IMO this is the right way to do it because it solves the chicken and egg problem that would normally exist with a universal funding method like this. Users don't have to worry about what payment platforms their favorite creators support; they can just browse the web like normal and the platform takes care of the rest.

Edit: I said it better in response to a sibling of yours: I think it's unethical for a platform to accept payment on my behalf without my permission.

The asymmetry created by this kind of "pay me without my permission" means that someone providing a service now has to do a lot of extra work if they want to get paid, whereas a user who wants to pay someone doesn't. That's not a good system if your goal is really to get money to creators.

Exactly. This system makes things easier on users at the expense of making it harder on creators. I think that's kinda the point though.

If your funding method relies on consumers essentially donating their money to you, it's extremely important to make that experience as seamless for them as possible. Patreon is great, but it does require users to go out of their way and make a conscious decision to fund _you_ specifically. That's a lot of extra effort that person has to go through just to give their money away to a random site they happened to visit for a couple hours that month.

With this system however the user just signs up for a single service _once_ and subscribes, and that's the full extent their involvement. The trade-off is that the content creator is now the one who has to go through the extra effort of setting up an account on this service, but unlike content consumers, the creator actually has an incentive to go through that process (free money) which makes it worthwhile for them.

And my point is that such a system is unsustainable, due to asymmetry of work.

Lets start with a few things that we can know are true:

1. In any system of patrons and artists, an artist will have more patrons than a patron has artists, or the system is unsustainable.

2. I could create a competitor to Brave, "Fearful", tomorrow. So could anyone else.

As a creator, its possible that every single patron of mine will pay me through a different service, I then need to register myself in all of them, and either manually, or via a middleman, convert the disparate currencies to my preferred one. But, because there are so many different payment methods, its likely that the long tail isn't worth my time to receive payment from. Systems that accept payment on behalf of someone else and require work on the part of that party to receive the payment create this loss.

On the other hand, even if every creator has their own payment platform, there's no loss. Patrons simply don't pay the long tail of the creators that they use, and instead only make payments to the ones they appreciate the most.

iow, asymmetry means that creator-focused services are the only ones that can be successful except for very niche groups. So, if your goal is to support blockchain tech, Brave is great. If on the other hand, your goal is to get paid by patrons, its not.

If the tokens were automatically returned to the consumer after a period of, for example, 6 months or so, and redistributed to creators via the usual method, would that alleviate your concerns?

I'm not sure taking a straightforward and easily reasoned about process that the courts could easily handle and moving it to something enforced by a programming language subject to bugs that are largely unable to be handled by courts is necessarily a step in the right direction. At least not until there's a lot more vetting of Ethereum and a much better and more secure ecosystem to call upon.

I am just glad somebody is trying to fix content monetization online without taking 30% for, what, handling payments?

You can argue how well it does the job (especially at the last bullet point) but it should be obvious that it does do in fact more than just "collect money".

Would it be similarly unethical to accept donations to {charity} without first getting their approval?

They work with any type of nonprofit, not only charities.

"We will reach out to the organization you select to ensure it is ready to accept donations from Amazon."

Furthermore, you aren't able to free form enter a charity. It's only from the list they've sourced (presumably from public records).

Yes they might be contacted, but what if they don't want (or simply can't for legal reasons) use Amazon as a gateway for their funds?

Now you've given users the impression that they are helping a certain charity when it never makes it there.

Theoretically, these same users might have made a small donation directly to that company if it wasn't for Smile.

I'd still recommend using Smile, overall I think it's great, but you have to admit there might have been a better way to go about it. How to do that better, I do not know.

[1] https://smile.amazon.com/gp/chpf/about/ref=smi_se_dshb_leli_...

This seems fair.

If I donate to my favorite YouTube personality and instead the money goes to PewDiePie's empire, I'm going to be upset.

The difference between donations and taxes is that I can choose who to fund and how much. If that choice is no longer mine, and I have a strong chance to fund entities I find morally repulsive, then why donate?

First of all, Brave doesn't just sit idly by and wait for creators to seek them out; they attempt to contact creators via email to let them know there are funds available for them to claim.

Second, Brave is completely transparent about how the process works. They're not claiming to donors that the funds _will_ reach their intended destination and then not delivering. The method they use to deliver cash to creators is clearly explained on their website.

Yeah, sounds legit.

EDIT: Oh, wait, they make you register a wallet on a site called uphold.com, which will just send the tokens to your Ether wallet or convert them to another cryptocurrency or pay you to your bank. You do have to register for KYC after $1000 worth of income, they say.

If you donate via this system, you've now created an obligation for me to read an email, look up the company, read their documentation, read reviews and scam reports to ensure that they're legitimate, provide them personal information, then repeat the process for a second site, and then I can get the money you've given me.

Yeah, I do think that's far, far too much.

