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Comment by fastball | Hacker News Reader

I think there is a difference between an imperfect implementation of something that has never been done before (especially when your competition is an adtech giant oligopoly) and "dark patterns".

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.

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> 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".

Actually I'm less charitable than "lack of common sense" and chalk it up to hubris – I think what happened is that they couldn't really imagine why someone wouldn't want to accept donations from their viewers/consumers, regardless of source, and so just defaulted to collecting for everyone assuming everyone would love to hop on board the BAT train. This of course turned out not to be the case for various reasons and yes is pretty obvious in hindsight.

But I'm still willing to forgive if I think the course-correction is adequate, which in this case it was.

The BAT that was moving around at that time was from Brave. We allocated hundreds of millions of tokens back in 2017 to a User Growth Pool. We distributed tokens to users of the Brave Browser, and allowed them to send those tokens off to their favorite content creators. This is similar to how PayPal lets you email money to anybody, even if they aren't signed up on PayPal. Our thought here was that users could effectively earmark the BAT they received from us, and that creators could sign up and claim those tokens.

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

The difference with emailing money on PayPal is that the recipient is notified. Brave was collecting currency on behalf of people without even notifying them.

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.

You're missing one of the earliest points in my response; the tokens people were "sending" to creators [were from Brave]. We gave the user 5 BAT and asked them who they'd like to support with it. User's could pick a creator, and we would work on notifying that creator that [BAT from Brave had been directed towards them by Brave users]. All of that aside, the feedback from users around this time was phenomenal, and helped us redesign the system into something substantially better.

Ah OK, I thought they were able to donate BAT they earnt from ads, that is definitely different. Still misleading, but better.

We didn't have the ability to earn from ad-notifications at that time. These events and changes (https://brave.com/rewards-update/) predate the launch of Brave Ads, which we introduced in April of 2019 (https://brave.com/brave-ads-launch/). I wouldn't say "misleading," as this suggests deliberate deceit. Our UI/UX was nascent, and naïve. The feedback we received was timely, and incredibly helpful. I'm pleased we were able to turn around the updates quickly, which have since served to make for a substantially better experience

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