I think this is a service I'd use if it were available as an extension rather than a browser in its own right.
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Schemes like this are nice, but don't forget who pays for hosting, serving and promoting the content.
https://www.patreon.com/Kurzgesagt - 9,890 patrons - $36,214 per months in donations.
https://www.patreon.com/cgpgrey - 7,719 patrons - $19,439 per video in donations.
Edit: And there's https://www.patreon.com/DeFranco at 14,268 patrons. His revenue is hidden but that's at least around 60k/month if not more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Peterson#Other_projects
https://basicattentiontoken.org/brave-expands-basic-attentio...
You can't pay me cents to pick a worse browser. It's like the days when there were those pay to surf companies. The promise of money is nice, but most end users don't benefit that much from it. There's a lot more incentive for the company for their product to work than there is for the users to adopt it.
Still my understanding is that Patreon doesn't automatically allow people to view YT videos ad free. Sure people get donations and the amount of donations drive the number of videos etc but they don't go into YT's territory.
He doesn't list a dollar amount but my guess is that it's at least $20k a month.
What we desperately need is a discovery system that is both fair and useful.
There are really only a couple problems: consumers have become accustomed to freeloading, and that there's no system in place to enable micropayments for content. Once we figure out a way to enable paying, let's say, $0.01 to watch a video or read a news article, the web will fundamentally change in a positive way.
(The implementations might differ in other important things, e.g. privacy or fee structure, but the basic user attention model seems similar enough to me)
I mostly use Brave on my phone because it makes the browsing experience faster and removes most ads by default. I won't change to another browser on the iPhone anytime soon. Having said this, I haven't used the payments feature outside of web3 (Ethereum DApps).
I don't watch ads with any interest or attention in general, but I often have Youtube playing some live concert on the background while I work and ads cut midway forcing me to change tabs so I can skip them. The idea that instead of breaking my concentration to stop an add playing I can simply let them and that _that_ could be a little money generating activity seems appealing.
(edit a word)
Why build a browser and not extensions for top browsers?
Extensions face API and performance limits. Our own browser lets us put our best foot forward on speed and deep integration of private ad-tech. We may do extensions if our users find themselves browsing in other browsers often.
=> give them feedback if you’re interested
This allows a user to donate to a content creator even if that creator doesn't have any way to get access the donations. That is, until youtubers start registering themselves in the payment tool, this is essentially watching someone's video, and then throwing money into a hole.
With other patronage systems, like patreon, you cannot donate money until the creator has an account. To me, that feels super sketch.
Edit: It reminded me to go and check my old bitcointip and altcointip accounts on reddit, on which I apparently had combined closed to $30 in BTC at today's prices, but which have both been shuttered and are now inaccessible. That's not promising.
The ad revenue is not the money at play here.
Median income in the US is ~$42,000/yr last I knew. Call it $4K to make up a bit for benefits and such. There isn't a hard-and-fast way to count because some people hide their total, but there are clearly plural hundreds of people above that line in the top 1000 [1]. There's several more hundred people making poverty-line in most of the US (which as a relative measure, I can't do a precise cut off), and before one starts moralizing about how horrible that is, remember that they are not necessarily doing this as their only job. What may not be enough to live on can still be a very very nicely paying hobby.
You are certainly correct that overall, more money flows through YouTube. I am much less convinced that that's a good thing in general, though. The incentives on YouTube fluctuate a lot, but in general tend to support quantity over quality. In fact as I think about it, I wonder if Patreon is helping prop up YouTube a bit by helping the quality producers resist that; if YouTube banned alternate monetization and tried to survive just on their own quantity-over-quality metrics I wouldn't be surprised they would eventually experience an eat-your-own-seed-corn collapse. I've listened to the YouTube videos of a couple of the people chasing the quantity-over-quality treadmill that YouTube ends up putting them on to stay on top, and it's not a life I'd want or wish on anyone.
Flattr 2.0 works more like Brave does; the user pays a monthly subscription, and Flattr just automatically distributes those funds to creators based on what sites the user views most often that month.
If you pay for mobile service per GB then you already have this problem.
This comment reminds me of mp3sparks / allofmp3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AllOfMP3 , saying they're on the up and up, content creators just have to ask them for their royalties.
