← What Next: TBD | Tech, power, and the future
What Next: TBD | Tech, power, and the future
Can Patreon Build a Better Internet?
00:34:22
CEO Jack Conte Wants to Try
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Seeking, pushing, optimizing, creating, learning, discovering. At Aramco, we believe in harnessing the power of data to push the limits of what's possible. That's how we deliver reliable energy to millions across the world. Aramco, an integrated energy and chemicals company. Learn more about us@aramco.com
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we all belong outside. We're drawn to nature. Whether it's the recorded sounds of the ocean we doze off to or the succulents that adorn our homes, nature makes all of our lives, well, better. Despite all this, we often go about our busy lives removed from it. But the outdoors is closer than we realize. With Alltrails, you can discover trails nearby and explore. Explore confidently with offline maps and on trail navigation. Download the free app today and make the most of your summer with Alltrails. Hey, it's Lizzie. Two quick notes before we get started. As of today, what next? TBD is moving to one day a week. You'll still hear us in your feed on Fridays, but not on Sundays anymore. If you have been a listener for a while, I want you to know how much we appreciate you and your support of the show and your willingness this to let us do weird stuff like make a meme coin or vibe code a game. My team and I are very grateful. The other heads up is that this episode has some adult language. You've been warned.
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A
Our brains are being melted by the algorithm.
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B
I've always been intrigued by Jack Conte.
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We're lonely and depressed, getting more polarized every day. We're endlessly doom scrolling, bombarded by rage bait. And it's because our experience on the Internet.
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Jack's the CEO of Patreon, and this is from a video he made with the New York Times. In the video, he has this theory of the Internet that you can tell a lot about a tech company by understanding what they optimize for. So I asked him, what is Patreon optimizing for?
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A
Getting creators paid for their labor, number one, long term relationships, number two, and human creation, number three. And I could talk a little bit more about each of those things.
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B
Yeah.
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A
But maybe at the core of it, I don't like what the current Internet is doing to humans or doing to me. I feel like a. I feel like I'm an experiment in a petri dish. And I feel like my limbic system, you know, is getting tested every day, you know, with what is sort of maximally fixating me and grabbing my attention. And I think it's bad for us. It certainly feels bad for me. I'm tired of logging onto the Internet and having it feel like rocket fuel straight into my veins. And I just don't. I just don't buy. What it comes down to is I don't buy that this is the only way to have media and community on the Internet. I think there's gotta be a different way. In fact, I remember when there was a different way. Just a decade ago, the Internet did not feel like this. It felt like a much better place.
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B
You think it felt fun then?
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A
I do. There were elements of it that felt fun 10 years ago, certainly 15 years ago. I remember when my bands first started uploading on the Internet and we were finding our community and finding people and yeah, there were elements of fun to it. I mean, the comment section was a bit gnarlier back then than it is now, but yeah, it was very specifically. The thing about it that was very different for creative people was, um, you could actually reach your followers when you built a subscription base, when you built a follower base and then you posted your next thing, you could reach the people who signed up to see you, and you can't do that anymore. Um, every time you upload something on the Internet now, it feels like putting a coin in a slot machine. And maybe you'll. Maybe you'll reach the people who subscribe to you, and maybe you won't. And it. With that as this sort of system, it's impossible to build a community, it's impossible to build a business as a creative person.
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B
So I think the options there are like, stand on the street corner and play music and busk for your dinner. The tech CEO version of that is you guys release this discovery network to creators on your platform. And I want you to help me understand it, because you've got a home feed which has got posts, newsletters, podcast, videos from people who fans already follow. Their memberships are at the top, but then also free posts, videos, things from recommended creators and communities. I need you to explain to me how that is not another social network.
