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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/ https://brave.com/publish
by egypturnash 8y ago
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/ 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 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.
- duxup 8y agoThat sounds so clumsy that I suspect they really don't care / want folks to fail to collect.
- egypturnash 8y agoYeah I suspect this is part of their overall revenue model.
- brandnewlow 8y agoHonest 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.)
- SamWhited 8y agoYou'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?
- brandnewlow 8y agoNot 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/ https://brave.com/rewards-update/
- SamWhited 8y agoThank 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).
- 908087 8y agoIs the implication here that "fellow nerds" should always be given the benefit of the doubt for some reason? I've seen some "very nerdy" people engage in some "incredibly selfish and shady" activities, so I can't help but laugh at that idea.
- staticassertion 8y agoI think people may be forgetting that Brave is a very small, new company, and not everything is streamlined yet...
- duxup 8y agoMaybe, but i'm pretty skeptical of the "taking money but not actually all that capable of getting it to the other person" to be a larger issue than streamlining.
- the_clarence 8y agoThis. Tabs on the side has been their number one feature request for quite a while now. They're a pretty small team.
- PhasmaFelis 8y agoThere's some things that you should not even start doing until you're certain that you can do them properly from beginning to end. If that breaks your business model, then your business model was shit. This is why the "move fast and break things" ethos is a terrible idea for anything more substantial than social media. See Robinhood, Theranos, etc., etc.
- SamWhited 8y agoThat's no excuse for financial fraud.
- jdietrich 8y agoI'm reminded of mail-in rebates.
- brandnewlow 8y agoI am on the business team at Brave. We want people to collect and get paid. It's a huge part of why we come in to work every day, to work on stuff that helps creators get paid. I'm sure there's UI/UX stuff in Patreon that could be better. That doesn't mean they don't want creators to get paid. It just means there's room for improvement.
- dylz 8y agoPeople on Patreon intentionally wish to accept donations, while you hide their Patreon ads, links to their other sites, and replace it with your unwanted platform? You can't compare yourself with a service that _someone particularly opted into and wants and set up themselves_ with _misusing someone's brand to take money as an unauthorised third party, while at the same time blocking that person's intended messaging to collect money for themselves_
- Doctor_Fegg 8y agoRight. The sensible thing for any Patreon user to do would be blocking Brave based on UserAgent. Oh, turns out Brave doesn’t have its own UA: https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/brave-user-agent-detection https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/brave-user-agent-detection What a dishonest product.
- dylz 8y agoWow, this is even more dishonest than I thought. Intentional choice too, not a "forgot to update after forking x browser".
- bjl 8y agoCome on, man. The 'donation' UI was clearly designed to deceive visitors into thinking that the creator signed up and customized it themselves. Brave fucked up big time, and you aren't doing your employer any favors by commenting here; at this point the only people who should be making statements are Brave's lawyers.
- 8y ago
- russdpale 8y agoHonestly I would find it much easier to pay you in BAT fully but Ill be honest, that sounds like a pretty convoluted process.
- egypturnash 8y agoOh apparently they understand Twitch channels too, huzzah, ugh.
- egypturnash 8y agoSo I typed my domain into the setup thing and I got this: "Hello. It looks like you are using WordPress!" "Your domain is NOT using HTTPS.Uh oh! Your domain is NOT using HTTPS. You will need to fix that before continuing." "The following error was encountered: SSL_connect returned=1 errno=0 state=SSLv2/v3 read server hello A: sslv3 alert handshake failure" Why do I need to be using HTTPS before you'll think about paying me, Brave? I've been getting along posting comics on my HTTP site for an entire decade, and I'm really not interested in bothering to set that up. You are really not built with any understanding of the level of technical knowledge among people who make art, are you. And I'm unusually technical for an artist. Oh wait there is a 'choose different verification method'. I can place a trusted file in my domain? Nope. Requires HTTPS. Or I can add a record to my DNS settings; let's try that... looks like I gotta wait for the dns to propagate, that's always fun.
- brandnewlow 8y agoWe're always trying to make the verification process better. On the one hand, it's a pain. On the other, we don't want to let someone other than you pass themselves off as you. The DNS and HTML snippet methods are similar to how verification works for many of Googles publisher and advertiser services, for what it's worth. Sorry this has proven frustrating but I hope DNS updates for you soon!
