October Update: So That Went Well
Added 2019-11-04 21:43:31 +0000 UTCHey team! Sorry for the slight delay with this update, I've been out of the country and just got back yesterday. (My assumptions that I would get some work done while traveling were, once again, over-optimistic.)
Normies
First off, I should say hi to all the new patrons. What's up?! The new video has been a big success and there are a bunch more of you now. Welcome!
How to Radicalize a Normie is currently on track to be the biggest Alt-Right Playbook so far. The current champion is Always a Bigger Fish, which had a bigger opening, but Radicalize got one of those after-release bumps and has had a longer tail so far. For comparison:
That's the opening two weeks for both videos. So! That is gratifying. I've also gotten some media inquiries; looks like I'll be in a Dutch TV documentary and possibly on Canadian radio in the near future (I'll update y'all as I get more info). Who knows, maybe I'll break through in my own country someday?
Thank you all so much, this channel couldn't possibly do what it's doing these days without your support. You have my deepest gratitude.
Solidarity Lowell
I've mentioned previously that I'll be giving a talk this month in Lowell. I now have actual details! To whit:
Endnote 4: How the Alt-Right is Like an Abusive Relationship
Sunday, November 17th
5:30 PM
Dracut Christ Church United
10 Arlington St.
Dracut, MA 01826
This talk will serve as the next entry to The Alt-Right Playbook, digging into all the research I did for How to Radicalize a Normie, expanding on it, and sharing some of my pet theories. I'm trying to get it filmed, but, barring that, I will record the audio and sync it to my slides in post, and that'll be November's video.
Paying What is Owed
This year has had a wonky release schedule:
January: The Card Says Moops
February: missed
March: Always a Bigger Fish, Origins of Conservatism
April: ~amnesty~
May: missed
June: missed
July: Who Shot Guybrush Threepwood 3, [deleted scenes]
August: missed
September: missed
October: How to Radicalize a Normie
That's six months missed. I ask for April off for personal reasons, and released two videos in both March and July, which leaves us with three missing videos. How to Radicalize a Normie is over 30 minutes, which we traditionally count for two months, so that brings us down to two missing videos. And I already owed you two missing videos from last year, so that brings us back up to four.
I have been allotted 35 minutes (plus Q&A time) for my Solidarity Lowell talk, so that may shave us down to three owed videos, but, then, I'll owe you a new video for December as well. So! This is where Protagony comes in!
(For the new folks: Protagony is a new series of short videos about narrative I've been planning since the summer; think of them like micro Story Beats episodes.)
So far I have two scripts written and have hired an artist to do the thumbnails. I'll be sneaking time to work on them here and there for the next couple weeks, but will go into production properly after the Lowell talk on the 17th. We're knee-deep in the holiday season and I've got more travel ahead of me, so rather than do my usual thing and predict optimistically that I will get four episodes of Protagony online by the end of the year and get ourselves squared up, we're gonna go with "let's see how many I can do before Christmas."
If we spill over into next year before we get things square, I can only hope the videos are good enough that you forgive me.
Revisiting Revisiting Perks
I've been brainstorming for a while on what to do about Patreon perks.
(Again, for the new folks: the site where I kept my video annotations went down a while back and being already way behind on annotations and having to redo all the ones I already did is a major drag, and I also haven't had much to say on the BTS blog for a while, so we've been trying to come up with some new $5 and $10 perks that are less labor-intensive for me, since maintaining the current ones would cut into the time I put into the videos.)
One problem here is that much of the stuff people have suggested doing as perks I'm already doing for everyone, or just for free on Twitter. Folks have suggested things like:
$1: Monthly Updates
$5: Early Access to Videos
$10: See My Research Notes
I've been doing Early Access at $1 since the beginning and my research notes are free on Twitter. I don't feel comfortable moving either behind paywalls after having them accessible for so long. Even these updates aren't gated at a dollar: you can see them if you're pledging anything, even a penny.
But I do have one idea, which is a book club. And I need your help on it.
What I'd like to do is take my research list and go through one book every month and invite people at $5-and-up to join me. We can all read the book the same month and then have a discussion about it. It'll help me keep up on my research and, hopefully, drum up some interesting discussion that will only improve the videos (and, of course, any observations that make it into videos will be credited to the people who made them).
