I just dug up info on how Brave’s contributions thing works and it feels like such a mess.<p>According to <a href="https://brave.com/publishers/" rel="nofollow">https://brave.com/publishers/</a><p>- 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.<p>- 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.<p>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?<p>The page where you sign up to receive payments (<a href="https://publishers.basicattentiontoken.org" rel="nofollow">https://publishers.basicattentiontoken.org</a>) 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.
Brendan Eich's defense of this scheme [0] seems a bit weak to me. Do you really think the solution is to make creators opt out? What in the world makes you think it's okay to represent people who have not asked for your assistance and take donations on their behalf? Why is it their responsibility to ask you nicely not to use their name to solicit donations?<p>[0] <a href="https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1076187316748615680" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1076187316748615680</a>
My basic objection to the "opt-out" scheme is that my browser is effectively acting as a man-in-the-middle agent, confusing both the reader and the author, and co-opting any existing compensation or donation procedure.<p>For example, consider <a href="http://www.vim.org" rel="nofollow">http://www.vim.org</a>, which hosts the text editor Vim. The author, Bram Moolenaar, makes this editor freely-available, and asks that any donations be directed to ICCF Holand, a charity that serves the Kibaale Children's Center in Uganda.<p>The Brave browser, as it stands now, inserts itself in the middle of this established reader/contributor relationship and now claims that it'll take your donations and administer them on Bram's behalf. The user who falls for this scheme then sees what appears to be _additional_ requests for donations (the _actual_ request). _At a minimum_, this inserted message sows confusion where there once was none. In the worst case, money that would have gone to the ICCF is now held in escrow by Brave, and may or may not be delivered, and if so, will go to Bram directly rather than to the charity he hopes to support.<p>This is just one example of how the browser intercepting and modifying what you see is a truly bad design (intentional or not).
I'd been really loving Brave and using it as my daily driver for a few months now, until that I noticed that little "Brave Ads" icon at the end of the address bar. That's when I realized their entire business model is just in the usurpation of existing Google ad revenue, dressed up with "privacy concerns" for the good PR. This sent me on a journey to find a really solid, free, Chromium based browser that is totally de-Googled, which seems absolutely impossible. I've tacitly settled on Vivaldi, but it's just impossible to really know if they are trustworthy as a company in the long run. Ultimately I feel like I can only trust a browser who's entire build process is open source at this point.
> <i>they said "we'll see what we can do" and that "refunds are impossible".</i><p>If a judge finds they've established themselves as a trustee, this argument won't fly. In fact it will make a quite spectacular and expensive thudding sound.<p>The trustee-beneficiary relationship arises from the situation and <i>does not require a contract</i> to be formed. If you are the legal owner of assets "for the benefit of" someone else, congratulations, you are probably a trustee.<p>Why does this matter?<p>Because trusteeship comes with a fiduciary duty. Fiduciary duty is a heavy burden. If it's applied to Brave it will create merry havoc: a pile of money that they cannot touch, under <i>any</i> circumstances. A pile of money that they <i>must</i> return, if it cannot be forwarded to the intended recipient. A pile of money that cannot be mixed with anything else in any way. The requirement to put the interests of the beneficiary ahead of their own. And on and on.<p>It's an attempt to be clever at marketing, to create an incentive to sign up. But as a legal situation it's a swamp full of unstable turd grenades.<p>... of course, I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. Maybe Brave found a friendly jurisdiction or a quirk in trusts law that they can squeeze through. But given the history of startups wishing that law doesn't real, I kinda doubt it.
Edit: title was changed, I am not Tom Scott<p>I am not too familiar with how Brave and BAT (Brave Attention Token), so please chime in. Here's how Brave describes the BAT YouTube donations system: <a href="https://basicattentiontoken.org/brave-expands-basic-attention-token-platform-to-youtube" rel="nofollow">https://basicattentiontoken.org/brave-expands-basic-attentio...</a><p>From my understanding, users of the Brave Browser select which YouTubers to donate to, but they don't know whether the channels have opted in to receive donations? What does Brave do with unclaimed donations? Someone pointed out this concern in an earlier submission: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15730661" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15730661</a><p>Furthermore, OP said that they might not be following GDPR due to collection of YouTuber data (to assign donations). IANAL, anyone know how compliant this is?