"Consumers" (a problematic term) need a refrigerator to keep food cold, figuratively speaking. They don't need "content." If money is what people care about, they should get into the refrigerator business. (In China, since that's where it is now.)
The web isn't a money machine. If everybody who wanted to get paid for it, got the hell off it or was starved off it, that also would lead to the positive fundamental change of which you speak. Just sayin'.
revshare is complicated and governed by, among other factors, deals YouTube makes with various parties. Brave doesn't have access to any of that information, so they couldn't possibly know how to split revenue between the uploader of the video and all the other parties that might have content embedded in the video, even if it were their intention to do so.
IMO this is the right way to do it because it solves the chicken and egg problem that would normally exist with a universal funding method like this. Users don't have to worry about what payment platforms their favorite creators support; they can just browse the web like normal and the platform takes care of the rest.
Edit: I said it better in response to a sibling of yours: I think it's unethical for a platform to accept payment on my behalf without my permission.
I happen to be working on this right now http://browsercoin.com, if anybody is interested in beta testing it out, my email is in my profile.
> Extensions face API and performance limits. Our own browser lets us put our best foot forward on speed and deep integration of private ad-tech. We may do extensions if our users find themselves browsing in other browsers often.
Basically, their FAQ answer is debatable because the Chrome API is more than enough to support a Patreonesque model, if you have uBlock and other privacy focused extension, you don't even need to download a heavy browser client.
Hence the name BrowserCoin, I'd be open to feedbacks on what you would like to see happen with it.
The whole idea that you can pay creators instead of watching ads is obviously a good one, and this is really the best attempt so far at actually solving the problem. Someone suggested implementing this as a chrome extension -- Really? They took an ambitious route with building their own browser, but that's obviously the correct move if Brave's goal is to transform the way ads and monetization work on the internet, which if you haven't paid attention, is currently destroying everything good about the Web and eating away at the values of civic society (again, see recent congressional hearings on Russian Manipulation if you've missed the news)
(Disclosure: I hold a small amount of BAT, but mostly discouraged by the finnicky nature of some of these comments that want Everything to be Perfect Overnight without realizing the scale of the problem that Brave/BAT are trying to accomplish)
Edit: If you want more reading on the subject of how screwed the digital content monetization industry is, this link is also sitting on Hacker News a couple stories below this one.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/theres-a-digital-media-c...
To put it succinctly, I think it's unethical for a platform to accept payment on my behalf without my permission.
(whereas yeah, I don't consider holding money in escrow unethical)
Plenty of the video-based ones are in erotic media, too. It's definitely a new and interesting income medium for that genre.
I have the exact same gripe with facebook—their only viable method of supporting content is itself ruining the site. Both companies are just leaving money on the floor by committing entirely to a single (dying) revenue model.
This looks cool, but seems inherently untenable at actually getting the money to the content provider without the content provider working with this service.
The asymmetry created by this kind of "pay me without my permission" means that someone providing a service now has to do a lot of extra work if they want to get paid, whereas a user who wants to pay someone doesn't. That's not a good system if your goal is really to get money to creators.
Patreon censors conservatives off their platform. [Context if you don't know what I'm talking about -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofpbDgCj9rw]
To some non-trivial minority of content creators that is reason enough to not use it. As someone who makes youtube vids and is thinking about scaling a brand, I want nothing to do with a tech platform that believes it should be the sole arbiter of who can and cannot solicit p2p donations/payments for their videos. I want a politically-neutral technology / payment mechanism.
Brave seems to be more ideologically aligned with myself, so I would rather go that route. Even though the current iteration has quite a few centralized stop-gates, I think it's feasible that Brave and the BAT system could ultimately provide a way for me to monetize my video content directly from users with BAT tokens and not have to deal with Jack Conte's moral grandstanding as a single point of failure for my revenue streams.
Some youtubers are already incorporating podcast ads (Blue Apron, Naturebox, etc) into their videos. So while I'm dubious of any particular coin trying to add its own monetization layer on top of youtube, I think it's a special case of a general phenomenon that bears monitoring.
Why not make it a "pledge?"
at any time, up until the policy changes. Users don't have to worry about what payment platforms their favourite creators support only if they are unworried about whether their money actually gets to those creators.