The question is: on what platform?
My ideal would be a dedicated Discord or Slack channel for each book, so people can read at their own pace and we can all just scroll through and see what we missed since last we logged in.
HOWEVER: managing a Discord is probably too much work. If it's a $5 perk, I've got to manually boot everyone who cancels or lowers their pledge, which takes constant monitoring, and, obviously, I've got to moderate the channel itself to make sure it doesn't turn toxic or unproductive. And that's a degree of labor that I can't spare right now, not without cutting into time that should be spent on videos.
We could do the book club as an end-of-month post and discuss the books in comments, but that's less interesting and will probably not foster the same kind of conversation. Alternately, I could do Discord and hire someone to moderate it, which I think could be in the budget, but I might have to give them access to my Patreon to see when pledges get lowered/canceled, and that's a lot of access to be granting an employee.
So I'm a bit stuck on this. What do y'all think? Have you seen any better platforms for book club-y stuff? Maybe a dedicated subreddit? Maybe a means of handling a Discord I'm not thinking of?
Hit me up in the comments.
-I
Comments
FWIW, I think I'd go to 5$ if it meant access to a Discord server / book club.
Manfredi
2019-11-17 11:38:56 +0000 UTCI'm a fairly new Patron ("How to Radicalize a Normie" brought me here, as it seems like it did many others), but I really like the idea of a book club and would likely up my pledge to participate! Discord can be good with the right protections and mod team. I'm fairly knowledgeable about the platform - would be happy to chat or lend more insight if that's the direction you are interested in going! :)
2019-11-10 05:51:38 +0000 UTCDoes Patreon have a way for you to export your data? They *ought to* though I do not know if they do. I would say just do an export of the data each month for your employee and ask them to compare to the previous month's and make the necessary changes. Should be pretty easy with basic Excel skills. I like the bookclub idea a lot. I had to decrease a lot of pledges because I am quitting my job and money will be tight for a while, but once that is resolved I'll move it back up and would definitely join in on that.
AV
2019-11-06 18:32:45 +0000 UTCI am so incredibly excited about the idea of a book club! Unfortunately I both dislike Discord (I find it chaotic and difficult to keep track of conversations) and have no better ideas, though,
Jenlifer Fronester
2019-11-06 02:23:22 +0000 UTCA book club sounds very cool. I probably won't partake simply because I've got so much on, but it sounds like a great perk to offer, especially if it can be offered/managed in a way that doesn't drain your energy but supports the work you are already doing. :)
Kait Hatch
2019-11-05 16:21:21 +0000 UTCI would 100% upgrade my pledge for a book club.
James Maloney
2019-11-05 14:43:52 +0000 UTCI love the book club idea!
2019-11-05 10:57:53 +0000 UTCDoes it automatically remove the role if they adjust/cancel their pledge?
Ian Danskin
2019-11-05 03:36:49 +0000 UTCAccess should be automated - you can create a Patreon reward to give a Discord role, and have channel(s) restricted to people with that role. I have a smaller community so haven't dealt with it on this scale, but it was very easy to set it up to have the roles automatically assigned for me. Moderation can still be a concern, but you should not have to worry about manually tracking people.
2019-11-05 03:29:52 +0000 UTCYeah, it's one reason I pointedly don't want a general Innuendo Studios Discord, just specifically a book club. Easier to tell when people are acting in bad faith, and the $5 gate helps prevent casual raiding. So far I haven't gotten raids on my Patreon itself, so I'm not TOO concerned with the Discord.
Ian Danskin
2019-11-05 00:22:46 +0000 UTCIt does! But you can't set it to only say when a certain tier lowers or cancels pledges. So I would have to forward every single lowered or canceled pledge, which would be a lot of irrelevant data at 1600 patrons. :-/
Ian Danskin
2019-11-05 00:20:18 +0000 UTCI like the idea of a book club, although you need a small core of very motivated people to keep it running, maintaining a constructive discussion mindset and of course mods. I'd be willing to participate and up my pledge, and I can ofc help moderate. I'd just warn you that discords servers can become a serious strain and a huge time sink for creators and I'm pretty sure having trolls or raids is something that will inevitably happen a few times.
