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Brave taking cryptocurrency donations “for me” without my consent

(twitter.com)
323 points plusCubed | 3 comments | 21 Dec 18 17:48 UTC | HN request time: 0.644s | source
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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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duxup ◴[21 Dec 18 20:00 UTC] 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 ◴[21 Dec 18 20:22 UTC] No.18736285[source]▶
Yeah I suspect this is part of their overall revenue model.
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brandnewlow ◴[21 Dec 18 20:44 UTC] 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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pushcx ◴[21 Dec 18 21:45 UTC] No.18736958[source]▶
https://twitter.com/ummjackson/status/1076221401353207808

Your UI really looks like Tom Scott has signed up to receive donations through you, not like you've scraped his photo and name off twitter and written a fundraising plea with zero mention that he's never heard of you and that you won't even try to contact him until $100 accumulates and then only half-assedly.

For most of us this is our first exposure to your model and UI, so that has set a very negative expectation. This looks like a scam and I'm now trying to figure out how to know if you've scammed any of my users without doing anything like installing Brave or signing up because your metrics probably count that as success rather than suspicion.

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1. pushcx ◴[21 Dec 18 22:19 UTC] No.18737213[source]▶
Also: your responses here, and Brendan Eich's on Twitter, seem to assume you are somewhere in the general brand feel of the EFF or Firefox. That this is a big misunderstanding of a clearly well-intentioned feature from familiar volunteers to the public interest.

You're nowhere near them. You're in the same mental headspace as ICO scams because you're also promising that if we give your cryptocurrency a bit of money the riches will rain down for everyone. You need to radically change your rhetorical approaches to this PR disaster (not to mention this "feature") if you hope to start building trust.

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2. brandnewlow ◴[23 Dec 18 04:20 UTC] No.18744405[source]▶
We've just published a post detailing the changes we're making to our UI in response to all the great criticism and feedback from the last 24 hours: https://brave.com/rewards-update/

These changes will make it very very clear when creators are not participating in Brave Rewards and will ensure no creator assets are being used.

In response to your other comments, I feel good assuming we're somewhere in the general brand feel of the EFF and Firefox. Brave has never once told people to speculate on the price of BAT (we get asked to do so about once a day and refuse because that's not what we're about). Also, yeah, we've shipped a browser used by 5m people a month around the world. There's a long way to go still but it's a start.

Thanks for your feedback.

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3. bjl ◴[23 Dec 18 16:06 UTC] No.18746794[source]▶
> In response to your other comments, I feel good assuming we're somewhere in the general brand feel of the EFF and Firefox.

That's laughable. Trust me, among the people who know about Brave at all, you're associated more with Dentacoin and Bitconnect than EFF and Mozilla. I expect you'll have a rude awakening when you're searching for your next job and people decide they don't want to hire a scam artist.