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egypturnash ◴[] 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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duxup ◴[] No.18736102[source]
That sounds so clumsy that I suspect they really don't care / want folks to fail to collect.
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egypturnash ◴[] No.18736285[source]
Yeah I suspect this is part of their overall revenue model.
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brandnewlow ◴[] No.18736484[source]
Honest question: Why do you suspect that? (I work at Brave. We're all very, very nerdy here. It'd be helpful to understand why a fellow nerd suspects we're up to no good.)
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1. SamWhited ◴[] No.18736564[source]
You're taking donations on other peoples behalf without their consent. That's the definition of "up to no good". Why would you assume you can do this and people will be okay with it?
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2. brandnewlow ◴[] No.18744444[source]
Not our intention. We've just posted up a rundown of the many changes we're pushing up tomorrow to address these concerns and clarify things a lot more: https://brave.com/rewards-update/
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3. SamWhited ◴[] No.18752364[source]
Thank you, this is a step in the right direction. Holding users money forever because they donated to a person who may know nothing about your platform is still scummy though. What happens to that money in the mean time? Is it sitting in a bank account you're earning interest on? Is it guaranteed by a financial institution?

You've made the representation slightly better, but this post still sounds like financial fraud.

> A change so that users may contribute only UGP-granted tokens to unverified creators, but can contribute self-funded and grant-funded tokens in any combination to verified creators.

This sounds reasonable, but you could also just not accept donations on behalf of people who haven't signed up for your platform. Why the hell should I as a creator be forced to waste my time opting out when you have no right to use my name to entice users onto your platform anyways? (not that I personally would have any value, I've never created anything anyone would care to donate for, I'm speaking hypothetically of course)

Furthermore, what if I have my own methods to donate to me and instead users of your browser see that I'm an unverified creator and donate through that instead? Now you've lost me donations I otherwise would have gotten. That sounds like serious lawsuit territory right there (though I'm not a lawyer, of course).