Brave is a web browser that takes your money and claims to pay out to your favorite websites and content creators, but in most cases actually pays into a "user growth pool" that funds pyramid-shaped marketing (paying users to use the browser) and referral programs for partner content creators. How is that not fraud?
To anyone who has mistakenly "donated" to someone through this service, here's a link to the FTC complaint assistant for reporting fraud, namely "Pretending to be a representative or employee of a business". You don't have to be a lawyer to let the FTC decide whether this is misleading marketing or not.<p>I honestly like the BAT idea. This is not the way to implement it, and based on the responses from Eich on twitter, and the representative in this thread, it seems like they aren't going to willingly change their scheme.<p><a href="https://www.ftccomplaintassistant.gov/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ftccomplaintassistant.gov/</a>
“Brave” is just a blatant protection racket, trying to strongarm people that want nothing to do with him into contracts dictated by Eich.<p>On the user-facing side, he’s replacing ads with his own, like a cheap motel WiFi. If you trust this blatant power- and money-grab with your privacy just because you see common cause with his mission to see traditional journalism die, I won’t shed a tear when we find out he’s selling clickstreams to the highest bidder.
If anyone's wondering what got Tom Scott so upset, it was probably this page in the UI flow:<p><a href="https://twitter.com/JTremback/status/1076213808706641925" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/JTremback/status/1076213808706641925</a>
This is the same growing pain that all the Git tip services went through. First, they accepted tips on behalf of repo maintainers on Github with the intention of letting those maintainers collect their tips later, then after a huge backlash they made it opt-in.<p>This cycle will repeat for any service that allows a platform to collect payments on behalf of users without asking the recipients for consent in advance.
If this person doesn't want his donations, or wants people to donate to some fund against malaria, I'm sure Brave can figure out how to redirect his funds to another donation site of his choice as a feature.<p>Brave's attempt to find a new way to pay content creators (and, sure, insert themselves into the process) seems to be in good faith. And I'll admit that the complaints are mostly in good faith too, especially that there should be a feature to opt-out, or there should be a way to receive your funds automatically (I'm surprised and don't 100% believe that there is not).<p>But the complaints and arguments saying this is "fraud" seem to be in bad faith. There's no evidence that these donations are completely irretrievable from the creators they were intended to go toward. Stop emotionally throwing around the word "fraud" as if there's criminal intent here for Brave to keep every penny of donations, zero intent to ever make that money available to the intended recipients.
Brendan Eich answers on Twitter: <a href="https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1076187316748615680" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1076187316748615680</a><p>basically he plans to keep it working the way it works now, "opt out" and all - he's confident this is a completely legal way to work
I hate to say I told you so, but I told you so[1], and it looks like eichs tune hasn't changed much[2].<p>It's like, very obvious that this would be an issue.<p>[1]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15723512" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15723512</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15735214" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15735214</a>
Brave is using the "opt-out" method used by tip4commit in 2014: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8542969" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8542969</a><p>From the comments there, a lot of projects dealt with that one by acting against such an abuse of their trademarks.
Hey guys I'm collecting donations for the Brave Browser to implement the BAT scheme responsibly. We've discovered some issues with it and think it needs overhauling. Please donate to<p>Standard Chartered Bank, Frankfurt, Germany; SWIFT/BIC Code: SCBLDEFX<p>IBAN: DE67512305000500136802<p>Beneficiary Name: SVB-Mozilla Foundation<p>You're helping a great project that way! (Note: You might not actually be donating to the Brave Browser directly and some of the funds may go to other projects.)
It does indeed sound like a mess.<p>Keybase had a better idea: tie various identities to something stronger (private key). That way you can say: I'm X on reddit, Y on HN, Z on YouTube, etc. I think Brave could follow the same model, just make it seamless (or partner with Keybase).<p>You could take it further. Why one and not multiple owners? Imagine you have a handle H on HN and then that handle publishes 5 messages of "My public key is XYZ". Then if someone were to donate to H through the system you could split it between participants.<p>And you could run with that! Why even split if you could build some crypto system of control on top of that through smart contracts that lets you basically manage a small organization.
