Don't use Brave. Tell others not to use it.
>What happens if you send a tip to an unverified creator?
I click “tip” for my YouTube channel, and the screen below comes up. The “Learn more” link goes to the Brave FAQ, which says that no funds leave the browser until the creator verifies — but admits that previous versions of Brave worked differently, and sent the tokens to Brave in the hope that the creator would sign up at some point.
It would seem this is possibly no longer the case, I'd love an update on it.
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.
He is expressing skepticism towards their original intentions and you like how they responded. No need to talk past each other.
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.
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".
But I'm still willing to forgive if I think the course-correction is adequate, which in this case it was.
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), 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
Just because someone can collect the money/currency at a later date doesn't make it fine. If I collected money on behalf of charities yet only gave the money to the charity if they explicitly asked me for it, I doubt that would go down well with donors.
I could even use the situation to my advantage by gaining interest on the donations in the time between it is donated and I pass it on. I suspect Brave was benefiting in a similar way - all the donated money would not be traded while Brave were holding onto it, creating a scarcity which would benefit BAT's prices.
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.
Brave runs on the exact same ad model as Chrome, they just inserted themselves as the middle man. There's no actual value provided here and it's basically just "big corporate bad" marketing
You couldn't be more mistaken here. I covered the history of digital advertising and the introduction of Brave's model here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsrrT502luI.
In short, Brave's model is largely the inversion of Google's model. With Brave, users must opt-in. Google doesn't ask you to opt-in. With Brave, user data remains on device. Google requires the remote collection of your data, as well as the broadcasting of it to third-parties. With Brave, users decide when and how many ads they will be shown. Google shows you as many as they can get away with. With Brave, user's collect 70% of the revenue for their participation. Google gives you nothing, but takes quite a bit. With Brave, Brave Software learns nothing about you, your interests, or your browsing history. Google learns quite a bit about you, harvesting as much data as they can get away with, and using it across contexts and domains.
And as to Brave's model of pooling users and preserving anonimity, isn't this exactly what Google's FLoC is? As far as I'm aware the dreaded third party cookies seem to be on their way out. I'll give Brave props for being a frontrunner on this, but that's not an inversion of Google's model, this appears to be exactly where everyone is going.
I think you're misunderstanding how Brave's anonymity works. We don't rely on something like k-anonymity where we hide users behind some common cohort ID. Suffice it to say, we're not big fans of FLoC: https://brave.com/why-brave-disables-floc/. Brave's anonymity is based on the inversion of the flow of data. Rather than collecting information about users, Brave transmits data from advertisers to the user's device for local scrutiny.
Google is in no way moving towards the Brave model; it they are far too dependent on user data, IMHO. Brave, on the other hand, was born with a Can't be Evil mindset; every step of the way we have built the application and service to preclude abuse and overreach.
Out of all chromes of Chrome I have sampled, Brave has the best visual polish. Best regards to your UI/UX design team.