Exactly. This system makes things easier on users at the expense of making it harder on creators. I think that's kinda the point though.
If your funding method relies on consumers essentially donating their money to you, it's extremely important to make that experience as seamless for them as possible. Patreon is great, but it does require users to go out of their way and make a conscious decision to fund _you_ specifically. That's a lot of extra effort that person has to go through just to give their money away to a random site they happened to visit for a couple hours that month.
With this system however the user just signs up for a single service _once_ and subscribes, and that's the full extent their involvement. The trade-off is that the content creator is now the one who has to go through the extra effort of setting up an account on this service, but unlike content consumers, the creator actually has an incentive to go through that process (free money) which makes it worthwhile for them.
This isn't analogous to collecting donations for a charity and then making a bulk donation. It's analagous to collecting donations for a charity, taking a cut of those donations for your troubles, and then depositing those donations in your bank account until the charity you supposedly collected for comes and asks for them.
I have no affiliation, I have zero of whatever their coin is, but I randomly signed up for their mailing list a while back out curiosity.
And my point is that such a system is unsustainable, due to asymmetry of work.
Lets start with a few things that we can know are true:
1. In any system of patrons and artists, an artist will have more patrons than a patron has artists, or the system is unsustainable.
2. I could create a competitor to Brave, "Fearful", tomorrow. So could anyone else.
As a creator, its possible that every single patron of mine will pay me through a different service, I then need to register myself in all of them, and either manually, or via a middleman, convert the disparate currencies to my preferred one. But, because there are so many different payment methods, its likely that the long tail isn't worth my time to receive payment from. Systems that accept payment on behalf of someone else and require work on the part of that party to receive the payment create this loss.
On the other hand, even if every creator has their own payment platform, there's no loss. Patrons simply don't pay the long tail of the creators that they use, and instead only make payments to the ones they appreciate the most.
iow, asymmetry means that creator-focused services are the only ones that can be successful except for very niche groups. So, if your goal is to support blockchain tech, Brave is great. If on the other hand, your goal is to get paid by patrons, its not.
I don't see what you mean by saying these are podcast ads?
If the tokens were automatically returned to the consumer after a period of, for example, 6 months or so, and redistributed to creators via the usual method, would that alleviate your concerns?
(E.g. if you are into photography or related areas, you're going to find Squarespace ads all over the place)
I am just glad somebody is trying to fix content monetization online without taking 30% for, what, handling payments?
As for the "thrown away money", that's people's business if they want to do it with a relative chance of the author gaining that money.
Blocking Brave for violating their usage agreements seems very much in another league, even though it might sound like they are building a browser monopoly via their video streaming monopoly. They are not in a position where they take the choice of defaults away from the user, and as long as Firefox, Safari and Edge have some market share, the user still has a choice of compliant browsers. Blocking Brave might be more akin to enforcing their ToS for Youtube via their Play store by blocking 3rd party apps with download function (which is prohibited in Youtube ToS).
Why? This doesn't seem obvious to me at all.
In fact, I'd argue the opposite. Depending on users installing and using an entirely different browser just so they can get one feature that could easily be implemented as a browser extension is likely to be a serious obstacle to that goal.
and then not depositing those donations in your bank account until the charity you supposedly collected for comes and asks for them.
Probably a typo :)
I'm not sure taking a straightforward and easily reasoned about process that the courts could easily handle and moving it to something enforced by a programming language subject to bugs that are largely unable to be handled by courts is necessarily a step in the right direction. At least not until there's a lot more vetting of Ethereum and a much better and more secure ecosystem to call upon.
Such issues came up in the old days, but they were settled without interposing themselves directly in my life. Back in the 90's, my music collection didn't start partially disappearing because of these things.
First of all, Brave doesn't just sit idly by and wait for creators to seek them out; they attempt to contact creators via email to let them know there are funds available for them to claim.
Second, Brave is completely transparent about how the process works. They're not claiming to donors that the funds _will_ reach their intended destination and then not delivering. The method they use to deliver cash to creators is clearly explained on their website.
Browsers need disruption anyway — chrome is increasingly buggy and slow, and I trust “the person who literally invented browsers, javascript, and the modern internet” to write another one.
