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Lots of people are pointing out that this isn't the case anymore, but the fact is that it used to work this way, and they only changed it after backlash. That w

Lots of people are pointing out that this isn't the case anymore, but the fact is that it used to work this way, and they only changed it after backlash. That was enough to turn me off of Brave forever.

fastball 5y ago
Yeah, I too dislike it when companies respond positively in response to criticism. I prefer the orgs I interact with to be perfect and never make mistakes and when they do (but they don't because I only interact with perfect institutions) I prefer them to double-down instead of improve.
- monetus 5y ago
  Your hyperbole seems to be purposefully taking the parent post in bad faith. He is expressing skepticism towards their original intentions and you like how they responded. No need to talk past each other.
  - fastball 5y ago
    I don't agree. GC cannot speak to their intentions, so at the end of the day this is just holding them to a standard that it is unreasonable to ever hold any institution to. Humans make mistakes and organizations are comprised of humans. What matters is how they address such mistakes, which I've only seen positive improvement from Brave.
- CharlesW 5y ago
  The point is that Brave can't be trusted by default. It's nice that they roll back dark patterns when they're caught by people like Tom Scott, I guess?
  - fastball 5y ago
    I think there is a difference between an imperfect implementation of something that has never been done before (especially when your competition is an adtech giant oligopoly) and "dark patterns". Worth pointing out that part of the reason it was hard to just refund people who donated to non-verified creators was Brave actually caring about privacy, so the donations in question were completely anonymous. So when it was pointed out that it's still a problem, they came up with a solution that I think strikes a good balance.
    - CharlesW 5y ago
      > So when it was pointed out that it's still a problem, they came up with a solution that I think strikes a good balance. Fair enough. To me, it couldn't have been more obvious that collecting "money" in creators' names and also misrepresenting that was Bad™. I'll try to be gracious and chalk this up to "lack of common sense" instead of "part of the evil plan".
      - fastball 5y ago
        Actually I'm less charitable than "lack of common sense" and chalk it up to hubris – I think what happened is that they couldn't really imagine why someone wouldn't want to accept donations from their viewers/consumers, regardless of source, and so just defaulted to collecting for everyone assuming everyone would love to hop on board the BAT train. This of course turned out not to be the case for various reasons and yes is pretty obvious in hindsight. But I'm still willing to forgive if I think the course-correction is adequate, which in this case it was.
        jonathansampson 5y ago
        The BAT that was moving around at that time was from Brave. We allocated hundreds of millions of tokens back in 2017 to a User Growth Pool. We distributed tokens to users of the Brave Browser, and allowed them to send those tokens off to their favorite content creators. This is similar to how PayPal lets you email money to anybody, even if they aren't signed up on PayPal. Our thought here was that users could effectively earmark the BAT they received from us, and that creators could sign up and claim those tokens. We identified verified creators as such, but didn't make the non-verified state as explicit. We largely followed a similar pattern to that of Twitter (checkmark for those who are verified, and nothing for those who aren't). When you visited a YouTube channel, website, etc., we would show you the name and favicon for that resource in the tipping UI. In the case of some YouTube channels, the page name was just the YouTuber's name, and their favicon was a picture of their face. The changes that Tom Scott and others suggested back in 2018 were ground-breaking. They helped us realize some naïve decisions in the UI/UX of the tipping process and more. We moved quickly to implement those changes (https://brave.com/rewards-update https://brave.com/rewards-update), and the entire system is now substantially better as a result. But there was never any ill-motive involved. We had BAT, and we wanted users to give it to their favorite creators. Tom Scott approved of the changes at the time, which was a nice way to wrap things up
- rideontime 5y ago
  When somebody shows you who they are, believe them.
drusepth 5y ago
Yeah; from what I can tell, Brave's history is basically a long list of: 1. Do something shady and/or incompetent to make money 2. Ignore an internet backlash calling them out for it 3. "Fix" said shady thing 4. From then on out, aggressively deny doing that thing everywhere it's mentioned, without acknowledging that it used to be the case Brave seems like an adequate browser for some niche use cases and probably has some cool tech. I do not trust the company or people behind it to have my best intentions in mind. It definitely feels like they like to constantly push boundaries, and not in a good way.

