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Brave taking cryptocurrency donations “for me” without my consent

(twitter.com)
323 points plusCubed | 16 comments | 21 Dec 18 17:48 UTC | HN request time: 1.302s | source | bottom
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egypturnash ◴[21 Dec 18 19:55 UTC] No.18736059[source]▶
I just dug up info on how Brave’s contributions thing works and it feels like such a mess.

According to https://brave.com/publishers/

- once you have accumulated $100 in contributions they email “the webmaster at your site” and the owner of your domain according to the WHOIS. I assume this is “webmaster@domain.name”, which I sure don’t have set up on my personal site.

- you have to “check your balance frequently and transfer funds wherever you choose”, which suggests that there’s no way to just say “send my my balance every month” and forget about it.

This whole model totally breaks down when you remember that there’s a ton of independent creators who don’t have their own sites, but instead post stuff on another site. Is Brave going to realize that I’m following this particular person on YouTube, that person on Tumblr, this other person on Deviantart, etc, etc? And are they going to ping them or are they just gonna tell the people who own the site?

The page where you sign up to receive payments (https://publishers.basicattentiontoken.org) makes it sound like they understand YouTube accounts and nothing else, and as a creator whos interest in pivoting to video is nonexistent, screw that, I’ll stick with Patreon and it’s opt-in model that just transfers money into my bank account every month as long as I have patrons.

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1. dessant ◴[21 Dec 18 20:40 UTC] No.18736434[source]▶
My impression is that Brave's current model actively hurts small creators that would otherwise get some of that money sooner on the donation services they have signed up for, without waiting for Brave's $100 withdrawal threshold to be reached, if it ever does.

I'd be surprised if this will be deemed legal, once more people will find out that there is a company collecting donations in their name and without their consent.

Contacting creators as soon as they receive their first tip may help. Otherwise it just looks like they're capitalizing on our content and keep the long tail of donations indefinitely, while also making it less likely that we get contributions from Brave users on other payment platforms, since as far as they know, they are already supporting us through Brave.

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2. _0ffh ◴[21 Dec 18 21:41 UTC] No.18736933[source]▶
>I'd be surprised if this will be deemed legal

I'm surprised how anyone could think this was a good idea, or even legal. What wouldn't surprise me is an incoming class action.

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3. GreaterFool ◴[21 Dec 18 22:05 UTC] No.18737106[source]▶
IANAL but I imagine that the donations are in brave tokens and it may or may not be treated as cash (even though the eventual payout is cash) which may or may not be legal depending on a lot of stuff that's beyond my area of expertise.

But if the idea was to 1) create token and 2) YOLO and yeah, lawsuits incoming.

But it could be that they have good lawyers and that it is actually legal (although as I write it I don't believe that, haha)

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4. isoskeles ◴[21 Dec 18 22:10 UTC] No.18737149[source]▶
> actively hurts

What do you think the word active means?

5. jacques_chester ◴[21 Dec 18 23:04 UTC] No.18737507{3}[source]▶
Trusteeship, tax laws and the like typically apply to anything of value, whether it's legally a currency or not.

If the tokens are valueless, then what is it they're offering? If they have value, how are they excused from usual rules?

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6. egypturnash ◴[21 Dec 18 23:32 UTC] No.18737670[source]▶
As far as I know none of my fans have even heard of Brave, so they're probably giving me money via Patreon or the occasional commission (and I should probably make the Paypal tip jar a bit more prominent, as well as maybe setting up Ko-fi or its ilk someday). But if Brave finds money to start a serious publicity campaign and get new users then I can definitely see that being a problem.

Needs a lot better way for them to contact creators, too. Probably they need some actual humans figuring out contact methods for a few years of growth instead of just assuming that "webmaster@domain.name" will get to the right person, and slowly building solutions for multi-user platforms based on the overall revenue of those places.

(Wedging into multi-user platforms by blocking their ads also has the problem of who's gonna pay for the servers if all the ad money gets siphoned off by Brave.)