It isn't "value for value", it's a donation. The most traditional, direct business model ever created involves you not having the content until you pay.
Is Google party to this? And if not, how is this sustainable model?
Honestly I hadn't looked into this browser previously, but I don't understand what their value proposition is, beyond handwavey promises that crypto-currency utility tokens and some future machine-learning developments can get around the ad fraud problem.
But if they need to build this out by subverting YouTube's advertising and revenue flow and replacing it with their own, that is not going to last.
Yes, I understand that if it's not reported it's unlikely anyone will be caught, but by the letter of the law does receiving a token mean I've received income?
Will you ever refund the money, say if its not claimed in a certain amount of time, or if the content creator hypothetically tells you to go jump?
Brave is putting the ads shown (and more importantly reigning in the out of control user tracking and privacy invading bullshit) in the hands of the user.
A side bonus is $ collected and available to content producers and website owners.
If Brave weren't crystal clear about all -- if they marketed themselves as purely an adblocker, for example -- then I think you'd have a point. As it is, it's simply adblocking with a twist.
(And you can still make extensions that offer partial functionality, such as the a BAT wallet for donations, but without the whole BAT Ads platform built in. You would get full functionality in apps that integrate BAT with the SDKs or if you use Brave itself.)
They're also offering SDKs for other apps: e.g., mobile apps, smart TV apps, etc.
See this post: https://basicattentiontoken.org/driving-user-adoption-and-ex...
(And you can still make extensions that offer partial functionality, such as the a BAT wallet for donations, but without the whole BAT Ads platform built in. You would get full functionality in apps that integrate BAT with the SDKs or if you use Brave itself. Chromne API gives access to browser history, and making a BAT wallet is pretty easy.)
They're also offering SDKs for other apps: e.g., mobile apps, smart TV apps, etc.
See this post: https://basicattentiontoken.org/driving-user-adoption-and-ex...
Secondly, Brendan Eich already confirmed that there is a 70% revenue share for users. Let's pretend the advertiser is paying 10 cents per view, then you would get 7 cents per ad watched. 70% is a lot.
Thirdly, even if it's just a few cents, it's better than nothing. Things build up over time. Before you know it, you'll have a few $. That's awesome. You can get a month of subscription on a ton of websites for like $3. That's also 3 songs on iTunes store, or a paid app on the app store.
It's a browser company. What do you mean, "order", do they have other priorities other than creating a browser?
I pay for YouTube Red so that I can play music videos on my tv all day without ads. But if I go to a video on my desktop it will stop the playing of the video on the TV as only 1 session can be had with youtube at once IF YOU PAY FOR RED. If I dropped red, and just used ad blockers I will still be available to have multiple video sessions at once.
Drives me up a while and im seriously considering dropping red.
You need to ensure a 100% signup by video creators to ensure every creator gets paid and no money is in a hole. That's simply not possible; many creators are probably dead, unable to access their accounts, or unwilling to sign up for this service.
In that case, a very significant chunk of cash would be collected and never distributed. Relying on 100% adoption by creators to ensure no funds are miscredited is a miserable user experience.
Final Tweet: "Ooops we invested all your money. Now it's gone. :("
"We will reach out to the organization you select to ensure it is ready to accept donations from Amazon."
Furthermore, you aren't able to free form enter a charity. It's only from the list they've sourced (presumably from public records).
Ideally in that scenario, competition would push creators and viewers onto some other platform.
Not sure how realistic that is, given the network effects involved with YouTube.
Imagine this for a moment: the Brave browser ships with a VR headset that automatically descends upon the user's eyes and ears for the duration of an ad, shielding them from their own screen (and thus the Youtube ad playing on it) and playing a different ad (or no ad) instead.
Does the same liability still apply?
I think that Brave lawyers will have an easy time convincing a jury that a merely drawing the user's attention to a different piece of content is not tantamount to damages to some website that happens to be among those open in their browser at the time.
...why not? Subversion of Youtube's advertising and revenue flow sounds like a prospect which enjoys high demand and low supply at the moment.
