: patron pledges $1, patron pays $1, creator ends up with some amount significantly less than $1, depending on all the fees.

Soon: patron pledges $1, patron pays $1.38, creator ends up with $0.95.

<comment><USER45> Is it a common scheme? It seems super misleading to do it that way, why have a percentage fee on both sides? "I pledge $x, I end up paying more and the creator ends up receiving less".

<comment><USER47> i'm not defending patreon here, but it is pretty normal.

Even the state takes both income tax and sales tax.

<comment><USER43> Not including taxes in the prices is a US thing only.

Most other countries have sane regulation that foster competition and transparency.

<comment><USER47> I know, I'm German after all and pay mehrwertsteuer on everything.

But wherever it is listed directly up front or not doesn't change the fact that the state takes money on both sides. When you're earning it and when you're using it.

The actual tax in Germany is about 50 %, it's just hidden in several smaller percentages

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> For those considering an alternative to Patreon, I have a self-hosted, open source payment platform that takes one-time and recurring donations via Stripe:

[https://github.com/sircmpwn/fosspay](https://github.com/sircmpwn/fosspay)

I offer this to my supporters in addition to my Patreon page.

[https://drewdevault.com/donate](https://drewdevault.com/donate)

[https://patreon.com/sircmpwn](https://patreon.com/sircmpwn)

<comment><USER49> That doesn't provide the benefit of batching, though. (Of course, now neither does Patreon.)

Have you considered putting up a hosted version that batches Stripe charges?

<comment><USER48> I hadn't, no. That sounds like a good idea.

<comment><USER50> If you accept money on behalf of creators, you probably need some kind of financial service provider license.

Handling chargebacks+fees might be a bit annoying as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Lots of people unsubscribing apparently, screencap: [https://twitter.com/lazygamereviews/status/93884540533643673...](https://twitter.com/lazygamereviews/status/938845405336436736)

<comment><USER31> I just did. I hope others do as well.

<comment><USER52> This sucks because I'm tempted to do it as well, but this means that I can't support the content creators that I like.

I really hope that a better alternative comes soon. I've seen a lot of people using [https://ko-fi.com/](https://ko-fi.com/) (and I've used it to donate to them a few times), but it's not exactly the same.

<comment><USER53> Creators won't bother to find alternative platforms until the users leave the harmful dominant one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Wow. I only have a pile of $1 pledges right now, and this will significantly increase my bill for almost no gain for the people I'm supporting.

<comment><USER41> Exactly no gain if I'm understanding it.

<comment><USER55> Well, the analyses that I'm seeing suggest they'll see about $0.05 more per pledge. So, not "no gain", but very little gain, and almost certainly some cost as patrons leave the service over the price increase.

<comment><USER41> Can you detail that math? I've seen math thrown around all over this thread, much of it contradicting. To me, this seems completely negative:

Before: 7-15% net fees - $100 = $93 or $85 dollars

Now: 8%+ net fees with near 30% fees for $1 and 10% fees for $10

That math is using net fees when considering the amount the patron pays vs the person gets. Patreon is pulling some shady math by pretending that the patron isn't paying the original fees as part of the total amount.

To me, it looks like for nearly all cases, fees are going to increase. I would revise my statement to "loss, not gain", even if all patrons stay on the service.

<comment><USER55> Sorry, I should have worded that more precisely. I was basing it on this: [https://twitter.com/wombatoverlord/status/938849760198447104](https://twitter.com/wombatoverlord/status/938849760198447104) and various pieces I've read by creators. It looks like creators were averaging around 89% in net fees previously, where they will now be averaging 95%. So, ~$0.05 more on a $1 pledge.

<comment><USER41> The problem is that that $1 pledge is no longer just $1. It's bait and switch math.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> It is definitely a money grab. They're even making it so that you can't use your patreon balance to pay other creators, ensuring you'll need to pay their "service fee"

[https://twitter.com/zandravandra/status/938897708286390272](https://twitter.com/zandravandra/status/938897708286390272)

</comment><comment><USER57> Another perfectly good startup killed by the dreams of grandeur of silicon valley investors.

Not everybody company is supposed to be the next Google, guys.

</comment><comment><USER58> I was considering Patreon for some stuff I planned to publish in somewhat distant future, but now this makes me suspicious. On such a platform I'd rather want to have numerous people that give me $1 monthly rather that a bunch that pays some three-figure sum, should I want to live off those pledges. If a $1 pledger decided to not support me anymore, I wouldn't have lost a big part of my income, but if instead someone who paid $100 or $200 decided to stop paying, that'd be a big change. I'd actually prefer to not allow people pay me more than $10 or 20 to not allow that kind of thing happen, and to not allow myself to have the illusion thereof.

As far as I understand, this new scheme will punish the kind of pledger that I said above I'd prefer: who pledges a couple $ or so. If I want to pledge $10 monthly, I'd better give it to a single creator than to 5-10 creators. In this case as a potential creator I'd be happier with a bigger cut from what I receive in expense of free payments on the patron's side.

</comment><comment><USER59> Don't Visa/MC frown on pushing CC fees on to consumers? And why now? Is it simply a cash grab or did their payment processor ask Patreon to change their tune?

<comment><USER60> I believe the general rule is that merchants can't charge customers more for CC payments than they do for cash payments. I assume Patreon doesn't take cash payments, so there's no issue there.

<comment><USER61> That used to be the case, but it certainly isn't anymore. 95% of gas stations in Los Angeles have a separate, lower, price per gallon for cash.

<comment><USER8> Providing discounts for cash, as gas stations do, was legal prior to 2013 (and remains legal to this day). In 2013, charging customers a clearly-notified fee for accepting credit cards was authorized for all merchants; most simply choose not to.

<comment><USER62> > In 2013, charging customers a clearly-notified fee for accepting credit > cards was authorized for all merchants; most simply choose not to.