fastball 5y ago

Yeah, I too dislike it when companies respond positively in response to criticism. I prefer the orgs I interact with to be perfect and never make mistakes and when they do (but they don't because I only interact with perfect institutions) I prefer them to double-down instead of improve.

monetus 5y ago
Your hyperbole seems to be purposefully taking the parent post in bad faith. He is expressing skepticism towards their original intentions and you like how they responded. No need to talk past each other.
- fastball 5y ago
  I don't agree. GC cannot speak to their intentions, so at the end of the day this is just holding them to a standard that it is unreasonable to ever hold any institution to. Humans make mistakes and organizations are comprised of humans. What matters is how they address such mistakes, which I've only seen positive improvement from Brave.
CharlesW 5y ago
The point is that Brave can't be trusted by default. It's nice that they roll back dark patterns when they're caught by people like Tom Scott, I guess?
- fastball 5y ago
  I think there is a difference between an imperfect implementation of something that has never been done before (especially when your competition is an adtech giant oligopoly) and "dark patterns". Worth pointing out that part of the reason it was hard to just refund people who donated to non-verified creators was Brave actually caring about privacy, so the donations in question were completely anonymous. So when it was pointed out that it's still a problem, they came up with a solution that I think strikes a good balance.
  - CharlesW 5y ago
    > So when it was pointed out that it's still a problem, they came up with a solution that I think strikes a good balance. Fair enough. To me, it couldn't have been more obvious that collecting "money" in creators' names and also misrepresenting that was Bad™. I'll try to be gracious and chalk this up to "lack of common sense" instead of "part of the evil plan".
    - fastball 5y ago
      Actually I'm less charitable than "lack of common sense" and chalk it up to hubris – I think what happened is that they couldn't really imagine why someone wouldn't want to accept donations from their viewers/consumers, regardless of source, and so just defaulted to collecting for everyone assuming everyone would love to hop on board the BAT train. This of course turned out not to be the case for various reasons and yes is pretty obvious in hindsight. But I'm still willing to forgive if I think the course-correction is adequate, which in this case it was.
      - jonathansampson 5y ago
        The BAT that was moving around at that time was from Brave. We allocated hundreds of millions of tokens back in 2017 to a User Growth Pool. We distributed tokens to users of the Brave Browser, and allowed them to send those tokens off to their favorite content creators. This is similar to how PayPal lets you email money to anybody, even if they aren't signed up on PayPal. Our thought here was that users could effectively earmark the BAT they received from us, and that creators could sign up and claim those tokens. We identified verified creators as such, but didn't make the non-verified state as explicit. We largely followed a similar pattern to that of Twitter (checkmark for those who are verified, and nothing for those who aren't). When you visited a YouTube channel, website, etc., we would show you the name and favicon for that resource in the tipping UI. In the case of some YouTube channels, the page name was just the YouTuber's name, and their favicon was a picture of their face. The changes that Tom Scott and others suggested back in 2018 were ground-breaking. They helped us realize some naïve decisions in the UI/UX of the tipping process and more. We moved quickly to implement those changes (https://brave.com/rewards-update https://brave.com/rewards-update), and the entire system is now substantially better as a result. But there was never any ill-motive involved. We had BAT, and we wanted users to give it to their favorite creators. Tom Scott approved of the changes at the time, which was a nice way to wrap things up
rideontime 5y ago
When somebody shows you who they are, believe them.

drusepth 5y ago

Yeah; from what I can tell, Brave's history is basically a long list of: 1. Do something shady and/or incompetent to make money 2. Ignore an internet backlash calling them out for it 3. "Fix" said shady thing 4. From then on out, aggressively deny doing that thing everywhere it's mentioned, without acknowledging that it used to be the case Brave seems like an adequate browser for some niche use cases and probably has some cool tech. I do not trust the company or people behind it to have my best intentions in mind. It definitely feels like they like to constantly push boundaries, and not in a good way.