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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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Obi_Juan_Kenobi ◴[] No.18738250[source]
> why a fellow nerd suspects we're up to no good

You're taking money on peoples' behalf without their knowledge or permission.

What the fuck more is there to understand?

Here's the bright ethical line: don't accept any money unless you can be assured that you can provide it to the beneficiary. At least failing that, make it abundantly clear to donators that there's no reason whatsoever to expect the funds to actually go to the recipient.

The moral hazard is blindingly obvious: the worse you are at getting funds to where they should go, the more money you make.

This is going viral and it's time to talk to your lawyer about your personal liability in this clusterfuck.

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1. brandnewlow ◴[] No.18744439[source]
We've shipped a bunch of hotfixes to our UI in response to this thread and others. You can read about them here: https://brave.com/rewards-update/

Thanks for your feedback. We shipped UI that sent the wrong message about unverified creators. Understood. We're hustling to get fixes in place and talking more about what we can and should be doing.