Who is me?
Tom Scott, an educational YouTuber. (I am not him, the title was changed by a mod I think)
[deleted]
Brave taking cryptocurrency donations “for me” without my consent
41–50 of 354 posts
Re: Brave taking cryptocurrency donations “for me” without my consent
#42I 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.
Re: Brave taking cryptocurrency donations “for me” without my consent
#43Brendan 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?
[0] https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1076187316748615680
Re: Brave taking cryptocurrency donations “for me” without my consent
#44Brendan Eich answers on Twitter: https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1076187316748615680 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
His tweet says, in part
> "... Tom has a point, we should let creators say "no thanks" and be auto-excluded. Users may already auto-exclude unverified sites/channels. We will work on this."
This makes your interpretation disingenuous, or uncharitable at best.
Re: Brave taking cryptocurrency donations “for me” without my consent
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've tried over and over for decades to like Firefox, but I just don't. I can't say it's a rational decision entirely. But beyond that, I just think that Mozilla's motives can't really be trusted at face value with the amount of revenue they have these days, and their whole profile sync service. It just comes down to incentives, and any company which collects any kind of data has the incentive to profit at our expens…
Is Mozilla run that lean even with >$500M in revenue?
The majority of that funding seems to come from royalties ($504M of $520M) [0]. What would be the leaner way of collecting those royalties?
[0] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2016/
Re: Brave taking cryptocurrency donations “for me” without my consent
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about the profile sync service can't be trusted? It's end-to-end encrypted. Mozilla doesn't have the keys.
It's just an attack vector I wish didn't exist at all. There's also metadata. Sure Mozilla doesn't have your passwords, but they know who you have passwords with. That creeps me out. There's nothing wrong with the all-purpose heavily featured approach of stuff like Chrome and Firefox, and I get that other people like Sync, I just really wish there was a totally stripped down basic internet browser I could trust.
Isn't profile sync opt-in?
Re: Brave taking cryptocurrency donations “for me” without my consent
#47Re: Brave taking cryptocurrency donations “for me” without my consent
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honest question. Why not Firefox? What are your concerns with it?
I've tried over and over for decades to like Firefox, but I just don't. I can't say it's a rational decision entirely. But beyond that, I just think that Mozilla's motives can't really be trusted at face value with the amount of revenue they have these days, and their whole profile sync service. It just comes down to incentives, and any company which collects any kind of data has the incentive to profit at our expens…
"Face value"? Try "source value".
What exactly is your problem with an opt-in service?
Re: Brave taking cryptocurrency donations “for me” without my consent
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
That rate limit isn't about pay walls. It's just twitter's desire to force mobile users to use their app. Every single time a mobile user goes to a non-mobile Twitter url, they will hit that "error". Given that it's 100% reproducible, trivial to fix, and trivial to work around (hit reload. No wait needed), it's clear that they just don't want people to use their web browser on mobile devices.
Reload never seems to work for me. I give up after 1 or 2 reload tries, though. > it's clear that they just don't want people to use their web browser on mobile devices. Which is clearly user hostile. Reddit does a similar thing whwre they artificially delay showing thebpage and then block a quarter of it with a banner asking you to use the mobile app.
Oh, not the button it offers to try again. That button is junk. Hit reload on your browser. That works every time, at least in my experience.
Re: Brave taking cryptocurrency donations “for me” without my consent
#50I 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…
That sounds so clumsy that I suspect they really don't care / want folks to fail to collect.