Snapping Snapper
2019-11-05 00:18:45 +0000 UTCCongratulations on the success of your latest video!! So happy to hear about it :-)
2019-11-04 23:14:35 +0000 UTCDoes Patreon send out email notifications of any lowered / cancelled pledges? If so, you could just install a filter in your email client of choice to forward those specific emails automatically to whoevers moderating the Discord. Which, I'm sure people in the community would be happy to help moderate. :)
2019-11-04 23:07:20 +0000 UTCI'd like to volunteer my time to help you with any of these ideas, if it gets your workload down a bit.
2019-11-04 22:30:46 +0000 UTCYou could probably still use slack for this—the discussion prompts would be posted in the main channel and people would be able to create threads as they saw fit. I’m not quite sure if permissions allow posting to be restricted while allowing for posts in threads but it’s at the very least a convenient, free, and searchable option (I think searchability for any platform is key but especially a political theory bookclub—I want to be able to back and see who said the cool thing that stuck with me for days!)
2019-11-04 22:22:14 +0000 UTCAlso while I’m sad the annotated videos are (more permanently) going away, but I get why you’re doing it. Hopefully this gives you more time to get caught up and, more importantly, take care of yourself and what not. Sending you good vibes!
Will Bower
2019-11-04 22:18:17 +0000 UTCI unfortunately don’t really have any suggestions about a better host for the book club. I just wanted to say that I really like the idea tho! I bought Neoreactionary: A Basilisk because it was in your bib (and cuz it seemed interesting) a while back but have been too busy with school to get through it. So the book club would be a nice excuse to do that, and it would be cool to hear more detailed takes from you (and other patrons) and how you interpret sources/where you get them from and what not, especially as I wanna learn to do the analysis/research you do on my own. So yeah! It has my support
Will Bower
2019-11-04 22:13:32 +0000 UTCps - for what its worth, I've been into the alt right playbook series for a while now, but 'how to radicalize a normie' was definitely what pushed me over the edge to add you on patreon - I'd like to be a bit more detailed on how exactly I think that video was a solid step forward for the content I've seen from you, but I don't have the time to really try to break it down at the moment, so - just rest assured that you're doing some good work and I appreciate it. 😊
matt
2019-11-04 22:10:16 +0000 UTCI'd rather see something in more of a threaded discussion format, rather than a group chat - I'm not sure what solutions are already out there for this. An invite-only subreddit? or maybe your own notabug? Kialo might be nice for a more formal, directed discussion of the pros and cons of claims made by the book read, but I'm not sure you want something so specific.
matt
2019-11-04 22:09:50 +0000 UTCFor the discord thing I don’t know if booting works but you could lock all channels expect like a support role to everyone that That doesn’t have the patron role but you still have to manage the community which could be alot so don’t worry is my phone
Quinn Pollock
2019-11-04 22:05:32 +0000 UTCJust pledged and it's so lovely to see you be so open about all this stuff, thank you! I'm a big fan of the book club idea, and I think it'd be a cool introduction to actual literature to people (like me) that find the whole concept a little daunting. It might be worth looking into what platforms books are available on and in what format ie ebooks, audiobooks etc, and giving people as much time as you can to get their hands on it before the group reading starts. If you can sort a discord without it costing too much or being too much of a security issue then that would be really lovely. Thanks again for the update!
2019-11-04 22:04:02 +0000 UTCI'm not at a high enough pledge level to gain benefit of the book club, but I like the idea and I hope everyone has fun with it. :D And I look forward to seeing the results on respective video's.
Sterling Treadwell
2019-11-04 21:59:18 +0000 UTCI love the book club idea!
Nathan Klassen
2019-11-04 21:57:11 +0000 UTCYeah if this exists it would help greatly Community moderation could work, but it might still be too hands-on until the moderators are totally up to speed
fusorx
2019-11-04 21:52:43 +0000 UTCThanks for the updates. Love the book club idea.
2019-11-04 21:51:19 +0000 UTCPrivate snapchat ??
2019-11-04 21:48:00 +0000 UTCPretty sure Patreon has a Discord integration that would handle the tier-related booting for you automatically. Moderation would still be a thing, though.
Doctor Professor
2019-11-04 21:47:30 +0000 UTC