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A
It certainly. I can totally see why it looks like that. And I know there's a lot of people who, in fact, there's a bunch of creators who are saying, like, hey, is this another social network? I don't talk about it like that. I don't tell our team it's a social network. I'm not saying, let's go copy social media features. I'm in fact, I'm asking our team very specifically to not pull from social media and to not look at social media when we're building at the core of it. If you optimize for watch time, if you optimize for what will somebody click on? What will somebody, um, what. What will a human watch or listen to or read for the longest possible time? You end up with stuff that is highly addictive and stuff that's fixates us and stuff that's bad for our brains versus if you try to pay creative people for their work, or if you invest in people building long term relationships with the people who actually subscribe to see those people, you end up with a very different system. So I actually. Yeah, I. Even if some people call it social media, that's kind of okay with me. The main reason is because at the end of the day, we're trying to get people to be able to build communities and followings and actually be able to reach those people and have conversation with them and actually be able to build a business with them. That's the difference. On Facebook, as a creator, everything is a gambler. Every post. I have no idea how many people I'm gonna reach. I can't make any money on the platform. I don't get paid for my labor as a creator. And on Patreon, we're paying creators billions of dollars a year.
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B
So when you're making these adjustments. Right. Cause this is a shift in terms of what you guys do. Are you thinking about it from the standpoint of how a creator experiences that or how an audience member, a fan, a member of the community engages with that?
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A
I think both. I mean, we have to think about it from the perspective of both sides, from the creator's perspective. I mean, this is sort of where Patreon came from. Right. My whole perspective as a creator myself, you know, the problems are very clear, which I've sort of just outlined.
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B
Yeah.
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And then from a fan's perspective, you know, I think there's also a bunch of problems. The Internet feels addictive. I don't hear from the people that I want to hear from. Like, I miss things that are important to me because even though I've signed up for them, I can't see them in the future. So, yeah, there's a bunch of problems, I think, both from the fan perspective and from the creator perspective. And we definitely think about it from both. Um, I think it's important that we do. One of the things that our creators have told us, you know, very specifically is that like they, they rely on Patreon to be able to. I mean, this is the thing that we've been saying for years and years. They rely on Patreon to be able to reach their most important fans. A creator's most important fans that like 5% of your audience, you know that that wants to go to your show, wants to get your merchandise, wants to listen to every episode, wants to download the course that 5% of your fans is a really important portion of your fans.
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Are they more important than just the sort of spray across the Internet portion, do you think? In the traditional model?
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I think so. As a creator myself, I think so. If I had the opportunity to reach millions of people or I mean, this comes back to the Kevin Kelly thousand true fans theory, right? Like, if I had the opportunity to reach millions of people or find my tribe who really cared for me as a creator, I want to find my tribe who really cares.
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Today on the show, Jack Conti wants to make a better Internet. Is that possible? I'm Lizzie o' Leary and you're listening to what Next tbd, a show about technology, power and how the future will be determined. Stick around
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Foreign.
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- [11:17]
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- [11:52]
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48 million people in the United States are adolescents between the ages of 14 and 24. They're working, parenting, leading, sometimes all at once. I'm balancing work and being a mom at the same time and I'm still on track to graduate with my bachelor's next year. So what do today's young people need to truly thrive?
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Tune in to good things from Lemonada
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Media to hear the six part Thrive series. I first met Jack a few years back at this big Internet conference. I talked to him and his team about how Patreon works and how they want their creators to have these deep connections with audiences to have them go to the live shows, buy their merch. It's a very different vibe than say a sponsored post on Instagram.
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A
Completely different. Yeah. I mean, if you think about the models on Patreon, there are creators with, you know, a few thousand subscribers on Patreon and they make, you know, tens of thousands of dollars a month and. Really? Oh yeah, wow. Yeah, absolutely. I mean there are, there are creators. Yeah, there are, you know, there are creators on Patreon who are making millions of dollars a year. Right. They're making hundreds of thousands of dollars a month. But the bulk of the creators on Patreon, you know, over half of our business, over half of our payments volume, you know, goes to creators who are making, you know, what we call like the sort of middle class creativity. It's, it's creators that are making between $1,000 a month and $30,000 a month. So it's not necessarily the Taylor Swifts of the world. It's not like the biggest creators on the planet. It's this, it's this emerging group of people who are building businesses with, you know, with their thousand, their thousand true fans, with the people that they found that are sort of powering their business and their community.
