What an absurd posture. HN is full of people endlessly harping about the shitty quality of free, ad supported SEO-rigged mill content that sucks, but then a site that allows often hard working creators to ask for very modest donations so that you can view their material is labeled as "exclusive" and implicitly elitist. The people who try to make some money on Patreon don't owe any special favors to children without credit cards or to people in other countries without applicable payment methods at their disposal. They owe themselves a living, and their sponsors a decent presentation, nothing more. There are still plenty of free alternatives out there, instead of harping about one person hoping to earn some money for all the work they put into their videos/creativity.

> an exclusive club

The club is affordable. What makes it exclusive is the intellectual alignment required to unlock the value of the information. Not everyone has that. If you have it, consider joining the club while you are still alive so you can enjoy the benefits of membership and fraternity with people like you. After that brief period expires, the club will be truly exclusive for a long time.

For the donation of a single dollar, you are given access to all of his videos. I would not describe that as "exclusive," although I understand what you are saying.

It was always meant for people to be patrons of someone, like artists were back in the Renaissance. It's simply a way for people to be paid for their work, and what better way than exclusivity? That's basically the same as being able to use software only if it's paid for, like most SaaS these days.

It still beats the other main business model for content creators which is peppering things with ads and SEO spam by a country mile in my opinion.

The club is so exclusive it costs $5.