Rebel Wisdom – Statement on Patreon
We’ve been following closely the fallout of Patreon’s banning of several creators, especially Sargon of Akkad. What seems clear is that they haven’t been following their own community guidelines and it seems that they are inconsistently applying them against certain people with what appears to be a political motivation.
We are not free speech absolutists, but it’s clear that Patreon is not a safe platform to be exploring difficult and rebellious ideas. We also believe that Sargon has been treated unfairly, with no warnings and no appeal process. We are actively looking for alternatives, but that is proving difficult (details below).
We have also found ourselves in a difficult position. We have worked hard to get to the modest level of Patronage we have so far, and our relationships with our Patrons are far more than just financial transactions, we have personal relationships with many of them and really appreciate the value that these relationships bring to us – to help us with our content and generating ideas through the 1-1 calls and the group calls.
We have a much more complex relationship than many on Patreon that don’t offer this kind of relationship with their Patrons. Community management is something that we are serious about and takes up a lot of our time. Patreon has very good functionality for this, in a way that none of the alternatives seem to at this moment.
We still have some hope that Patreon will learn from this experience and introduce systems and procedures that take the bias and uncertainty out of their actions. However, with every new statement that admits zero error on their part, this seems less and less likely.
Like many other creators, Patronage/Subscription is absolutely central for our plans in growing Rebel Wisdom and making us independent from advertisers. We opened a Subscribestar account a week or two ago but that was immediately frozen as Paypal refused to take payments. Our web designer is working on a subscribe model directly on our website which will hopefully be up soon.
In addition, Jordan Peterson and Dave Rubin have announced that they are working on a Patreon alternative that they say will be up before Xmas.
For now – we will keep our Patreon account open and we would ask any Patrons who are uncomfortable about funding through Patreon to be patient while we work out the best route forward. To contribute directly to our work, you can send donations directly to us on Paypal: info@rebelwisdom.co.uk document.getElementById(‘cloakf6337f9952eb2e0330e2162c1905e35d’).innerHTML = ”; var prefix = ‘ma’ + ‘il’ + ‘to’; var path = ‘hr’ + ‘ef’ + ‘=’; var addyf6337f9952eb2e0330e2162c1905e35d = ‘info’ + ‘@’; addyf6337f9952eb2e0330e2162c1905e35d = addyf6337f9952eb2e0330e2162c1905e35d + ‘rebelwisdom’ + ‘.’ + ‘co’ + ‘.’ + ‘uk’; var addy_textf6337f9952eb2e0330e2162c1905e35d = ‘info’ + ‘@’ + ‘rebelwisdom’ + ‘.’ + ‘co’ + ‘.’ + ‘uk’;document.getElementById(‘cloakf6337f9952eb2e0330e2162c1905e35d’).innerHTML += ‘‘+addy_textf6337f9952eb2e0330e2162c1905e35d+”;
Many thanks and happy Christmas,
Rebel Wisdom (David and Ali)