Is this de-platform proof?
eg, if <insert-controversial-site-or-person> - and they got lots of complaints for triggering <whatever-major-taboo-thing> - can the payments to gab,storm,badguy,badgirl,camgirl etc get stopped from brave or get brave stopped from taking payments all together from higher up the chain or whatever?
Is there actual money involved? I have 60 BAT in my Brave account, and I didn't pay a dime to anybody. Yet, looks like I can donate them. Not sure I understand how the system works - am I supposed to eventually buy BAT tokens if I want to donate them?
Stop you're crashing my BAT investments! /s<p><a href="https://screenshots.firefox.com/tqACbxJj731kH7Ri/pro.coinbase.com" rel="nofollow">https://screenshots.firefox.com/tqACbxJj731kH7Ri/pro.coinbas...</a>
Brave jumped the shark when they chose to prioritize an ICO and "revolutionize ads" over core browser functionality. They are now ironically spinning their own flavor of making the user the product. Just say no. Uninstall.
Instead of taking donations for other people, we here at ClearCoin replace all the ads you see with ads from our network that reward the user with our crypto token, and content creators can opt-in to share in the profit.<p>Chrome Extension: <a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/clearcoin-the-ad-blocker/benncgglohdbeapbakcebdobkdbkdcba" rel="nofollow">https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/clearcoin-the-ad-b...</a>
Given that some people will give money to any basic bitcoin scam in twitter, I'm not surprised<p>But yeah, the whole situation is ridiculous, might be grounds for a nice lawsuit.
People could do something similar for open source projects: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736006" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736006</a>
I don't totally understand what his problem is. He doesn't want to take money that people are trying to give him? What is the problem here exactly? If he doesn't want it, why not just donate it or something?<p>It's not like the browser is setting up a crowd funding page for you.. it just lets you know you can pay your favorite content creators how you want instead of a huge unfair chunk going to google.<p>And for the record, and of you are free to send me money in any which way you can, I even accept trained pigeon courier!
They are not taking cryptocurrency "donations" they are taking user contributions. If the creator doesn't want them then I, as a user, have agreed that they go into the "User Growth Pool". In my opinion I don't really care if the creator has signed up or not, as a consumer I have decided I would rather pay for content using Brave's system rather then being forced to use the incrediably intrusive and malicious tracking based ad system of the traditional web ecosystem. If a creator doesn't like it they can block me from watching their content. I will not subject myself to their abuse of my data.<p>The real issue here is that consumers are using the same tactics creators have used since the first ads appeared on the internet, and now the content creators are upset. If they don't like the new rules then block me, some sites have already done that with Ad Blockers and paywalls.
People complain about paywalls, but this is literally the first Twitter link I've looked at in days and I get a rate limiting error. I don't mind paywalls, but wish micropayments we're easier. Whatever anti-user stuff Twitter has been up to (this isn't a new problem) is just atrocious.
Venmo has been doing this forever: <a href="https://help.venmo.com/hc/en-us/articles/217532047-I-paid-a-New-User-" rel="nofollow">https://help.venmo.com/hc/en-us/articles/217532047-I-paid-a-...</a>
No way is this going to fly under GDPR. Whatever genius had this idea needs to be held accountable legally for a massive breach of trust. Opt out isn't going to fly in 2018. Collecting money on the behalf of individuals is fine IF they opt in to the service. I imagine this service would have exploded in popularity and been perfectly legal if it was opt in but now.. Yeah.. heads should roll.
How would it work otherwise? How would we automate consent from the relevant webmaster, website owner, etc? It seems like we wouldn't be able to successful communicate with the principal in many or most cases.<p>I've thought of something vaguely similar – documenting website behavior and optimization opportunities without the involvement of publishers. It would be nice to have a known online resource/repository for this, kind of like the security vulnerability communication website that I can't remember at the moment.