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Brave taking cryptocurrency donations “for me” without my consent

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Re: Brave taking cryptocurrency donations “for me” without my consent

#81

Post by brandnewlow »

egypturnash wrote: post #42

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…

I 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!

Re: Brave taking cryptocurrency donations “for me” without my consent

#82

Post by dessant »

egypturnash wrote: post #42

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…

My 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.

Re: Brave taking cryptocurrency donations “for me” without my consent

#84

Post by the_clarence »

staticassertion wrote: post #68
duxup wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds so clumsy that I suspect they really don't care / want folks to fail to collect.

I think people may be forgetting that Brave is a very small, new company, and not everything is streamlined yet...

This. Tabs on the side has been their number one feature request for quite a while now. They're a pretty small team.

Re: Brave taking cryptocurrency donations “for me” without my consent

#85

Post by brandnewlow »

duxup wrote: post #50
egypturnash wrote: post #42

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…

That sounds so clumsy that I suspect they really don't care / want folks to fail to collect.

I 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.

Re: Brave taking cryptocurrency donations “for me” without my consent

#86

Post by jacques_chester »

> they said "we'll see what we can do" and that "refunds are impossible".

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.

The trustee-beneficiary relationship arises from the situation and does not require a contract to be formed. If you are the legal owner of assets "for the benefit of" someone else, congratulations, you are probably a trustee.

Why does this matter?

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 any circumstances. A pile of money that they must 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.

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.

... 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.

Re: Brave taking cryptocurrency donations “for me” without my consent

#87

Post by sftwds »

subway wrote: post #65
beering wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Containers add-on[0] for Firefox that Mozilla makes has satisfied my need for partitioning. It's on a per-tab basis and also lets you define certain domains to automatically open in a specific container (e.g. Jira always opens in my Work container). I can't really speak to Firefox's performance issues though. I feel like they're just as good on rendering and JS speed, but the overall UI doesn't have the same "fas…

Every time the containers add-on gets updated, it forgets all your preferences.

Really? Is that a known issue? I haven’t experienced that and I’ve been using containers on Firefox since they were introduced.

Re: Brave taking cryptocurrency donations “for me” without my consent

#88

Post by anonytrary »

aphextron wrote: post #9

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 d…

I noticed that, too. I tried to use Brave on mobile, and it ran about 5 times slower than Chrome. It's just not worth switching from Chrome IMHO.

Re: Brave taking cryptocurrency donations “for me” without my consent

#89

Post by brandnewlow »

egypturnash wrote: post #64
duxup wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds so clumsy that I suspect they really don't care / want folks to fail to collect.

Yeah I suspect this is part of their overall revenue model.

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.)

Re: Brave taking cryptocurrency donations “for me” without my consent

#90

Post by colordrops »

aphextron wrote: post #9

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 d…

Brave is open source where Vivaldi is not. Vivaldi seems to have some performance issues as well.

Aren't the Brave ads opt-in?

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