The federal ban on charging fees was lifted, but many states (including New York and California) also still outlaw this at the state level.

In addition, merchant agreements often prohibit it - for example, merchants that take American Express cannot charge fees for any transactions, even the ones that run on Visa or Mastercard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> Flattr is making the most out of the situation :) [https://blog.flattr.net/2017/12/patreon- fees/](https://blog.flattr.net/2017/12/patreon-fees/)

<comment><USER64> "We still think Patreon is a great solution for creators, but they now seem to be less about supporting creators plural, and more about supporting a creator singular (or perhaps one or two creators)"

Does anyone know what they're talking about with the "or perhaps one or two creators" part?

<comment><USER55> With the fee change, if you have a budget of, say, $15 to spend on creators on Patreon, it makes sense to split that into as few pledges as possible to minimize the number of times you pay the fees.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> This is doubly weird because Patreon only charges users once per month, so they are really only paying one transaction fee per user. They also charge VAT for european pledgers, already bringing up the pledge amount by 25%.

</comment><comment><USER66> Wasn't there something recently about Patreon having problems (legal/regulatory) with the way they were bundling all the contributions for a user and only submitting a single card/processor transaction for the total?

If so, that might explain why they want to effectively unbundle everything again, even if it makes everything worse for everyone.

The marketing-weasel language of their "robust question and answer page"[1] is a little hard to take regardless of actual reason though.

[1] [https://patreon.zendesk.com/hc/en- us/articles/115005631963-W...](https://patreon.zendesk.com/hc/en- us/articles/115005631963-What-does-Patreon-s-service-fee-mean-for-me-)

<comment><USER67> Do you recall which rule/law required unbundling of charges?

<comment><USER68> This is most likely due to EU's new PSD2 regulations (see [https://stripe.com/connect/eu-guide](https://stripe.com/connect/eu-guide))

<comment><USER69> If you ride the guide in its entirety (or the text of the PSD2 at [http://eur- lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX...](http://eur- lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:32015L2366&from=EN)), you would see that one-to-many transactions are fine under the PSD2 regulations.

The most likely reason for the change in fee structures is that Patreon simply needs to charge more money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm fine with them taking 2.9% (although I'm sure their volume lets them get a discount below that), but $0.35 per PLEDGE is lunacy. They don't make individual charges for each pledge.

</comment><comment><USER70> I think this is more psychologically jarring than financially jarring. It's like if Amazon turned around and said, we're making Prime free, but it's a flat 25 cents for your previously free delivery. Doesn't _sound_ a lot, but that's a psychological barrier that'll pop up every time when you're about to order something.

Consumers _really_ love knowing up front what they're committing to pay. Adding extra charges on is not going to help at all with adoption.

</comment><comment><USER71> "Concern" nothing. I've already lost enough patrons on the campaign that supports a side project to eat up a sizable portion of the supposed benefit to me.

<comment><USER71> It's now up to _twice_ what the benefit would have been in lost Patrons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think patreon should be way more precise to how much is going to the creator and how much they take when you make a pledge.

When I pledge 1$ to some creator, I was unsure whether the creator would get the whole money and I would pay fees in addition, or if patreon would take the fee on those 1$.

<comment><USER72> Well, that's not at all unusual, 99.9% of credit card transactions you don't know the fee the merchant is paying.

<comment><USER7> I mean they should at least say how much the creator will receive, and how much he won't (patreon fees + credit card fees, I don't care about the details).

<comment><USER72> Once again, when you donate to an charity or buy a product from the shelf you don't know how much the charity or retailer would receive when you pay with a credit card.

Not unusual.

When you check out in Walmart how much is the fee Walmart pays? You have (basically) no idea.

<comment><USER7> Of course not, but it depends if you consider that you're paying the creator, and that the platform is just an intermediate, or if you're paying the platform for a service and they pay the creator with their revenue. If they're just an intermediate and I want to pledge 1$ to the creator, I expect that he will receive 1$, and if not, I want to know how much I need to give in order that he does.

And you're wrong about NGOs, usually they do provide how your money will be used, what is the amount of money that will go for their internal costs, and what will be used really for charity. I wouldn't absolutely not give to a charity that would not provide me those details.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> Oh, closed systems will use their semi-monopoly position to raise prices? Who would have thought ...

</comment><comment><USER67> Is there a viable alternative to Patreon?

<comment><USER28> Kickstarter's got one, but it's invite-only right now. [https://d.rip](https://d.rip) \- I could find no sign of their fee structure anywhere on the site. There's also [https://liberapay.com](https://liberapay.com) \- a non-profit Patreon clone, whose code is public. You _may_ have to be creating open source content, I'm not sure. Seems to pay weekly, does not take any cut themselves (?!?!?).

<comment><USER40> I just migrated my two Patreon pledges to Liberapay, and it worked surprisingly well. You decide how often you want them to charge you—and then they re-distribute the money on a per-week or per-month basis to creators.

So you can choose to be charged every month (and have ~2% of banking fees), or to provide money for the next 3 months (and the banking fee will be less). Money will be redistributed to creators once a week (or once a month) anyway.

Plus they only charge banking fees, nothing for themselves (tip is voluntary).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> I was sending a favorite podcast of mine (It's Just Banter) $1 a month. But with a 35 cent fee to send 1 dollar, it seemed crazy, so i cancelled it. I'll find another way to support TC and Jake.

</comment><comment><USER75> Ok, as someone who pledges a few dollars to many creators, this sucks. I also haven't seen any big improvements to their platform featurewise; I've been repeatedly asking for email digests since they took over Subabble and they keep replying with, "Great idea. We'll pass it along." So no idea what they need more money for. I'll probably be stopping my pledges after trying to discuss this with the creators I support (and Patreon but they probably won't say much).

</comment><comment><USER76> Greedy Patreon.com, I already deleted my account.

You need to send an email to: email@example.com

<comment><USER77> Or just click disable in the dashboard. Pretty easy, actually.