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Your start into this world is obviously as a musician, but you guys just hit what, $10 billion paid out to creators. That is a lot of money. Talk to me about what you think were the biggest kind of most important points to get you to that place and then what your vision is for the next five years.
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I think maybe the first one is just starting the company. The first one is just saying, hey, the Internet is Going in a direction that I don't like as a creator. I'm being told that I should upload to these platforms and give them my labor for free, and I should do it in exchange for the exposure. Maybe the first step was just like, hey, this is a problem. This is not fair for creative people. Creative people deserve to actually be paid for their work. They are creating value in the world. They are building communities. They are reaching people, you know, who love their work. It's not fair or good for society to not compensate those people for their labor. So kind of, I guess realizing that, building that, getting that out, step one, maybe the next important milestone was building, you know, turning that problem into, like, a professional membership suite. Because one of the things that we realized probably early on, you know, maybe 2017, somewhere around there was. There's this. There's this bifurcation of media on the web now. Like, people are starting to. The web isn't just pure free anymore. Even, you know, Slate has a subscription offering. And, like, different media companies have divided their offering into free and paid. That's not where the Internet was in 2012. Like, everything was free. You know, everything was free back then, but now people are starting to realize, like, wait, why am I. Why should I give away everything? I should be paid for some of my work? And so we built this, you know, essentially this membership system that allowed people to section off a portion of their catalog and have a freemium offering and a premium offering. And that got really big with podcasters and video creators and a whole bunch of creators who are making episodic media and kind of building the CRM and the email system and the professional tool suite, the analytics around that idea of this membership platform. And your second question, though, around, like, what's next? You know, in many ways, I think the journey of Patreon echoes the journey of media. And because essentially, Patreon is like, we're serving small business media companies, right? Like, that's what a creator is. It's a small business media company. They make things for the Internet. And the challenge with that is the same challenge for media companies, same challenge for creators, same challenge for Patreon. Being downstream of Facebook and YouTube and TikTok is a perilous business for creators. It is a dangerous, difficult position to be in to rely on those platforms for traffic, for community, for payments. You know, I won't go so far as to say it's. It's a losing strategy because you still kind of need those companies. That's where the world is. Congregated But I wish that weren't the case. It sucks being downstream of those platforms. It sucks for media companies, it sucks for creators, and it's bad for Patreon too. We don't want to be downstream of those companies. And so, you know, what's the future of Patreon? What's the future for creators on the platform? I want to be able to. I want to be able to have Patreon send those creators, send our creators traffic without needing it from Facebook and Instagram and YouTube. I think if we force creators to rely on those platforms and, um, it's bad for them and it's bad for us.
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I mean, you have lured some big names. Anne Helen Peterson, I believe, Virginia Sol Smith too. Some. Some people who have quite large followings have left other platforms and come to you. Why?
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I think the real reason is because of our values. But I think, you know, we have a lot of the features that a lot of creators who are starting to realize, hey, I want to build a business around my. Around my work. We have a lot of the features that those creators need to be successful.
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Like what?
