The team at Patreon, the membership platform for creators, has been building like crazy and is now revealing the result. On Thursday, the company debuted dozens of new features to help creators get discovered, build their community, learn from insights, and more.

Patreon says its roadmap is meant to reflect the core philosophy that today’s internet has failed creators by prioritizing fleeting engagement over genuine community, making it hard for creators to be fairly paid.

“The current version of the web is a failed promise for creators and fandoms. As creators, we can’t even reach our followers on the platforms anymore,” wrote Patreon CEO Jack Conte in an announcement about the new features. “Social media has created mass polarization, addiction, and made it increasingly difficult to build a creative community and business. I refuse to believe that this is the best or only way that the internet can work for creators and fans. I believe it can and should be better,” he added.

Patreon’s changes, however, acknowledge the role that short-form video platforms, like TikTok or Reels, play in helping creators find an audience.

To make that discovery easier, it’s rolling out a feature on iOS called Clips, which will turn creators’ videos into short, shareable clips. These can be downloaded and shared off-platform, as on TikTok, or posted as Patreon’s own short-form post format, known as Quip.

Plus, creators will be able to leverage new tools that offer potential fans more previews of their work.

The tools, which are still in early testing, include suggested video previews, which will pull out the most engaging parts of their paid videos, and another that lets creators quote snippets of their longer written posts into Quips. The video previews can be shown to fans who are weighing whether or not to pay to unlock the content or subscribe to a membership, while the text-based, quote Quips can be shared as previews to the Home feed, offering creators more exposure.

Native video and Quips are also now rolling out to creators of adult (18+) content.

Another significant change in today’s update involves Patreon’s discovery algorithm.

Before, the company’s recommendation systems focused on finding creators similar to those the user already liked, but it tended to favor larger creators. Now, discovery will focus more on comparing a particular post to other posts by topic, craft, style, theme, and other factors. Patreon says this will help to highlight smaller creators, too.

The company is also rolling out several new features designed to deepen fandoms and help make Patreon more of a destination.

The highlight here is a new communities feature called Niches, which allows creators to participate in dedicated, topic-based communities built around specific interests, subcultures, or fandoms. This could help fans discover more of what they like, without needing to dig around the site to find all the different creators focused on the topic at hand.

Patreon will also roll out other tools, like support for Live Q&As on creator livestreams, and tools that let fans make their own profiles. (Those profiles and the communities are now in early testing, while the Live Q&As are now arriving.)

Another set of tools will help creators track their audience and earnings, which can be key to developing a healthy fandom.

Patreon is launching more granular earnings, membership, and growth analytics, with an earnings tab that breaks down earnings by tier and billing cadence. The platform is also adding membership insights, like member counts that show free trials and members in payment retry, plus filters to break down memberships by trial, gift, active, and retrying status.

A revamped version of the Payouts tab will also show creators a complete record of the earnings moving in and out of their account.

Soon, Patreon will also add creator milestones, or key growth moments, to celebrate special moments in terms of the growth of their community.

As part of its longer-term roadmap, Patreon plans to develop security features like anti-AI scraping tools, real-time spam detection, expanded auto-moderation, additional verification measures, and more.

The full list of improvements includes thirty new or revamped features, some of which are still in early testing. Over the next few months, creators should expect to see many more changes arrive, Patreon said.

Meta’s experimental vibe-coding gaming app, Pocket, is now rolling out to everyone in the U.S. The app, which arrived quietly last month in the test market of Brazil, allows people to generate small, interactive games using AI prompts, which are published to a scrollable feed.

Based on Meta’s acqui-hire of the team at the vibe-coded gaming platform Gizmo earlier this year, these games — or “gizmos” as they’re called — respond to touch and the tilt of your phone, play sound effects, and can include clips of your favorite songs.

They can also use photos from your camera roll or access your camera. The resulting games can then be shared on your profile, where others can save them, remix them into other creations, or simply repost them.

The app is the latest example of Meta’s push to make AI creation tools mainstream, following its earlier efforts that included making AI-generated images with its Meta AI app as well as AI videos created with an experimental app called Vibes.

Pocket now joins these and several other standalone mobile applications from Meta in recent months. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has credited the increased output to AI-enabled software development, which makes it faster for the company to test and ship new ideas.

“Earlier this year, we shipped Instagram Instants. We also just launched Forum, a stand-alone Groups app, and Seller, a stand-alone Marketplace app. I expect it to become a lot easier to ship new apps,” he told analysts on July’s earnings call. “So we are planning to build out more ideas and use our recommendation systems to scale them.”

In addition to Instants, Forum, and the Seller app, Meta has shipped an experiment involving AI bedtime stories, and this week, a Meta AI app for Mac.

The lowest prices for TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 end in just a few days, this Friday, August 21 at 11:59 p.m. PT. Once that window closes, your chance to save up to $300 on your pass, or get an even larger discount on group pricing, will come to an end.

If you’ve been circling around Disrupt, then now’s the best time to lock in your pass and start getting ready to join the rest of the startup community gathering in San Francisco from October 13-15 at Moscone West!  

If Disrupt has been on your radar, now is the time to lock in your pass before Friday’s deadline.

TechCrunch Disrupt: Where the startup ecosystem moves forward

Each year, TechCrunch Disrupt brings together more than 10,000 founders, investors, and startup community members, driving innovation forward. And for our event this year, you’ll find a keen focus on building and developing in the AI era across all of our stages of programming. If you want to be on the cutting edge running into 2027, this is the event for you.

And you don’t have to be a founder to get value out of Disrupt. Whether you’re raising capital, scouting investments, hiring talent, launching a startup, or building strategic partnerships, Disrupt puts you in the middle of the conversations shaping what’s next and can help you make the connections that propel your next year of growth.

Here’s just a glimpse of what you gain by attending:

• Actionable insights from founders, operators, and VCs actively building and investing in today’s market. Our agenda features a wide range of topics, curated to focus on insights that lead to action.
• Direct access to investors looking for their next portfolio company and founders seeking the right partners. Plus, you can get AI-powered networking opportunities through our app or take deeper dives through our many Side Events.
• Early visibility into emerging technologies and startups before they break into the mainstream through our Exhibit Hall.
• High-value connections that lead to funding, partnerships, customers, and career opportunities. Disrupt is about growth, both for startups and yourself!

What’s new at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026

Keeping that focus on building companies in the AI era in mind, we have a great slate of new stages and programming to inspire and educate:

• Real World AI Stage: AI is moving beyond the screen and into the physical world. Explore how robotics, autonomous systems, manufacturing, healthcare, and defense are turning AI breakthroughs into real-world products and businesses.
• Smart Money Stage: Follow the money. From fintech to stablecoins to payments, embedded finance, and AI-driven financial services, this stage explores how technology is reshaping the movement of capital.
• Smart Systems Stage: Every AI breakthrough depends on the infrastructure behind it. Discover the innovations in chips, compute, energy, networking, and data centers that will determine the next generation of technology companies.

Our Disrupt, AI, and Builders Stages are also returning this year, and we have excellent speakers joining us across them all: 

You can explore the rest of our extensive speaker lineup right here! 

Don’t miss out on the best TechCrunch Disrupt’s prices!

This is your last chance to save before rates increase, so lock in your pass before Friday, August 21 at 11:59 p.m. PT to get the best prices, whether you’re a student looking to get their introduction to the community or an established investor in search of an untapped opportunity.