<comment><USER76> Thanks! It seems that this option only shows up in the desktop version and not in the mobile version!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> Hold up, they take one charge on my PayPal and if I understand this correctly, they are going to charge me for each of my pledges?

So, 4 x $1 pledges that are taken as one charge will now cost me $5.52 ($1 + $0.35 + $0.03) * 4))?

<comment><USER79> Yes. They only charge you once, though. So the extra fees aren't payment processor fees anymore and they pocket the rest. Calculate the differential on the paypal transaction fee and you'll arrive at patreon making some sweet percentages.

Patreon used to have PayPal charges 5% + $0.05. So let's presume they're paying the same.

They charge you once for $5.52. Paypal gets $0.326 + $0.05 out of it. $3.80 goes to creators. Instead of Patreon making $0.20, they now make $1.344.

Yes, you read that right, Patreon is making $1.344. ~35% profit margin vs 5% off your donation. They've multiplied their cut several times over.

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> YouTube, now is a great opportunity to integrate your own patronage system (or even a simple per-video or per-channel donate button)!

</comment><comment><USER81> This is why I have been skeptical of Patreon as a revenue source for working artists. I don't like the whole copyright regime and would drastically alter it, but the basic idea of a fungible copyright is a lot more bankable than renting a tin cup from a monopoly provider. Not hating on Patreon which I admire in general, but a single provider is undesirable compared to federated micropayments.

</comment><comment><USER82> So assuming this is yet another VC-funded firm being pushed to only go after "whales" and cull undesirables... Who are the whales, and who are the undesirables? My tinfoil hat says adult art is made up of more/smaller pledges and they're hoping this will run them off the service. That's typically why companies do this.

</comment><comment><USER14> Great summary of the math from reddit: [https://www.reddit.com/r/patreon/comments/7i2kqd/patreon_wil...](https://www.reddit.com/r/patreon/comments/7i2kqd/patreon_will_start_charging_patrons_a_credit_card/dqvrb9d/)

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm fairly sure this is tied to anti-money laundering rules (but would be happy to be corrected). Basically, if Patreon bundled patron payments and then paid them out to creators, it could be construed as transaction laundering.

The basic problem is that it would be cheaper for everybody involved if Patreon would charge each patron a bundled amount for all their supported campaigns, and then pay out to each creator everyone's support to them. This means that there are N + M transactions, where N is number of patrons and M is number of creators. However, due to a myriad of rules, they actually need to pay out N * M transaction fees, because each patron's contributions will be going more or less directly to each creator (minus Patreon's cut of course). The extra fees more accurately represent the cost of doing business with credit cards.

This article explains the AML rules in this area: [https://www.trulioo.com/blog/transaction-laundering-a- growin...](https://www.trulioo.com/blog/transaction-laundering-a-growing- threat-to-the-payments-ecosystem/)

<comment><USER83> > I'm fairly sure this is tied to anti-money laundering rules (but would be > happy to be corrected). Basically, if Patreon bundled patron payments and > then paid them out to creators, it could be construed as transaction > laundering.

I doubt this. If I buy 10 1 euro iPhone apps in a day, Apple will charge me $10, in one transaction, then eventually pay out a euro less their fees to each developer. I don't really see why this would be different.

<comment><USER9> These are recurring payments which might be treated differently.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER84> Setting themselves up for a fall with all the recent rules and fees they're adding.

</comment><comment> Paul-ish I wonder if this change has anything to do with the median number of creators the typical Patreon users supports. A lot of angry people here sound like power users, but that might not representative of the overall userbase.

</comment><comment><USER85> Why is someone as big as Patreon paying 2.9% + 35 cents? Even stripe should be able to do better than that?

<comment><USER77> They're not, thats the point. They say in their FAQ their stripe rate is 1.9%

</comment></comment><comment><USER86> Duplicate: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15869233](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15869233)

Though this one seems to have gotten more attention.

</comment><comment><USER87> It's actually not about new fees. They are adjusting fees in a funny way, but it's all about trying to make their freemium assumptions work. Most creators are using Patreon to enable a partly-gratis partly-paywalled business model. None of this would have come about if it were just about donating to creators you like.

[https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/market-research/other- crowdfundi...](https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/market-research/other- crowdfunding#fn5)

</comment><comment><USER88> I really thought this is a space where crypto currencies should shine. Is there an established base of people that take a crypto currency. BTC is no longer useful for this, but something must be.

<comment><USER89> Except don't most crypto currencies have transaction fees as well? Ones which can be far, far more than credit card ones (See: Valve dropping BTC from Steam).

</comment></comment><comment><USER90> Five percent is already ridiculous, this is just getting greedy.

You would think YouTube would finally eat their lunch here but then the CEO over there can't even update her own recently launched channel so fat chance.

<comment><USER46> The problem is that google (or alphabet) is just catastrophically bad at most customer relationships (except for ad buyers, though even then it's iffy). They treat all the content creators on youtube like users instead of customers. And they don't care about building a platform, ecosystem, community, etc. that supports the creators, they're willing to just let things flap in the wind and hope for the best.

</comment></comment><comment><USER91> We used to run a marketplace for designers and one of the things we learned (too late) was to charge more. Pick a number, double it, and you are still probably not charging enough. You can't run a service on dog food forever.

Sure Patreon raised funds, but those funds can't subsidize them for a lifetime, they gotta get sustainable and do it fast. There is not a chance they will be wasting time to build their own credit-card processing, so Stripe fees are here to stay.

Although contributors are important, Patreon would have nothing without their creators. Creators make the content which people pay for, and creators need to put food on the table to keep doing what they are doing.

If you are a creator making $2,000 a month, for example, then an extra $100 is an extra trip to the grocery store, and that's important. If someone wants to fund a creator, they will, and the extra couple of bucks isn't going to discourage that.

