Note that this wasn't the case in the beginning. It was only at some point that Patreon gave creators that choice - and I believe the default was to hide the earnings (but no the number of patrons).

The good old battle between privacy and transparency! Nothing better to start a heated conversation: Finland publishes all personal taxes https://taxjustice.blogspot.com/2011/11/finland-publishes-al...

"Transparency" is a pretty word, and I like transparency in a lot of things, but not in everything, and I don't think it's good here. I've given my reasons in another comment close to this one:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18468332

Like john_moscow has pointed out, though, that deters people from becoming Patreon creators. It's very normal for people to underestimate the difficulty of what others do or the real worth of their work. Besides that, supporting someone economically in a capitalist environment is giving them your vote for them to continue doing what they're doing. Not voting for them, when you otherwise would, solely because you can see they have some quantity of votes already, disrupts that.

I would like this type of economy to flourish, as it seems like a very viable way to get good economic support for open-source. However, if this is a common occurrence, it seems developers will continue to be better off working on closed-source.

"Fair" is relative.