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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. egypturnash ◴[] No.18736904[source]
Basically it feels like you are saying "we will take donations for you but tell you we are getting them in the most obscure ways possible, and we will certainly not make it easy for you to claim them".

Or to couch it in the form of a GenX nerd reference: if you're taking donations in my name, you're telling me about them by putting a note to that effect in a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard".

Realistically, I would say it'd look a lot less suspicious if you stopped taking donations for people until they have actually opted in. I'm on Patreon because one of my fans said "hey I really wanna start giving you money for your comics, would you set up a Patreon?", not because Patreon found my stuff and set up a tip jar for me.

Also automate the payouts, if I have ads on my stuff then I get money every so often as long as I've accumulated more than the minimum payout, but I have to remember to go check with Brave? Come on, it can't be more than a couple day's hacking to give a creator the option to say "pay me every month if I'm above $minimum_payout". (And if this is a thing you can now set up to happen regularly, there are webpages that need to be updated to reflect this.)