Furthermore, I suspect Patreon has data on how much is being contributed by each user. I doubt, like the top comment suggest, that 1 person on the platform would fund 100 creatives. Probably 1:3 ratio, with a couple of outliers, is most likely.

This is a good change.

p.s. If they don't have it yet, expect Patreon to start partnering with places like Teespring to offer merch by their creators. It just makes sense.

<comment><USER55> > If someone wants to fund a creator, they will, and the extra couple of bucks > isn't going to discourage that.

I'm explicitly hearing the opposite from creators on Twitter. People are already seeing patrons defecting from projects over this.

<comment><USER91> Like Jason Lemkin said, the customer who churned is the customer you've never had.

<comment><USER92> Well, small problem with that - words have meanings. They were a customer, in that they were giving Patreon money. Now they are not a customer. It's not that they were never a customer, because they were giving Patreon money. And now they're not.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Our Living Style Guide (Writing maintainable HTML/CSS) - <AUTHOR> http://info.rjmetrics.com/blog/bid/52753/Our-Living-Style-Guide-Writing-maintainable-HTML-CSS

<comment><USER2> Working on a project with no set style standard, this article does a good job of voicing my frustrations. When tasked with inventing a new piece of the software, each designer, programmer, and manager tends to disregard all previous design decisions and create their own idea of what the project should look like. It's resulted in a totally inconsistent look, each page only bearing a passing semblance of the one before.

But a living style guide is worth nothing if the team members willfully choose to ignore it and pursue their own style agendas (and they are personal agendas, make no mistake). I've implemented some seriously ugly interfaces in the name of consistency, and the project is better for it.

The biggest hurdle is convincing management that this new flashy module simply does not mesh with the rest of the software. Design wants to impress, management is impressed, off to the nerds to implement it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Totally agree here. This is really more of an experiment in self/organizational discipline more than anything else. We all talk so much about how some new technology is going to increase productivity; sometimes it just comes down to hacking the social dynamics of coding.

To your comment about new flashy modules that don't mesh, banks seem to be the biggest transgressors in this area.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm quite sure that facebook would follow a lot of what is being advocated in here, but then css variables get expanded etc to give them 6498 variations.

For the past 5 years or so I've had an average an average of 8 base css files for most projects, normally along the lines of page layout / typography / individual elements in different contexts / interactive elements & their mobile equivalents in separate files then a separate file for each ~type~ of content object within a page, sass gets expanded, then they get minified & cached as one file. Along with saving a hash of their internal paths to prevent the majority of cache misses, I've found this works well (for javascript also) & other than hand-tweaking a couple of homepages or high traffic landing pages haven't had to do much else.

edit: to be clear, the article is great advice but would have you end up with a monolithic common.css, don't do that, there are better alternatives

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm a big fan of style guides, and I plan on advocating their use on any projects that I'm a part of.

They make it easier for full stack devs like me to be productive without having to delegate every small thing to a designer or rely on everything being done up front.

I think others feel similarly. The proliferation of Bootstrap-powered sites proves it.</comment>


Inkscape Version 0.92 is Released - <AUTHOR> https://inkscape.org/en/news/2017/01/04/inkscape-version-092-released/ <comment><USER2> I've always found Inkscape surprisingly easy to use in comparison to other open source tools (like for Gimp for example).

I use it for almost all my diagramming needs (scientific publications/documentation). Closed source tools are almost certainly better in one or more respects. But it's certainly good enough for me, and it makes me feel happy and secure to be using an open source tool.

<comment><USER3> Gimp prefers the absolute most surprising and unexpected behavior given all available options. Krita designers should be hired to redesign Gimp. If Krita support image editing slightly better, I'm pretty sure no one would use Gimp again.

Inkscape is excellent at surfacing options. Even a novice can discover how to use it simply by reading options available at any time.

<comment><USER4> I hear this complaint a lot and it always surprises me. I guess I'm just used to it after using it as my primary raster image editor for more than 15 years.

What is it that's particularly unintuitive?

<comment><USER5> As a user of Gimp of 10+ years and counting, here's some thing that have bitten me several times:

* The multi-window interface. I know you can change this, but there's no good reason for not being the default since the beginning. God help you if you close the layers window and don't know how to bring it back.

* That you cannot _save_ to any format that it's not XCF, but that you have to _export_ to them.

* The sliders to select tool properties, such as brush width. I can slide them (but not all the way from 100 to 0, that requires 6 slides!), I can use the up-down arrows, and I can type a value. But if I want to slide and I click it wrong, I have to enter a number. So now I have to click somewhere else first, and try again. It's frustrating.

* Overlap in functions between different tools. For instance, the perspective tool and the cage tool.

* Fine-tuning a digital tablet. I doubt anyone knows the difference between "screen", "window", and "deactivated".

<comment><USER6> > The sliders to select tool properties, such as brush width. I can slide them > (but not all the way from 100 to 0, that requires 6 slides!)

Sliders are split, so the top slides over the full range and the bottom is for fine adjustments.

<comment><USER7> This is totally not obvious. No visual clue hints at this, except maybe the changing cursor shape, not very helpful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> You can write your own plugins¹ for Inkscape as well. Last year I've had a lot of fun writing a plugin that skews, scales, and rotates objects in Inkscape to create (simple) drawings in the isometric perspective² — have a look at the write-up if you want to find out about basic linear algebraic SVG transformations in Inkscape. SVG is extremely well-suited for such tasks.

1: [https://inkscape.org/en/gallery/%3Dextension/](https://inkscape.org/en/gallery/%3Dextension/)

2: [http://jeroenhoek.nl/articles/svg-and-isometric- projection.h...](http://jeroenhoek.nl/articles/svg-and-isometric- projection.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> Inkscape is amazing. So is Gimp, Blender and many other. All amazing software. I have just one thing that I wonder, why do they all seem to be lacking in the UI department? They all have UIs that look and feel way more clunky than even the cheaper proprietary alternatives. Not complaining, I like them anyway but maybe a more user friendly UI would open up this amazing tool to a broader audience?

