Patreon laid off their security team
Patreon’s comment on this so far is on their creator Discord, so I can’t link to it, I’m afraid, but this is what one of their team members posted about an hour ago (7:29 PM EST):<p>- - -<p>“As a global platform, Patron will always prioritize the security of our creators&#x27; and customers&#x27; data. As
part of a strategic shift of a portion of our security program, we have parted ways with five employees. We also partner with a number of external organizations to continuously develop our security capabilities and conduct regular security assessments to ensure we meet or exceed the highest industry standards. The changes made this week will have no impact on our ability to continue providing a secure and safe platform for our creators and patrons, including the upcoming adult ID verification requirement.”<p>- - -<p>I have no idea how big their security team is (five may in fact be the entire group they called “the security team”), but I am not convinced that this is necessarily the end of the world for those who use Patreon. I don’t know how much financial data they even store directly (I would assume best practices entail letting their payment processors store actual credit card and bank account numbers, for instance, although I’m aware that may be easier said than done depending on their infrastructure).<p>While I do think Patreon is going to have Issues (tm) due to having accepted so much VC money, it’s not clear to me that these layoffs were forced by their funders—they haven’t accepted any money recently, and I haven’t heard anything that suggests their revenues have been dropping to a point where there’d need to do serious belt-tightening.<p>(Also, to people who seem to think any creator could just slap up “a basic microblog” and get all of Patreon’s functionality, that kind of falls into the “not even wrong” category. Replicating what they do would be a lot of work even for the technically-minded, many creators who use them are <i>not</i> technical, and even if you pull it off, there are things that just literally can’t be duplicated as a solo endeavor: all of your patrons may be supporting multiple creators, not just you; patrons may discover other creators based on who their friends support and who those they support are supporting; creators who support other creators just have those charges automatically deducted from their earnings; etc.)