- imustbeevil 8y ago> we don't want to let someone other than you pass themselves off as you Wait, but that's exactly what you're doing to Tom Scott by collecting money in his name after he's asked you not to.
- egypturnash 8y agoDNS still isn't updated, and I got signed out of my session on your site. I'll probably be signed out again by the time I check tomorrow, if I remember to.
- brandnewlow 8y agoI work at Brave on the business team. This is helpful feedback. Brave is a startup with a small team earnestly building a new thing that combines a browser with a tipping system, with creator tools, with ad blocking... it's ambitious! As it's a new thing, describing it can be messy sometimes. We're always working to make our language better and clearer though. Thank you for letting us know it fell short for you. To address a point: We know there's a lot of creators on a lot of platforms. At the moment, we've built support for creator channels in the form of web sites, Youtube channels and Twitch channels. When I joined this past summer I had the same reaction. "What about Tumblr? What about Twitter?" Each new platform takes time to write support for and we have a long list of features requests. We'll get there!
- jonahhorowitz 8y agoHere's the deal. If you want what you're proposing to work - you need to copy the model that Google briefly used with Google Contributor. Bid on the exchanges for the ads you want to block. Then serve cat pictures (or whatever). The creators will get paid through the existing payment infrastructure and you don't need to build an entirely parallel, opt-in system that will probably never gain enough traction to be worth using.
- Klathmon 8y agoI'm still amazed and saddened that the original Contributor didn't work out. It was such a great concept that would work all the way from first introduction to a hypothetical future where everyone uses this and nobody sees ads.
- jonahhorowitz 8y agoAgreed. That said, it's better if it's someone other than Google doing it. Google only has access to bid on the Google exchanges, but a 3rd party can bid on AppNexus, private exchanges (WSJ), etc.
- marcinzm 8y ago>Each new platform takes time to write support for and we have a long list of features requests. We'll get there! And until you write that support do you still take tips and send them to the whois account holder of the domain? Or do you block tips?
- dessant 8y agoMy 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.
- _0ffh 8y ago>I'd be surprised if this will be deemed legal I'm surprised how anyone could think this was a good idea, or even legal. What wouldn't surprise me is an incoming class action.
- GreaterFool 8y agoIANAL but I imagine that the donations are in brave tokens and it may or may not be treated as cash (even though the eventual payout is cash) which may or may not be legal depending on a lot of stuff that's beyond my area of expertise. But if the idea was to 1) create token and 2) YOLO and yeah, lawsuits incoming. But it could be that they have good lawyers and that it is actually legal (although as I write it I don't believe that, haha)
- jacques_chester 8y agoTrusteeship, tax laws and the like typically apply to anything of value, whether it's legally a currency or not. If the tokens are valueless, then what is it they're offering? If they have value, how are they excused from usual rules?
- londons_explore 8y ago
- smsm42 8y ago> makes it sound like they understand YouTube accounts and nothing else The text on the page - as I see it now - says "Do you run a web site or are you a YouTube creator". I think that doesn't say "YouTube accounts and nothing else", since it explicitly mentions "web site" before Youtube.
- egypturnash 8y agoThat's after a paragraph where I listed like five large sites with tons of users on them.
- mattferderer 8y agoIt's been a while since I started using Brave but I felt they were pretty up front with how the payments worked. I do understand the frustration though of those who don't see this. Brave could warn visitors donating when the content owner hasn't set up Brave Payments. Brave could refund said money back to the visitor if it goes unclaimed after a while. Just random ideas from someone who actually likes their attempt.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- jacques_chester 8y agoMy understanding is that automatically refunding as part of the agreement with the Brave user is probably workable. Even more workable is to be opt-in only. That's what I would do (to the point that I developed a protocol that's purely opt-in).
- brandnewlow 8y agoAfter all the very passionate feedback yesterday here and on Twitter, we're reworking things to make it clear who's participating in Brave Rewards and will receive tips and who's not and won't. We erred in shipping UI/UX that didn't make this clear enough. We're fixing this.
- davidgerard 8y agoYou erred in "opt-out" versus "opt-in". Literally your founder advocated this spammy method.
- alpacaarmy 8y agoI mean the founder created JavaScript. Can't expect a lot of good design from him, can we?
- brandnewlow 8y agoWe erred in making it appear non-participating creators had opted in at all when they have not.
- AndrewKemendo 8y agoWhen they first came up on HN, that was pretty much the chorus: Nice thought, but the implementation isn't practical.