I don't buy this idea that Wu is donating 100s of dollars to herself for no better reason than to keep her patreon total up. I've never seen Wu give the slightest shit about Patreon, or keeping her patrons happy.
It seems fairly obvious to me that every month a certain percentage of her patrons' credit cards expire and their payment fails. They get a notice from Patreon to update their details, some of them do and some of them take it as a prompt to stop their patronage because it's lost any meaning for them. So at the beginning of every month she gets a large drop in patrons, and she gains a handful back over the course of the next week or so.
You're right to be suspicious, but let's face some facts here.
First, right out the gate and before we even begin on Wu self-buffing, we know Wu circular donates not only because of the Patreon hack but because Wu was donating to obvious friends of hers on the frontpage until Patreon gave hosts the ability to hide their donator lists. This was backed by Randi Harper basically admitting that all of the Usual suspects were doing it to inflate their Patreon numbers. She had no reason to implicate herself like that except to dick over Wu and Quinn, and there's every reason to believe her given this.
This said.
Last year, Wu's Patreon was bouncing up and down and dipping down repeatedly as her numbers gradually trickled away. She would repeatedly trend below $2500, only to springboard back to almost 580 patrons and over the requisite amount (which was Natalie's hiring cost, according to Brianna, surely by coincidence). The laws of "You haven't been enough of a victim lately" kicked in, and she was trickling downwards. And then, in January of 2016, Brianna Wu had her infamous Capitalism chimp-out that got her banned from Gamerghazi along with her stooge, Mattie Myers, and caused her patreon backers to pull out en masse. She went in less than 2 months from over 570 and over $2700 to 540 and well under $2300. It was well-documented, too:
The indication here is that those that pulled out were the big money donators, and Randi Harper's dialogue on the matter certainly lent credence to this theory.
Wu's patreon would keep entering a pattern of dipping down sharply, only to gradually refill over the course of a week and a half. Every time she had a major Twitter chimp-out, she would lose around 20 people, only to gradually refill a bit more and be basically where she was when she began. But when the biggest ones happened, Wu would lose even more than that, and she would dip under $2000 for the first time in March, which is around the same time that Wu had some of the Patreon backers demanding proof that the employee Wu was hiring was real.
The pattern has repeated, over and over again, for months. Each time Wu has some kind of shrieking meltdown, she loses more people. What's that? She was triggered by Sonic the Hedgehog? There went another 10 backers. What's this? She made an appearance on
The Internet Ruined My Life alongside guy who pissed in food? There's another 10. She'd lose several, often 1-2 weeks before a sudden resurgence of cash would dampen the loss a bit.
Now, there are arguments to be made that the cycle we've seen with this, over and over, is Patreon just recalculating the numbers, and perhaps there is something to that, but the repeated losses of backers timed to her chimp-outs suggest something more. Brianna Wu is obsessed with her public image to an almost hilarious degree, and with this in mind it would make perfect sense that she'd use any method at her disposal to attempt damage control and make her seem like less of a fuck-up.
UPDATE: Speaking of Patreon, Brianna seems to have had some kind of update addressing the death threats she recieved from Chloe Sagal. However, it's a Patron-only post, because
of course it is.