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Everything from RSS syncing to analytics to free to pay conversion tools, to really good CMS to, you know, a CRM system, to collecting emails of all the people who follow you, to, you know, all that to integrations across other platforms. Like, we have that full suite of tools that creators need. But then I think from a value standpoint, we also, one, do right by creators. And two, I think just the way we handle things on the platform is different than how a lot of companies handle stuff on the platform. We have very specific opinions around what we don't, you know, want on Patreon, you know, and we act on that. So, like, we've taken certain posts down off of Patreon. At times we've had to take creators down because they're outside of our content policy. I hate taking income away from people. I do not want to do that. So we take those decisions very, very seriously. But if someone is spreading hat and, you know, and is, you know, spreading Nazism and using Patreon to do that, I don't. I don't want that. Our team doesn't want that, you know, and we act on those decisions. I think a lot of other platforms
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B
don't help me understand something about the new system, though, because if you're. If your new system is built on people kind of engaging more with their home feed. Right. Doesn't that create an implicit pressure on creators to make more stuff, put more Stuff up there, which is the opposite of being considered.
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A
I don't think it has to do that. I think the current systems that exist have put that pressure on creators because they're trying to maximize for time spent. So I'll tell you exactly how it works. Those systems say we need to maximize the amount of posts, maximize the length of those posts, and, and, and maximize the amount that creators can make those posts on the platform, such that people log in every 20 minutes for new more stuff and spend an extra 10 hours on the platform because every extra hour that people spend on those platforms is extra ad dollars for their business. That is not how Patreon's business model works. We don't get paid if you spend an extra two hours on the platform. In fact, Lizzy, if you ask me, what is time spent on Patreon? What is the average time that a fan spends on Patreon? I don't know. We don't track. Doesn't matter to me. And it doesn't matter our teams. That's what I mean by, like, this is fundamentally a different system and it has different incentives. And I think we should expect to see different, like different things happening because of that.
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I mean, I think what you're talking about here, when we talk about kind of Web 2.0, right, is, is an Internet built on advertising. Google and Facebook, Google and Meta are advertising companies that, that is kind of the backbone of what they do. And what you are talking about is an Internet that kind of got rid of ads that wouldn't have ads. But I think a problem is that consumers also like that they like being served the exact sweater that they're gonna wear because Instagram tracked enough third party data about them that they're gonna serve them the sweater. Like that seems like a really difficult tension in terms of growing audiences on a platform like Patreon.
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A
If consumers like that, then they can go to Instagram. Yeah, I mean, I know, I'm joking, but I'm serious. Like, but you're not. Well, I don't. Okay, so if consumers like that, if fans like that, fine. And, and maybe they'll use those platforms for that experience, if that's what people want. But I think there's some things that you'll be able to get on Patreon that you won't be able to get on those other platforms. And I think it'll, I don't think it'll replace those platforms. I think people will still use the big social media sites, but I think on Patreon, you'll Get, I think what will end up happening because of the way we're running these systems, because of the incentive structures, because of, you know, what we're optimizing for. I think you'll get more intimacy, you'll get more vulnerability. It will feel like smaller spaces. It will feel less like a big open public town square and more like, more, more like, you know, a living room. I think it'll feel more open. I think it'll feel less trolley. I mean, not will feel. It already is feeling this. And the people that are using the product now are already saying this. So that's very intentional on our part. Like we want it to feel that way and I think we can continue to keep it feeling that way even as it scales. Like there's ways that we can create more of a niche feeling and niche communities, you know, in the product that doesn't just kind of feel like the free for all of social media.
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B
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- [26:37]
A
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- [27:11]
B
Let's talk about AI, because that is where I think a lot of these content moderation questions are going. You told Katie Drummond at Wired in an interview that you use ChatGPT that you were super into it. But that was a little while ago. That was six months ago. I'm curious what AI you use now.
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A
I switched from ChatGPT to Claude when the whole DoD thing went down. It was surprisingly easy. I just asked ChatGPT to output text with everything that it knew about me. And I told it, I was like, be very specific and very detailed because I'm going to take this, I'm going to take your output and I'm going to put it into Claude. So just like tell me everything you know. And it wrote me this big long document and I downloaded it and I uploaded it to Claude and then I switched to Claude. And what do I use Claude for? I use it for like it's been really good for health, actually. Nutrition and health. Like I'll ask it what's in a particular food and if it's good for my LDL and stuff like that. It actually gives me good answers.
