The membership Scratch is adding to their website is very faulty and unfair, and it may lead to more bans or even people quitting, which is bad for the website and its members. I believe you should make it more fair, or scrap the membership entirely.
Here are some issues from the membership:
Exclusive sprite packs: How are you going to stop people from giving the sprite packs out? Are the sprite packs going to be available on a separate website, or will they be marked with a special label? People will find some way to give these out for free, even if they get banned, the ones who backpacked it will have the sprite.
Story Xperiential: Disney stories suck nowadays (besides Zootopia 2 according to critics) and not everyone wants to make stories on Scratch so it will be a wasted feature.
Merch and Merch discounts: Who buys Scratch merch? Scratch merch is just repetitive merch with Scratch Cat and friends or Scratch Cat wearing some sunglasses or hats. It doesn't have special art or special features. And the showcased “Membership Merch” isn't that great either.


I checked the scratch merch and the website was filled with “BECOME A MEMBER!” it's everywhere

The Scratch Membership is a more engaging way to donate to Scratch (as they are a non-profit) and I don't get how a software a company uses correlates to the user making bad stories. The only real issues right now are the questionable choices to possibly add paywalled items (although more cosmetic than useful, which are cat blocks & profile badges)

Moss-Star44 wrote:

The membership Scratch is adding to their website is very faulty and unfair, and it may lead to more bans or even people quitting, which is bad for the website and its members.

People quitting I could see happening, although this has never stopped Scratch. Plenty of users quit from the studio update back in 2021, and from Scratch 3.0, and from Scratch 2.0, etc…. and Scratch is still going strong!

It's unclear to me why there would be more bans, however. The membership is somewhat unrelated to how often the Scratch Team bans users.

Moss-Star44 wrote:

Exclusive sprite packs: How are you going to stop people from giving the sprite packs out?

They won't. The Scratch Team has stated that they are aware that users can get the sprites from others. The membership perk is “early access” to these sprites, not “exclusive access.”

Moss-Star44 wrote:

Story Xperiential: Disney stories suck nowadays (besides Zootopia 2 according to critics) and not everyone wants to make stories on Scratch so it will be a wasted feature.

Not everybody needs to benefit from every perk of the membership in order to join it.

Moss-Star44 wrote:

Merch and Merch discounts: Who buys Scratch merch?

I imagine teachers and schools are the primary users of Scratch merch. No doubt that there are some folks very passionate about Scratch who use it as well. I'd be curious on the statistics of this, myself.

Moss-Star44 wrote:

Story Xperiential: Disney stories suck nowadays (besides Zootopia 2 according to critics) and not everyone wants to make stories on Scratch so it will be a wasted feature.

It's not actually something by Scratch – it's just that you can get it for free through Membership instead of paying much more to get it on its own.