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.)
You're taking money for people without a good way of getting it to them (or ensuring that they want the money at all).
My friend Mark had an accident and I think he needs help paying for it. Would you give me some money to help Mark pay for his medical bills? Thank you, I'll just put it in my bank account until Mark asks me for the it.
Trust me, I'm trying very hard to let Mark know I have money for him. I'm going to send a letter to his parent's house so he knows that I have money for him, but only when I get $100. In the mean time I'll just hold on to the money.
Oh Mark never got the money you gave me to give to him?
Well, you only gave me $75 so I never sent him a letter.
Well, it turns out Mark isn't on speaking terms with his parents, so he never got the letter.
Well, he has health insurance and didn't need the money after all.
Where's the money now? I guess it's still in my bank account. No you can't have it back.
i'm thinking about starting to accept money on behalf of Hollywood stars like say Tom Cruise. Once $10M is collected (obviously there is no point in bothering Tom with lesser sums) i will do my best to deliver the money to him.
We shipped a UI/UX that was confusing. We originally used checkmarks to denote creators participating in the program but did not have clear language or markers for creators not participating in then program. Many have pointed out the problem with that, which is helpful!
That's all being updated now and will hopefully roll out very soon. We've heard the feedback and will make sure no creator assets are used for non-verified creators, that it's clear non-participating creators are not in fact participating, and that any tips sent their way will not in fact reach them unless they choose to participate. We're also adding more clarification around what happens to funds "tipped" to non-participating creators.
We want it to be clear if Mark is part of Brave Rewards or not.
Why do you even allow donations to "non-verified" websites at all? As far as I can tell, there really isn't any legitimate reason for this, other than forcing website owners to sign up for your payment system.
This is a fair question that's being discussed internally as a consequence of the feedback we're hearing from everyone.
Brave is about to push up a number of hotfixes to our code that address people's concerns. You can read about them here: https://brave.com/rewards-update/
You'll see an express commitment to consider whether to completely block out tips to unverified creators/publishers. That's not a thing we could fix overnight but we're acknowledging it might be the best move and committing to looking into it.
>Where's the money now? I guess it's still in my bank account. No you can't have it back.
Except the money goes back to the Brave user pool and ends up in the hands of creators who have opted to participate. Brave's hope is that every content creator will eventually register to collect what's theirs. Their business model depends on it.
Before judging, please read their materials (and examine their pedigree). It's pretty clear they are thinking much, much bigger than what you're accusing them of. This a Google level play, not some two-bit micro-transaction scam (if anything, it's a little bit too ambitious).
This all goes without even mentioning the huge privacy gains to be had for end users if their model works. I encourage you to have a look into that as well if it's a topic you're interested in.
Time will tell if they succeed or fail. But if they fail, at least they'll do so "while daring greatly".
So people can donate to person X but if they don't claim it in time, the money is given away to all the other users that are using the service? That seems really shady to me that donations would be redirected like that. Either keep the money in escrow forever or don't take unsolicited donations without the person's consent in the first place.
Your UI really looks like Tom Scott has signed up to receive donations through you, not like you've scraped his photo and name off twitter and written a fundraising plea with zero mention that he's never heard of you and that you won't even try to contact him until $100 accumulates and then only half-assedly.
For most of us this is our first exposure to your model and UI, so that has set a very negative expectation. This looks like a scam and I'm now trying to figure out how to know if you've scammed any of my users without doing anything like installing Brave or signing up because your metrics probably count that as success rather than suspicion.
Also: your responses here, and Brendan Eich's on Twitter, seem to assume you are somewhere in the general brand feel of the EFF or Firefox. That this is a big misunderstanding of a clearly well-intentioned feature from familiar volunteers to the public interest.
You're nowhere near them. You're in the same mental headspace as ICO scams because you're also promising that if we give your cryptocurrency a bit of money the riches will rain down for everyone. You need to radically change your rhetorical approaches to this PR disaster (not to mention this "feature") if you hope to start building trust.