<comment><USER10> 1\. It's very very hard to find out what's intuitive, yet powerful to use. Unlike implementing some algorithms, creating a good UI requires feedback from users.

2\. It takes a lot of time and you frequently have to start over once you find out that what you thought works well, doesn't work well for others.

3\. From anecdotical experience, I'd say that user interface design isn't what open source developers are interested in. It's a distraction from what they actually want to work on.

Personally, I find Inkscapes UI okay to use. Blender and Gimp, on the other hand, are a horrible, unintuitive mess. Whenever I need to do some image manipulation, I try to get by with Irfan View and Inkscape (even for raster graphics) as much as possible, just to avoid having to mess around with Gimp.

<comment><USER11> In the case of Blender once you get the hang of it, you'll feel more confortable than with other similar tools that do the same. I would say its kinda like vim.

Also why don't you use Krita?

<comment><USER12> > Also why don't you use Krita?

Because GIMP is for general image & photo manipulation and the product vision for Krita is to be a painting application.

<comment><USER13> I just fund out about Pinta yesterday - and it's a pretty nice alternative for folks who don't like GIMP UI.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> As an impoverished freelancer I've used Inkscape to create lots of illustration that helped put food on the table. I found it easy to use, only occasionally did I need tutorials for a specific task.

I don't really understand the complaints about Inkscape being unintuitive - tools that have lots of options and do complex things will by nature be less intuitive than tools that do simple things. Sometimes you've just got to learn the software to make use of it. I have lots of experience with both Inkscape and Illustrator and I actually like Inkscape more. Illustrator was perfect to me at one point, and it seems like Adobe just kept tweaking endlessly in ways that were detrimental to the product, rather than enhancing it.

</comment><comment><USER15> Inkscape is great! Its PDF+Latex exporting functionality makes it perfect for diagrams in papers, exams, and whatnot. The editing tools are also very nice.

It also edits PDFs, which I found pretty cool! I use it to make airline tickets not take up a full sheet of paper. To be honest, if you export the PDF back out, it jumbles some of the fonts a little, but that's mostly OK.

<comment><USER5> It's even better when you combine it with the command line tools. You can design a template on the GUI, and then customize it and export it via a script.

<comment><USER16> Which command-line tools?

<comment><USER15> type "inkscape --help"

on your command line. It exports things to formats, and you can query information from files.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Inkscape is amazing -- I've used it on and off for over 6 years, and it's never let me down.

Protip: It's PDF import is amazing.. try it.

The only thing I miss is a workable layers functionality.

<comment><USER18> PDF import is really useful if you want to avoid hand writing on forms and save an editable copy of what you've typed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Inkscape is a gem! I'm glad more people seem to know of it than did even 5 years ago. I haven't tried 0.92 yet, but the one problem I have had with it is the macOS version, which requires X11 and has more problems with the window manager than even GIMP. Realistically, it's better to run these programs in a VM on macOS, sadly. On Linux & Windows, it is awesome and I have yet to encounter a circumstance where I couldn't achieve something that could be done in Illustrator.

I find it interesting how people still don't like GIMP. I always suspect people want it to be like Photoshop, but now I don't know. With single window mode, I have virtually no complaints. (beyond the continual lack of CMYK support, which prevents wider adoption)

For those developing Inkscape, I hope you realize that your efforts have helped me professionally, as I have regularly used it to design graphics and icons for web development at my work. Thank you!

<comment><USER20> There is an unofficial build floating around somewhere of a native MacOS Inkscape written against the Cocoa framework rather than X11. That's the one I use. It's an old version though.

<comment><USER21> Here it is:

[https://inkscape.org/en/~su_v/%E2%98%85inkscape- osxmenu-r129...](https://inkscape.org/en/~su_v/%E2%98%85inkscape- osxmenu-r12922-gtk2)

[https://inkscape.org/en/~su_v/%E2%98%85inkscape- osxmenu-r129...](https://inkscape.org/en/~su_v/%E2%98%85inkscape- osxmenu-r12922-gtk3-demo)

The GTK2 and GTK3 versions work about the same for me. The main issue is that double-clicking and/or select-all in certain text boxes will crash the app. Fortunately, Inkscape saves a backup of your work before crashing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Inkscape is used in every Finnish gymnasium (high school). This is due to the new computerized matriculation exams: [https://digabi.fi/tekniikka/ohjelmistot/inkscape/](https://digabi.fi/tekniikka/ohjelmistot/inkscape/)

<comment><USER8> Always refreshing to see schools using free software to teach. Students can keep using Inkscape legally for free after graduation.

<comment><USER22> Similarly when they actually get interested in something and want to play around with it at home. It's just kind of shit when students are pretty much forced to piracy, if they want to learn more about something than is taught in their classes.

<comment><USER23> I love what Autodesk have done with Fusion 360, they made it free for students and tinkerers. It's a brilliant tool and I wish more software manufacturers got on board with programs like this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Inkscape is amazing and I mostly used it for creating 2D graphics for game UI. One of the downsides is X server dependency in MacOS. Look and feel don't match the MacOS' standart look and feel. Keyboard handling and focus issues can be annoying time to time. Also some long awaiting issues like disabling antialiasing for exports are considered as low priority[1]. This prevents designer to export crisp images for 8bit style games.

[1] : [https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/947660](https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/947660)

<comment><USER25> There's inkscape-osxmenu for MacOS[1] (though it was not 100% stable back when I used it a couple years ago).