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B
Is it right?
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So I, because there are hallucinations and judgment issues. If it's like a serious thing, I almost always check a second or third source. And actually one thing that I found is it often sounds very confident and it can make you stop relying on your own judgment. And so what I found is like useful is to not think of it as any sort of authority at all, but to think of it as one person's opinion. And then, you know, you can. I use it as like a starting point and then I'll look things up, you know, online after that. That's how I use it. And yeah, I think it's. I think it's helpful. I like it. I mean, I, if I weren't so angry about how the tech has rolled out I think I'd feel better about it. But the fact that, the fact that pretty much all of these companies have basically used the totality of creator uploaded work without consent, without compensation and without credit, I find really depressing. And, and, and I'm. Yeah, it, it, it, it feels counterproductive to the reason I started Patreon.
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B
It seems very counterproductive to your, your past as an artist.
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A
It, it's. And, and I've looked up my stuff on those models and they'll make a, you know, an image of pomplamoose I used, I prompted Suno to make a song that sounded like my band and it did it, it was like spot on. Sounded like my band. My band hasn't been paid for for that work. We, we never gave our consent to have our music be uploaded into those models. It feels like starting over from zero and.
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B
But you're using it.
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Well, I use Instagram too and I use YouTube too and I pay my taxes, even though I disagree with a lot of what my federal government is doing. You know, I like, I think, I think, yeah, I think we like. It's very like if you wanted to be totally pure, like at this point you'd have to check off the Internet. Like any website you use, any app you use is benefiting from LLMs at this point. Like the code written in a lot of these apps is generated from LLMs. Like we're all using AI at this point. And yes, I mean, I guess I think what you're sort of maybe insinuating that it's hypocritical of me to use
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B
Claude and to saying it's hypocritical. I'm just, I'm just like wondering how you, who have clearly thought about this a lot in terms of artist work and compensation, think through this very thorny problem.
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A
Yeah. So there's another really important thing about it, which is, you know, if you look at, like if you look at this historically, right, you know, the first commercially available synthesizer, the Novacord, which I think came out in the 30s. When that instrument came out, you know, the musicians union, like immediately put a ban on it because they were afraid that it would replace orchestras. And like, you can look back at that and be like, ah, that's really silly. What a silly thing to do to ban the synthesizer. But guess what happened to orchestras over the next hundred years? Like in the 40s, you know, every single one of the top 10 songs on the radio was a recording of an orchestra. And now it's essentially zero. I Hate that thousands of people lost, you know, lost their jobs as professional musicians when synchronized music and, you know, and picture came out with the Vitaphone, you know, when talkies first, you know, sort of came into being in the 20s. I hate that tens of thousands of musicians lost their jobs. But I love the sound effects in Star wars, and I'm glad that there's, like, sound in movies, and I watch movies with sound. I don't know. I guess what I'm saying is, like, I think you're right to point out the tension. And it does feel. Maybe the reason I said hypocritical is because it does feel hypocritical. And, you know, this is the world that we live in. It's a hard place. Now. What's important for artists right now and the reason I'm coming out and saying I use these tools, like, I'm being very deliberate about that and why am I doing that? For a couple of reasons. One, this is one of those moments on the Internet where I feel like the conversations I'm having in private with other artists are very different than the conversations I see happening online. Online, I see this very clear bifurcation and, like, almost like a boycott of all AI tools. But, like, when I talk to my creator friends, they're all using Quad or ChatGPT, or they're using Descript to edit their podcast, or they're using, you know, AI tools to clean up audio. And, like, everybody's using these tools in some capacity to help them. And so anytime I've felt that tension in the past where I'm like, these conversations in private are different than the conversations that are happening online. It makes me want to be one of the first people to just go out online and be like, hey, I'm just going to say what I'm seeing because something feels untrue right now, and I want to be like, I want to be. I want to be a whole person.