"For each website receiving votes during a Calculation Period that is not a Brave Publisher by the end of that Calculation Period, the BAT corresponding to its votes will not be distributed at the end of that Calculation Period, and will instead be held in an Uphold omnibus wallet for no less than ninety (90) days thereafter. At that time, the undistributed BAT may be sent to Company’s user growth pool, which is a pool of BAT that Company administers to incentivize use of the Platform (as described more fully in Exhibit B of the BAT Terms of Sale, available at https://basicattentiontoken.org/terms-and-conditions/). But if the website receiving votes becomes a registered Brave Publisher before the corresponding BAT is sent to the user growth pool, that website will receive such BAT as Publisher Contributions in the first Calculation Period following its registration."
So if you donate money to a content creator that hasn't signed up to be a Brave publisher (and in doing so, agreed to Uphold's ToS), your donation will go to the "User Growth Pool". From their regular ToS:
"Once the User Growth Fund is exhausted, it will be discontinued, and no new BAT will be created for or transferred to the User Growth Fund"
So who knows where your donations will go if the content creator doesn't sign up to receive them.
[0] https://basicattentiontoken.org/contributor-terms-of-service...
EDIT: Oh, wait, they make you register a wallet on a site called uphold.com, which will just send the tokens to your Ether wallet or convert them to another cryptocurrency or pay you to your bank. You do have to register for KYC after $1000 worth of income, they say.
"Where does my contribution go if a publisher/website is not part of this program yet?
When there is about $100.00 USD in BAT for a specific publisher, from all contributors, Brave makes three attempts to complete the publisher verification process. We will hold unclaimed funds for a minimum of 90 days, after which it will be added to the UGP (User Growth Pool)."
Yes they might be contacted, but what if they don't want (or simply can't for legal reasons) use Amazon as a gateway for their funds?
Now you've given users the impression that they are helping a certain charity when it never makes it there.
Theoretically, these same users might have made a small donation directly to that company if it wasn't for Smile.
I'd still recommend using Smile, overall I think it's great, but you have to admit there might have been a better way to go about it. How to do that better, I do not know.
[1] https://smile.amazon.com/gp/chpf/about/ref=smi_se_dshb_leli_...
If you donate via this system, you've now created an obligation for me to read an email, look up the company, read their documentation, read reviews and scam reports to ensure that they're legitimate, provide them personal information, then repeat the process for a second site, and then I can get the money you've given me.
Yeah, I do think that's far, far too much.
On the producer side, I registered my site by adding a file to the .well-known directory, and that's it. I can now receive BAT or just USD/EUR to my bank via some service called Uphold.
On the consumer side, it's nice, you top up to your browser directly (so no third-party wallets or anyone to know what you visited, hopefully) and it distributes the money you set per month to the sites you visited, based on the number of visits. I bought some BAT and can definitely see myself using this, if it were not for having to completely switch browsers (I use Firefox and plan to keep doing that).
Overall, good job to the Brave team, the system seems very well-thought-out (I'm not sure about how privacy is handled, but hopefully no third party will know the sites I visited, even though I guess the Ethereum ledger is public and someone could surmise this). Too bad it requires me to switch browsers to use.
EDIT: One problem I saw is with Uphold, which quotes me 51,000 BAT/BTC (and "no hidden fees"!) and then, as soon as I sent the money to buy the BAT, the "activity" page quotes 47,000 BAT/BTC. So much for no fees.
EDIT 2: And now it charges me an extra $4 to withdraw, screw that. I'm not going to spend a load of money on fees so I can spend money on content, so creators can pay more fees.
EDIT 3: And it doesn't even let me withdraw (the "confirm" button stays disabled). Also, I have special hate for forms that say "amount to withdraw", include no fees in that, give you no "all" option and make you guess twenty times which amount will withdraw the closest thing to all your money, while the fee keeps changing every five seconds because of fluctuations. Screw everything about this.
This seems fair.
People having that attitude towards content creators is how we landed in this mess in the first place.
I feel like a lot of ICOs are simply used to try to capture a piece of the cryptocurrency/ICO hype and avoid securities regulations, but there’s no advtange to users.
Let me try again:
Think about how much spam you receive on a regular basis.
Now imagine you're in a position where you have fans wanting to send you money: you probably get all the bulk spam plus a ton of targeted spam simply for being notable. This goes double if you have a need for people to be able to message you legitimate business inquiries, because then you're going to get illegitimate inquiries as well.