[1]: [https://code.launchpad.net/~suv- lp/inkscape/osxmenu](https://code.launchpad.net/~suv-lp/inkscape/osxmenu)

<comment><USER21> [https://inkscape.org/en/~su_v/%E2%98%85inkscape- osxmenu-r129...](https://inkscape.org/en/~su_v/%E2%98%85inkscape- osxmenu-r12922-gtk2)

[https://inkscape.org/en/~su_v/%E2%98%85inkscape- osxmenu-r129...](https://inkscape.org/en/~su_v/%E2%98%85inkscape- osxmenu-r12922-gtk3-demo)

The GTK2 and GTK3 versions work about the same for me. The main issue is that double-clicking and/or select-all in certain text boxes will crash the app. Fortunately, Inkscape saves a backup of your work before crashing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> If you're looking fantastic Inkscape tutorials, check out Nick Saporito's YouTube channel. Really great stuff for beginners and pros. [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEQXp_fcqwPcqrzNtWJ1w9w](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEQXp_fcqwPcqrzNtWJ1w9w)

</comment><comment><USER27> Sorry to be that guy, but I always had the impression that Inkscape is way more cumbersome and difficult than it should be. And it seems to me that there is _very_ little progress.

I don't use/need vector graphics editors very much, but I now bought affinity designer. It seems to be way more professional, and is quite affordable (basically in the same price category as Inkscape, at least for me).

<comment><USER28> I don't know why you are downvoted for your opinion, but totally agree that Inkscape is pretty low quality and buggy as well. On the Mac specifically the experience is so 1990s and un-macOS (yeah I know, it's an X app)

I used it for a while for generating SVG files, ended up writing a script that would optimize the crappy files it generated and reduce them 10 to 20 times in some cases. Oh and then there are these odd floating point drifts (coordinate 10 becomes 10.035 etc.). Seems like one of those pieces of software that would be very difficult or impossible to fix.

<comment><USER27> Yes, I also had to create some SVG files during a project for a client and used Inkscape on Windows for that. Then hand-edited all of them, because I wanted to get rid of all the crap before importing them.

I basically just bought Affinity Designer as a knee-jerk reaction because I disliked Inkscape so much.

<comment><USER29> Inkscape adds a bunch of metadata to it's svg's, but also has a "Simple SVG" save-as option, did you try it ?

<comment><USER28> I did try it. Apart from metadata there are two other major problems: it generates a lot of unnecessary attributes with their default values, and also the floating point errors I mentioned. The latter can affect the appearance of your graphics on your screen unfortunately, i.e. a vertical line with X=10 is one thing but X=10.035 is another.

<comment><USER16> Optimized SVG is the one you want.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> [https://github.com/tksh/Pure-Stroke-SVG- Portrait](https://github.com/tksh/Pure-Stroke-SVG-Portrait) I'm an analog illustrator. This is my first digital artwork made with Inkscape 0.91. Drawing with Inkscape is very interesting for me. If Michelangelo lives in our time, his sketches are made with Inkscape I think.

</comment><comment><USER31> First of all I love this app <3

But it has a few problems in terms of usability the major one that would be nice to get addressed at some point is GTK. Getting inkscape to run on macos for instance, requires X11 which creates a really bad integration with MacOs itself. The solution is Qt, probably this is one of those initial decisions that Inkscape devs regret everyday.

Gradients is another example about bad usability, try by yourself to add a new step to the gradient without smashing your keyboard/mouse. Turns out the solution is googling it which gives a solution for that, however you will eventually forget about that since it's non-sense (then repeating the same cycle again).

<comment><USER32> Gtk3 supports macOS natively

<comment> mc- The next version (0.93) will use gtk3 and, hopefully, should feel more "native" in mac os x.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Anyone knows if v0.92 now supports hi-dpi screens? Last version didn't and I couldn't find anything in the release notes.

Otherwise a superb product, in particular if you are on Windows or Linux and you can't run Sketch.

<comment><USER34> That'll require GTK+3 at least. They're still using GTK+2. According to the roadmap it's scheduled for Inkscape 1.4. At the current pace it'll take years to reach 1.4 IMO.

See [http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Roadmap](http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Roadmap)

<comment> mc- Actually, we plan to release 0.93 with gtk3. The current devel version (trunk) already dropped all gtk2 code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This graphic of the Inkscape keyboard layout is useful: [https://openclipart.org/detail/188861/inkscape-keyboard- layo...](https://openclipart.org/detail/188861/inkscape-keyboard-layout-v0484)

<comment><USER8> It could use an update though. I like Ⓜ for the on-screen ruler. It's quite useful if you are drawing plans using physical units of measurement (millimetres etc.).

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Inkscape 0.92 Release Notes:

[http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Release_notes/0.92](http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Release_notes/0.92)

</comment><comment><USER36> This seems like a good opportunity to ask, is there a clear way to export an svg from inkscape for the web? In a lot of applications (for instance with logos on the web) you want to be able to make a selection, reduce it down to a single path represented by a single d attribute, and then be able to copy that off, or save as a file. I did manage to do it by fiddling around by combining/intersecting different shapes, until the output svg got into the right form, then normalizing that with an online tool. But is there a way to do this more easily in Inkscape?

Ideally you could make a selection, and then go to file > export for web, and get a graphical dialogue to allow you to play around with viewBox and other display attributes. Or is there another open-source program that handles this well? Now that SVG seems to be becoming more and more a first class part of the web, this kind of thing would be very useful.

<comment><USER35> It's even simpler than that. Ctrl-A (select all), Ctrl-K (Path->Combine).

The catch is that if you're using objects, they will be converted to paths (curves) and you'll lose useful things like fill, rounded corners, gradients... If you think about it, what you're asking only makes sense for very simple drawings - only those can be represented by a single path.

<comment><USER36> Ah, thanks for confirming, pretty certain that is what I ended up doing. If I recall, this did still have other issues, for instance handling scaling and origin was difficult, and also I think all the points had 10 decimal places unnecessarily. I needed to use web tools to get it into the right shape, although part of this may be that I was getting my head around the difficulties of how SVG works on the web, using viewBox rather than height/width attributes and so on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> There's a handy YouTube video covering various improvements:

[https://youtu.be/EI1hxXt9U4c](https://youtu.be/EI1hxXt9U4c)

I had to pause it quite a bit, but the demonstrations are nice to skim.