We've just published a post detailing the changes we're making to our UI in response to all the great criticism and feedback from the last 24 hours: https://brave.com/rewards-update/
These changes will make it very very clear when creators are not participating in Brave Rewards and will ensure no creator assets are being used.
In response to your other comments, I feel good assuming we're somewhere in the general brand feel of the EFF and Firefox. Brave has never once told people to speculate on the price of BAT (we get asked to do so about once a day and refuse because that's not what we're about). Also, yeah, we've shipped a browser used by 5m people a month around the world. There's a long way to go still but it's a start.
> In response to your other comments, I feel good assuming we're somewhere in the general brand feel of the EFF and Firefox.
That's laughable. Trust me, among the people who know about Brave at all, you're associated more with Dentacoin and Bitconnect than EFF and Mozilla. I expect you'll have a rude awakening when you're searching for your next job and people decide they don't want to hire a scam artist.
That doesn't just look like a scam. That is a scam. You can't just go collecting for causes without being empowered to do so. It's the same as people that go door to door collecting money for some charity when they are actually just going to spend it on their own stuff.
Hi Jacquesm. We had no intention to scam people. We shipped a confusing UI that should have been better thought out. In response to all the passionate feedback from creators our product team worked around the clock to push up a bunch of hotfixes that should go live tomorrow. You can read about them here: https://brave.com/rewards-update/
Thanks for jumping into the conversation. Also thanks for all the stories on HN over the years.
The UI isn't the only problem. Take your blinders off. People don't want to be opted into a service like this. I believe it was intentional to make it "look" like everyone is already a part of this (see facebook's creating "shadow accounts" so people think everyone is already on there). This is a scammy move and you need to stop. If you don't think you can get your foot in the door in a new market space legitimately then just stick to making a browser and leave tips/funding to Patreon and others.
That's not true. We spent a lot of time designing the UI for verified creators and did not spend adequate time thinking through the UI for unverified creators. The changes being rolled out tomorrow will address the concerns that have been voiced. No one will look like they are participating in the program who isn't.
We agree it's confusing and are shipping updates very soon that will make it clear, driven by all the feedback we've received here and on Twitter. We didn't set out to confuse people but clearly we did. Not our intention. We will do better.
You invite users to donate to regularly purchase your cryptoassets whilst designing a dark pattern UX which indicates the cryptoassets are being distributed in a certain ratio amongst YouTubers and other content creators. Your website also falsely claims to be sending these assets to these content creators once a month and falsely claims that browser users can see how the assets have been distributed using this UX. In fact, only a small portion of the assets are actually distributed, and the browser user has no way of knowing whether their intended recipients receive anything.
Your investors are rewarded by the cryptoasset price rising from more people buying the tokens than selling them.
Do you honestly not see the problem here?
And that's even before we get into the TOC which explicitly permit you to confiscate funds not claimed within 90 days for growth marketing use....
We do see a problem here. It's unclear why people are assuming it was intentionally done vs. just poorly thought out UI.
We've spent a lot of time discussing the feedback from threads like this and tomorrow a bunch of changes will go live. Please take a look at this blog post detailing them: https://brave.com/rewards-update/
Even if Brave has the best interests of everyone at heart, this kind of thing has been tried many times and nobody is ever happy with it.
If the person doesn't want to make money from their fans, that's their choice and it's not cool to possibly mislead fans into thinking the person is taking their money.
It's a pain for people to have to constantly monitor all the random sites collecting money "for them". New services are popping up all the time, how are people supposed to keep track? No, Brave is not going to be able to find the correct way of contacting everyone.
If your service is great, why not make it opt-in and advertise it? Patreon succeeds because people want to sign up and make money from it when they're ready to do that. I believe you're all trying to do their right thing and not take anybody's money fraudulently but this isn't the right thing.
We've just posted up a rundown on the changes we're implementing in response to feedback from threads like this. Please give it a look and see where it lands for you: https://brave.com/rewards-update/
We shipped confusing, poorly thought out UI, got a bunch of negative but really thoughtful feedback, and are moving quickly to get things fixed.