Then imagine one of the messages in the flood (I know people with six figure unread message counts) that is your inbox said that they had some money available for you, and all you had to do was sign up for their service with your personal information.
You'd be crazy to be willing to do that without researching, likely for several hours.
And if more of these services start popping up, then you have to check up on each one individually as they come in.
That's not something most people in that position can afford to do for 0.01% of their inbox.
Or you could ignore them, but then you're at risk of upsetting your fans because they're trying to send you money and you're not receiving it, out of a quite reasonable assumption that it could be a scam. No one wins in that situation either.
Or, consider the following situation:
Someone you know recommends a donations platform, or you find one while searching, whatever.
You sign up for an account, post the link somewhere, and people use it.
It's much more inconvenient for the users who are giving the money and have to track down what platform you use, but at the same time they also get a level of assurance that any money they send will end up in your hands in the end.
You didn't originally explain why it was a difficult problem at all, all you did was insinuate that most people are too lazy to read documentation, made hyperbolic statements about the difficulty of claiming money, and seemed to suggest that therefore this specific project is a failure or something.
While this post is a bit better at clarifying your argument, the post you're responding to is still 100% in the right here. You may have thought you were helping with it, but the fact is that all most people like to do, is poke holes in reasonable solutions, just because they don't exactly match whatever specific criteria they had in mind. You have to remember that the perfect is the enemy of the good, and it's so easy to come up with criticisms, that even the people you're critiquing have probably thought of them already, much to everyone's astonishment probably. What's not easy, is coming up with any kind of alternatives or possible solutions to these holes, because if it were, they would've likely been implemented.
Believe it or not, all this does is demoralize people actively trying to solve the hard problems you claim to be trying to "help", thus hurting your own cause in the end, because there's no motivation to be gained by helping a bunch of entitled armchair know-it-alls. Despite what everybody may like to think, technological progress is fundamentally a people problem just as much as it is an actual technological problem.
EDIT: Just for full disclosure, as a cryptocurrency investor myself, I also am bearish on BAT. But that's just because I'm bearish on anything having to do with Etherium by default.
I didn't come in and say the whole thing was a bad idea and that it should be abandoned. Just that if the design requires more than a paragraph of explanation, then that's a serious problem for the target audience. As well as pointing out that the idea of not requiring opt-in actually causes the friction that it seeks to avoid.
If insight into the target audience's perspective is demoralizing, you honestly should stop and reconsider your priorities. I say that without any kind of sarcasm or criticism in my voice. If the people you want to help believe that the thing you're making will cause problems for them, that's a red flag. It's not always true, and it might not be true for all users, but it's something to seriously consider.
If people are worried that your product will appear to be a scam, you absolutely need to reconsider.
In such a video every currency unit inside youtube (Ads, Red, ...) can be split up automatically according to some per-video sharing agreement. Everything that comes through Brave has a single recipient, the channel operator (because Brave can't read this contract).
But I wouldn't say there's no advantage to users-- an ICO can let the founders (a) raise funds, and (b) give them a financial incentive for the project to succeed.
So in theory, ICOs can help users win because they can lead to great products that otherwise wouldn't exist. (That said, a lot of teams/projects are total junk.)
This is exactly what Patreon does. Pretty smart, honestly.
Sounds like pwaai is literally working on browsercoin right now! :)
Patreon is worse at this point because they have already demonstrated they will seize and/or not distribute funds to accounts they dislike. That's one step above Paypal levels of horrible business practices.
If I donate to my favorite YouTube personality and instead the money goes to PewDiePie's empire, I'm going to be upset.
The difference between donations and taxes is that I can choose who to fund and how much. If that choice is no longer mine, and I have a strong chance to fund entities I find morally repulsive, then why donate?
I actually agree with this completely, but it's totally orthogonal to key points of the counter-arguments here. Some people thinking your project will cause them issues cannot be inherently bad, pretty much out of necessity, because you simply can never please everyone all the time. If it starts to become a sizable portion of your intended audience, maybe, but even then there will always be a sizable signal/noise ratio as well, which is the real issue here. It's not that people's concerns are unfounded, or that they should be ignored, it's that nothing is ever argued in favor of why this specific issue should be prioritized over all the other equally urgent issues in a project, nor more importantly, how this particular issue could be addressed.