</comment><comment><USER38> While on the topic of Inkscape. I've been wanting to post this for the programmer/gamer crowd. At one point I was able to do vector scans & then go in an fill them. I had a lot of interest from German gamer crowd, whom liked the backdrops. However, Inkscape no longer allowed this. Adobe followed with something similar (plug-in)- D3.js(code).Do to heavy memory use this would make a good isolated app. Here is an example . . [http://i.imgur.com/20W2UBd.png?1](http://i.imgur.com/20W2UBd.png?1)

</comment><comment><USER39> Inkscape is one of my favorite tools when I am creating slideshows. Sometimes I rely on Jessyink, when I want to use some zooming slides (like Prezi does), sometimes I use it to create visually complex slides that I include in presentations created with other tools (e.g. title slides to include in beamer, out diagrams in LibreOffice Impress - the later works, but it's so ugly I prefer Inkscape).

What I like most is the abundance of alignment tools Inkscape provides: it is really easy to produce slides that use the space in a well balanced way!

</comment><comment><USER40> Here is discussion on the effort to move Inkscape to GitHub: [https://github.com/inkscape/inkscape/wiki/Migrate- Launchpad-...](https://github.com/inkscape/inkscape/wiki/Migrate-Launchpad-to- GitHub-%5BDRAFT%5D)

</comment><comment><USER41> Are there any open-source Inkscape "libraries" of, what can only be said to be, clipart out there?

I'm looking for ways to diagram Neural Networks. It would be great if there were some 'NN clipart' from which I could just drag-n-drop stuff.

<comment><USER37> Search wikipedia.org and openclipart.org.

<comment><USER42> There's an openclipart.org browser built in, File > Import Clip Art ..., but I'd use your web browser, it's much better UX.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I've given up on using Inkscape on my Mac, but I am stuck with OS X for a while. Are there any other vector graphics programs that are cross platform and not too expensive? I don't want to invest in learning an OS X only tool.

<comment><USER44> Affinity Designer. I've played with it some but I can't get past a few UI choices that are Just Plain Wrong to someone like me who's spent about fifteen years using Illustrator.

<comment><USER43> Thanks, I will check that out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Any suggestions for finding free/non-pirated vector images online?

<comment><USER17> I end up using images.google.com with the query:

<keyword> ext:svg

This usually finds me good options, many from wikimedia etc, which are under a open license.

Many times, if you only can find free and open images, but in raster format, use something like vector magic to convert them to SVG.. VM usually does an excellent job with basic handholding.

<comment><USER18> Here's an an example search: [https://www.google.com/search?q=site:wikimedia.org+ext:svg+-...](https://www.google.com/search?q=site:wikimedia.org+ext:svg+-map+-graph&tbm=isch)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I once used inkscape to draw collision geometry for a game! Versatile!

</comment><comment><USER46> I recently began to use inkscape again. I am getting into 3d printing and Inkscape is great for creating .stl/.svg files of text fonts or 2d images.

</comment><comment><USER47> Looks great but not available for Mac users.

<comment><USER48> Yes, it is:

[https://inkscape.org/en/download/mac- os/](https://inkscape.org/en/download/mac-os/)

Uses XQuartz, the platform's X11 emulation.

<comment><USER49> They didn't release new 0.92 packages for Mac and apparently don't plan to.

<comment><USER50> Noooo! are you aware of any third party binaries?

<comment><USER51> There's an inkscape cask for homebrew. You should be able to compile it on your own too.

<comment><USER52> The cask is 0.91, and uses the .dmg file.

I'll subscribe to their dev mailing list and see about volunteering to get the macOS version out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Is it still only 32 bit? The 4 gig ram limitation made some complex processes much slower than they needed to be.

</comment><comment><USER54> I will see if stability improved. At least in Win32, I got pissed off so many times with crashes and hangs.

</comment><comment><USER55> Having used Inkscape and Adobe Illustrator at different times, I'd stick with illustrator any day.

</comment><comment><USER56> Sometime between 0.42 and 0.91 the PDF export for very narrow lines ceased to function correctly.

I have to keep old versions around in order to produce cut lines for my laser.

Very disappoint. Perhaps 0.92 fixes.

</comment><comment><USER57> Love Inkscape</comment>


A Gentle Intro to MVC - <AUTHOR> http://nemetral.net/2008/07/31/a-gentle-introduction-to-mvc-part-1/

<comment><USER2> I think its great that webapps have borrowed some concepts from MVC. But people should understand that this new thing should be called something like "web_mvc" or less glamourous "web_page_shared_nothing_mvc".

Separation of code and componentized page rendering are well done by web frameworks which call themselves MVC, but are leaving a lot on the table from the original use of the pattern.

The original MVC had models, views, and controllers living independent life cycles. These objects used events and inversion of control to bind and inject themselves into one another. Far more interesting than web_mvc which basically spins up a bunch of objects, renders a page and throws everything away until the next request. The closest thing web frameworks have to original MVC lives in projects like seaside and lift.

</comment><comment><USER3> This article makes me nervous. The author freely admits to a gaping security hole in part 3 of the article. Instead of fixing the code, the author just added an annotation. I just know that someone inexperienced in the ways of PHP is going to copy and paste that code without reading everything thoroughly. I understand the author was trying to keep things simple, but it's irresponsible in my opinion.</comment>


Life may be getting better at evolving - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20170301-life-may-actually-be-getting-better-at-evolving <comment><USER2> This "meta game" was my absolute favorite epiphany as a biology undergrad! Genomes evolve in ways that allow beneficial mutations in the future-- And genes aren't so much randomly scattered in chromosomes as much as they are grouped in ways that maximize useful insertions/deletions/frameshifts.