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7. londons_explore ◴[22 Dec 18 00:03 UTC] No.18737887{4}[source]▶
Presumably the same way supermarket vouchers have a cash vale of $0.0000001
8. londons_explore ◴[22 Dec 18 00:03 UTC] No.18737889{4}[source]▶
Presumably the same way supermarket vouchers have a cash value of $0.0000001
9. xur17 ◴[22 Dec 18 00:16 UTC] No.18737954[source]▶
> My impression is that Brave's current model actively hurts small creators that would otherwise get some of that money sooner on the donation services they have signed up for, without waiting for Brave's $100 withdrawal threshold to be reached, if it ever does.

FWIW, you can create an account manually and withdraw with << $100 in your account. $100 is just the limit for them to notify you.

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10. mthoms ◴[22 Dec 18 04:55 UTC] No.18738998[source]▶
Just to clarify, a content creator just needs to register with Brave once and all further contact will go through whichever channel they choose.

I suppose the presumption is, once (if) Brave reaches critical mass, or gets enough press, there won't be a monetizing content creator on the web who isn't aware of it.

My apologies if you know this already. It's just that the "whois" email is not really telling the full story. Unfortunately, this is the best (only?) option they've got to try and contact the creator at this point.

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11. brandnewlow ◴[22 Dec 18 18:24 UTC] No.18741770[source]▶
We hadn't considered that many creators would interpret our UI/UX as "solicitation" vs. "letting a user do a thing they want to do in our browser."

In any event, the confusion is 100% our fault and we're working on updating the UI and language to be clear based on all the feedback we've gotten. We must do better.

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12. cfabbro ◴[23 Dec 18 00:50 UTC] No.18743593{3}[source]▶
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Du-Bo-rUYAAeU6b.png:large

Might I also recommend you update the language on the "tips" overlay itself to remove any implication the money is actually going to the creator when the truth is really that its being held by you, essentially in escrow, until they claim it... which they may never actually do. And even using "tips" to describe the process also seems rather misleading in this case too.

Also, automatically scraping a creator's profile picture and adding it to your own overlay to give yourself the appearance of legitimately representing them is incredibly misleading as well. So might I suggest you stop doing that too.

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13. egypturnash ◴[23 Dec 18 01:14 UTC] No.18743692{3}[source]▶
Like most creators I know, I've heard of ko-fi. I don't have an account there. I haven't felt it fits my working methods. They don't have a page to take money in my name, either.

I've heard of GoFundMe and don't have an account there, either. Now that they seem to be quite happy to take money from people making comics designed to "stick it to the libs" I kinda don't want to have an account there. They don't have a page in my name either.

"I don't want to do business with you, and I don't want to have an account so I can opt out of doing business with you" is, I feel, a valid attitude. Is anyone who hears about Facebook's "shadow profiles" happy to know that Facebook is tracking them despite them not using that site?

"Having a human find a contact method for a creator" is an option. It does not scale but how many times do I see people writing stuff here on HN that advises doing stuff that doesn't scale until you know it's worth automating it? If Brave wants their model to work they need to put the time into this kind of stuff. Hell, have the user who wants to pay a creator via Brave do it: "Hi! We don't have any contact information for this creator yet, and our automated methods can't find anything. Would you tell us how to contact this person?" And then not take money in the creator's name until they actually say yes.

14. brandnewlow ◴[23 Dec 18 04:06 UTC] No.18744349{4}[source]▶
We just posted up info about the hotfixes going live and I think you'll see your ideas!. This blog post lays out what we're doing: https://brave.com/rewards-update/

Thanks for your feedback and suggestions.

15. brandnewlow ◴[23 Dec 18 04:10 UTC] No.18744365[source]▶
We just posted a list of the many changes we're pushing live to address the problems found in our UI: https://brave.com/rewards-update/ Thanks for your feedback.
16. brandnewlow ◴[23 Dec 18 04:10 UTC] No.18744367[source]▶
Correct.