- [34:11]
B
You've been very gracious with your time. I just have a couple more questions for you. In your way of living, in your Persona, in the work you do, you are in many ways a sort of anti tech CEO, right? You're like a dad who wears a hat and, you know, makes music. I wonder, though, if you have thought about how and why tech CEOs have become an avatar of so many things that people in this country are frustrated and angry and disgusted with. Like, why do we hate tech CEOs so much?
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A
I mean, a lot of people aim that at me, too. I appreciate your dad in a hat comment, but I get plenty of.
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B
You do.
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A
I'm quite personally familiar with that. Yeah, yeah, of course. Of course I do. Why? Why do we hate tech CEOs? There are so many reasons. There's so many reason. Maybe one main reason. And this is something I've learned, you know, in just going from YouTube creator to being in tech, which I was not something I expected or wanted. It's. It still feels like a, an odd turn in my life. But people in tech think in a very different way than people, I think, in the rest of the world. And it often makes tech people seem just so fucking out of touch with how humans act and what humans want. And I think it stems from like a, a different way of seeing the world, a different way of thinking about the world, a different way of kind of being in the world. Maybe that's one, two is maybe a more forgiving reason. Although I don't mean to be forgiving of tech CEOs, but I think like anytime you are making decisions at that scale, like making decisions with billions of people,
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B
you're.
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You're gonna just. Yeah, you're gonna make decisions that hurt a lot of people. I think a really good example of this is like I remember in 2018 when Facebook made a change to their algorithm and then it was just like years of media layoffs. Like, I remember that. That's right. To, to everybody in the world. You look at that and you're like, this is fucking evil. How could you do this? And I think it's very hard for them to explain themselves in those moments for whatever reason. I mean, I could keep going. There's so many reasons people hate tech
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B
CEOs, and yet you seem to fundamentally optimistic that there is a way to make an Internet that is better.
- [37:58]
A
What are we going to do? Let it be like this. I remember in 2013, I remember pitching Patreon to a bunch of people, pitching Patreon to investors, pitching Patreon to friends. And everybody's like, Jack, nobody's gonna pay for stuff that they can get for free on the Internet. And like, you know, we have a long way to go. I'm not declaring victory. I don't want, you know, it's not an I told you so thing, but like, we've made it. We've made a difference. You know, we've sent $10 billion to creative people. That's $10 billion that would not be in the pockets of creative people had we not been like, you know what, let's fucking try it. Let's try to make something better. Because I don't like the way this is going right now. And I have that same feeling now. I have that same feeling now. I don't like the way the Internet is going. I don't like it as a creator. I don't like posting and having it feel like a slot machine. That fucking sucks. It shouldn't be like that for creative people and for the. For their communities. And so I think it's worth trying something else. And there's gonna be a lot of people along the way who say, jack, that's stupid. Jack, what are you doing? You can't win against TikTok, Jack. You're just copying social media. Jack, it's never gonna work. Fine. People can say that all day long and I don't. Sorry, Lizzie, it sounds like I'm throwing shade at you. I don't mean to be. I'm just saying I'm used to skepticism about these things. And at the end of the day, if you're not gonna try, what are we doing? May as well try.
- [39:37]
B
Jack, thank you for your time.
- [39:39]
A
Thank you, Lizzie.
- [39:42]
B
Jack Conte is the CEO of Patreon. And that is it for our show today. What Next? TBD is produced by Evan Campbell and Patrick Fort. Our show is edited by Paige Osborne, who is the senior supervising producer for what Next and tbd. Mia Lobel is the executive producer of podcasts here at Slate. And TBD is part of the larger what Next family. You can hear an extended version of this interview with Jack on Slate's YouTube channel. Just go there to check it out. All right, we'll be back next week. I'm Lizzie o'. Leary. Thanks for listening.
- [40:28]
A
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- [40:53]
B
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