Evolution has its hands on so many different biological processes, including itself. Nature is astounding.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, even evolution is evolving. We like to think of ourselves as highly evolved, but honestly, we're still extremely primitive compared to what life could be given another two or three billion years to play out.

<comment><USER4> Unfortunately life does not have that long [1]. A billion years at best.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future#Fut...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future#Future_of_the_Earth.2C_the_Solar_System_and_the_Universe)

<comment><USER3> You're presuming that life doesn't evolve to the point where it can escape this planet and move to other ones.

Even if we have a horrible nuclear war that kills all humans it will only take 100-200 million years for another highly intelligent species to come back and take over again. We've got around five kicks at the can before it's too late.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The reverse happens as well. Consider DNA repair. Evolution requires a certain level of mutation in order to work. If a species evolves perfect DNA repair mechanisms, then it will stop evolving and eventually go extinct.

However on an individual level, DNA repair is highly selected for. Any individual with lower mutation rates is much less likely to die of cancer. Much less likely to have offspring with harmful genetic disorders. After all, the vast majority of mutations are either neutral or harmful, not beneficial. So individuals with the repair gene will tend to have more successful offspring than organisms without, and the frequency of the gene will increase.

Most genes that could improve evolution itself are not selected for. Individual fitness matters, not group fitness.

There are other ways evolution hurts itself. For instance there is a condition in mice that lives on the male chromosome. It causes all of it's offspring to be male. So all of them also carry this condition. Thus the condition spreads itself twice as much as the competing genes. And so it quickly fixes itself in the population and then there are no more females.

<comment><USER6> D. radiodurans has evolved something close to 'perfect DNA repair mechanisms' without becoming extinct [1] I would say the heightened risk of extinction relies on the assumption that the environment will change and the organism will not be able to adapt (without mutations). But for many bacteria, that seems unlikely to occur.

1: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinococcus_radiodurans#Ionizi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinococcus_radiodurans#Ionizing- radiation_resistance)

<comment><USER7> We've observed in the lab that in bacteria harmful changes in the environment increase the number of mutations.

Further, we've observed that in many cases the mutations tend to be in the genes that are most closely related to the change. That is, if the PH drops to the point it is causing mutations, many bacteria will tend to get those mutations in genes that are likely to increase tolerance for acidity!

Now _that_ is what I call evolved evolvability.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think that with all the medical aids (for instance, glasses), life may actually get worse at evolving.

Unless, of course, you consider those aids as part of the system.

<comment><USER9> I think the same applies to eating.

Since we can eat, we don't have to produce energy using sunlight like plants do.

Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

<comment><USER10> A plant has to collect sunshine for a whole season to produce a couple of fruiting bodies that you can eat in minutes. I'd say heterotrophy wins.

<comment><USER11> Well, if you think that a plant only produces fruits for animals to spread seeds...

<comment><USER10> The ultimate evolutionary strategy: by tasty to a lifeform that has discovered agriculture.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> _" The big challenge for Watson's hypothesis is whether any empirical evidence for it can be found in nature"_

Bit of a sticking point, and what follows is less than convincing. This feels like the biological equivalent of Conformal Cyclic Cosmology; a neat idea, that seems to be pretty disconnected from reality.

</comment><comment><USER13> Do you want shoggoths? Because this is how you wind up with shoggoths.

Seriously though, if the trend of species 'remembering' old genes and becoming more agile in throwing them into the mix continues, could we wind up with monstrous horripilating beasts capable of directing their own morphology? Or as Lovecraft put it,

"It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train—a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter."

<comment><USER14> Probably not. At least, not in "real-time". It makes for good horror and sci- fi, but in reality the energy costs of constantly reforming yourself like that would be, shall we say, _prohibitive_. (Incidentally, at the risk of slight spoilers, this is an issue that is addressed, if slightly obliquely, in Michaelbrent Colling's horror novel _The Loon_.)

There are plenty of organisms that have extremely free body plans that can be altered as they grow, however (notably, most plants and fungi), so it's less of a stretch to imagine a creature that could consciously direct changes in its own morphology over long periods of time- equivalent to how long it would take the new structures to grow _anyway_ , if they were a set part of a normal animal's morphology.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> A similar idea comes from Daniel Dennett: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZefk4gzQt4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZefk4gzQt4)

If we consider cultural (memetic) evolution as a type of evolution, then the answer is YES!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> There is some similarity in the work by Leslie Valiant where he uses an "ecorithm" approach uses computational concepts to explore fundamental mysteries of evolution and the mind. Incidentally, he is the man behind PAC ;) [https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160128-ecorithm- computers-a...](https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160128-ecorithm-computers- and-life/)

</comment><comment><USER7> This was one of the key insights I got from the book "The Plausibility of Life". The authors describe several mechanisms beyond genetics, primarily developmental, that make organisms more evolvable and help improve the odds that random mutations will be at least interesting, rather than immediately fatal.

</comment><comment><USER16> Neat idea. The fulltext is paywalled but one thing I'm curious about is where exactly the "strength of connectivity" would be stored within the chromosome?

</comment><comment><USER17> Except for the whole development of science and technology apparently inevitably leading to the destruction of the balance in life's environment thing and its subsequent (temporary?) extinction. Will humans __ever __be able to escape this planet?

<comment><USER18> Probably not, but don't worry. Our ability to destroy the world is greatly exagerated.

I don't think we will even manage to get ourselves extinct, though a great deal of needless suffering is pretty much innevitable at this point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> tl;dr - Computer scientist discovers that selection happens at the organismal level, bringing his understanding of the subject to very nearly what a third year undergrad has.

<comment><USER20> Substantive criticism is always useful, though snarky tldrs generally lack the substance. What points in particular do you find egregious?</comment></comment>


Learn English Vocabulary with Your Turn Game - <AUTHOR> https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=learn.english.vocabulary.game <comment><AUTHOR> Get it for free from Google Play!</comment>