The problem here isn't one of digging up issues, as anybody that's managed any kind of non-trivial project knows they are plentiful, it's a problem with finding solutions. Therefore, the main counter-argument that's been made here is that simply shouting and pointing at these things is not going to help your case as an end user. It's a pretty straightforward point, but people seem to forget that all projects need to make trade-offs, and that often their contributions aren't totally novel "insights" that the project maintainers aren't aware of.
For example, you state:
> if the design requires more than a paragraph of explanation, then that's a serious problem for the target audience.
Which is true, but arguably anyone doing any kind of business would likely know that already. The trouble is actually coming up with such a short explanation, especially when as was claimed before, people don't like to read documentation. It's not exactly easy to explain Bitcoin in one paragraph, much less smart contracts, and even harder still to explain some etherium-based token, on top of explaining the business model and the reason behind it in such brevity. Which is why, even though I'm also not particularly in favor of this BAT project, I know I have nothing to contribute to it in terms of useful criticism because I acknowledge that it's a hard problem and that they're fighting an uphill battle anyway. The part that I am arguing against, is that many seem to implicitly believe that just pointing out that some project is fighting an uphill battle is enough of a worthy contribution to get their concerns addressed/acknowledged somehow.
The more concerning corollary to this, is not so much that these sorts of responses "discourage" active project developers anyway, but that they de-incentivize future projects from even attempting to bother with hard problems, just because they observe enough of a backlash against previous solutions that they deem the risk-to-reward ratio not worth it, instead of actively exploring the space, when that's exactly what's needed to gain any sort of traction on long-term hard problems.
We already see this happening, with so much manpower going towards developing relatively safe "problems" like scaling social networks and/or optimizing ad delivery mechanisms, instead of encouraging people to try out different/riskier things. And that's the real crux of the issue.
On top of that many ICOs seem to have unjustified valuations and reduced oversight from investors vs traditional fundraising.
You can argue how well it does the job (especially at the last bullet point) but it should be obvious that it does do in fact more than just "collect money".
1.) This issue should be prioritized because it makes the whole endeavor literally appear to be a scam to the exact people it wants to help by sending them money.
2.) It should be addressed by being opt in.
Both of which I did cover in my previous posts.
I get where you're coming from. But this is actionable advice with a very strong reason why it should be prioritized.
We floated a User Growth Pool (UGP) of 300M tokens + 60M+ in reserve, created by fiat. These tokens were created before the sale and not sold. They're fungible, indistinguishable from other BAT created pre-sale for lockup to team & advisors, and from the one billion BAT sold on 5/31.
This idea was inspired by social credit currency, issued to citizens to endow them with funds. It can't be done with existing cryptocurrencies unless someone rich does it out of charity. The UGP has notional value between $40M and $110M. No moneybags in sight was volunteering to donate that much BTC or ETH to us.
We had two goals with the sale: endow the UGP, and fund the project. BAT is an ERC20 token so has many decimal places of fractional precision. As we grow, gain users who contribute starting from $0 cost to the user (via grants from the UGP, and even matching contributions for some months), prototype and ship user-paying private ads, and add other apps, BAT should become more valuable and our initial and matching grants can reduce to keep about the same value in USD or other fiats ($5 for initial grant, still working out matching details).
Hope this helps. We're playing the long game here. If the ecosystem expands and Ethereum solves scaling and anonymity on-chain, we will have the only decentralized, user-first and user-private/ZKP-anonymous funding model for the Web.
Here's a pie chart of token holders, where you can see the UGP+reserves, Bittrex (an exchange with BAT held for liquidity provisioning), the team+advisor lockup, and smaller accounts:
https://etherscan.io/token/tokenholderchart/0x0d8775f6484306...
If creators don't register after a decently long interval, the tokens flow back to the user growth pool. Users may choose to support only verified creators/publishers. As we scale up this user growth pool "powerball" effect goes away, and the BAT becomes more dear vs. fiat, so the pool lasts longer as grants and matching scale down in token quantity per user.