Basically it feels like you are saying "we will take donations for you but tell you we are getting them in the most obscure ways possible, and we will certainly not make it easy for you to claim them".
Or to couch it in the form of a GenX nerd reference: if you're taking donations in my name, you're telling me about them by putting a note to that effect in a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard".
Realistically, I would say it'd look a lot less suspicious if you stopped taking donations for people until they have actually opted in. I'm on Patreon because one of my fans said "hey I really wanna start giving you money for your comics, would you set up a Patreon?", not because Patreon found my stuff and set up a tip jar for me.
Also automate the payouts, if I have ads on my stuff then I get money every so often as long as I've accumulated more than the minimum payout, but I have to remember to go check with Brave? Come on, it can't be more than a couple day's hacking to give a creator the option to say "pay me every month if I'm above $minimum_payout". (And if this is a thing you can now set up to happen regularly, there are webpages that need to be updated to reflect this.)
You're taking money on peoples' behalf without their knowledge or permission.
What the fuck more is there to understand?
Here's the bright ethical line: don't accept any money unless you can be assured that you can provide it to the beneficiary. At least failing that, make it abundantly clear to donators that there's no reason whatsoever to expect the funds to actually go to the recipient.
The moral hazard is blindingly obvious: the worse you are at getting funds to where they should go, the more money you make.
This is going viral and it's time to talk to your lawyer about your personal liability in this clusterfuck.
We've shipped a bunch of hotfixes to our UI in response to this thread and others. You can read about them here: https://brave.com/rewards-update/
Thanks for your feedback. We shipped UI that sent the wrong message about unverified creators. Understood. We're hustling to get fixes in place and talking more about what we can and should be doing.
You'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?
Not 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/
Thank 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).
Why would I suspect anything else with the way it's presented?
Presumably you'd be entirely happy if I made a fork of Chromium or addon that asked for donations on every Brave related site and personality.
I'd try and tell you via whois data (even when it's twitter and YT that doesn't have whois lookup for end users) when the amount passed $20k. I'd go with $100, but as it's a side project I can't yet add a system to manage smaller donations. It's on the todo list.
You can withdraw funds earlier if you ever happen to randomly discover I'm collecting donations for you. Otherwise I'll sit on it to help with development and hosting costs. Thanks.
Brave Co would be happy with this and would not resort to lawyers?
We agree our UI sends the wrong message. We're pushing up a bunch of fixes to make it clearer tomorrow. You can read about them here: https://brave.com/rewards-update/
This almost sounds like something that belongs on /r/fellowkids. Combined with the description in your profile with the whole "I'm on HN to learn from people out there in the trenches" line makes it all come across very badly IMO. (Written from mobile Brave and love the built in script and ad-blocking, but I honestly think you'd be better off addressing some of the concerns here rather than sidling up and saying "hey I'm one of you"
All of the other comments have described (much better than I can) why this is likely some kind of fraud (and definitely unethical).
I wanted to comment on the "fellow nerd" trope -- I don't see why it matters that you (or the majority of Brave) are nerdy. That doesn't mean you are somehow incapable of acting unethically or committing fraud. Many of our "fellow nerds" have broken the law. It doesn't diminish their intelligence, but it does reflect on their morality.
We've just published a blog post listing then many changes we're pushing up tomorrow to address concerns in this thread and on Twitter; https://brave.com/rewards-update/
As it says in the post, we're definitely planning to talk about whether to block attempts to tip unverified creators altogether.
Not specifically. But yes, fellow people should be given the benefit of the doubt in my opinion. I was asking if Brave had done something to merit not getting that.
A company collecting charitable donations? No, that deserves immediate scrutiny. Your business model is beyond sketchy. You're approaching this with an affronted "but we're all nerds here!"
It doesn't matter if you're a nerd working for a crook, a crook claiming to be a nerd, or just a crooked nerd. But the business model has a smell and if you don't recognize it then you're merely complicit.
This whole episode is a case study of the way people who have convinced themselves they're doing something positive for humanity can find moral justifications for any transgressions along the way.
