Brave taking cryptocurrency donations “for me” without my consent

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.

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.

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.)