Let me try again:

Think about how much spam you receive on a regular basis.

Now imagine you're in a position where you have fans wanting to send you money: you probably get all the bulk spam plus a ton of targeted spam simply for being notable. This goes double if you have a need for people to be able to message you legitimate business inquiries, because then you're going to get illegitimate inquiries as well.

Then imagine one of the messages in the flood (I know people with six figure unread message counts) that is your inbox said that they had some money available for you, and all you had to do was sign up for their service with your personal information.

You'd be crazy to be willing to do that without researching, likely for several hours.

And if more of these services start popping up, then you have to check up on each one individually as they come in.

That's not something most people in that position can afford to do for 0.01% of their inbox.

Or you could ignore them, but then you're at risk of upsetting your fans because they're trying to send you money and you're not receiving it, out of a quite reasonable assumption that it could be a scam. No one wins in that situation either.

Or, consider the following situation:

Someone you know recommends a donations platform, or you find one while searching, whatever.

You sign up for an account, post the link somewhere, and people use it.

It's much more inconvenient for the users who are giving the money and have to track down what platform you use, but at the same time they also get a level of assurance that any money they send will end up in your hands in the end.

You didn't originally explain why it was a difficult problem at all, all you did was insinuate that most people are too lazy to read documentation, made hyperbolic statements about the difficulty of claiming money, and seemed to suggest that therefore this specific project is a failure or something.

While this post is a bit better at clarifying your argument, the post you're responding to is still 100% in the right here. You may have thought you were helping with it, but the fact is that all most people like to do, is poke holes in reasonable solutions, just because they don't exactly match whatever specific criteria they had in mind. You have to remember that the perfect is the enemy of the good, and it's so easy to come up with criticisms, that even the people you're critiquing have probably thought of them already, much to everyone's astonishment probably. What's not easy, is coming up with any kind of alternatives or possible solutions to these holes, because if it were, they would've likely been implemented.

Believe it or not, all this does is demoralize people actively trying to solve the hard problems you claim to be trying to "help", thus hurting your own cause in the end, because there's no motivation to be gained by helping a bunch of entitled armchair know-it-alls. Despite what everybody may like to think, technological progress is fundamentally a people problem just as much as it is an actual technological problem.

EDIT: Just for full disclosure, as a cryptocurrency investor myself, I also am bearish on BAT. But that's just because I'm bearish on anything having to do with Etherium by default.

I didn't come in and say the whole thing was a bad idea and that it should be abandoned. Just that if the design requires more than a paragraph of explanation, then that's a serious problem for the target audience. As well as pointing out that the idea of not requiring opt-in actually causes the friction that it seeks to avoid.

If insight into the target audience's perspective is demoralizing, you honestly should stop and reconsider your priorities. I say that without any kind of sarcasm or criticism in my voice. If the people you want to help believe that the thing you're making will cause problems for them, that's a red flag. It's not always true, and it might not be true for all users, but it's something to seriously consider.

If people are worried that your product will appear to be a scam, you absolutely need to reconsider.

I actually agree with this completely, but it's totally orthogonal to key points of the counter-arguments here. Some people thinking your project will cause them issues cannot be inherently bad, pretty much out of necessity, because you simply can never please everyone all the time. If it starts to become a sizable portion of your intended audience, maybe, but even then there will always be a sizable signal/noise ratio as well, which is the real issue here. It's not that people's concerns are unfounded, or that they should be ignored, it's that nothing is ever argued in favor of why this specific issue should be prioritized over all the other equally urgent issues in a project, nor more importantly, how this particular issue could be addressed.

The problem here isn't one of digging up issues, as anybody that's managed any kind of non-trivial project knows they are plentiful, it's a problem with finding solutions. Therefore, the main counter-argument that's been made here is that simply shouting and pointing at these things is not going to help your case as an end user. It's a pretty straightforward point, but people seem to forget that all projects need to make trade-offs, and that often their contributions aren't totally novel "insights" that the project maintainers aren't aware of.

For example, you state:

> if the design requires more than a paragraph of explanation, then that's a serious problem for the target audience.

Which is true, but arguably anyone doing any kind of business would likely know that already. The trouble is actually coming up with such a short explanation, especially when as was claimed before, people don't like to read documentation. It's not exactly easy to explain Bitcoin in one paragraph, much less smart contracts, and even harder still to explain some etherium-based token, on top of explaining the business model and the reason behind it in such brevity. Which is why, even though I'm also not particularly in favor of this BAT project, I know I have nothing to contribute to it in terms of useful criticism because I acknowledge that it's a hard problem and that they're fighting an uphill battle anyway. The part that I am arguing against, is that many seem to implicitly believe that just pointing out that some project is fighting an uphill battle is enough of a worthy contribution to get their concerns addressed/acknowledged somehow.

The more concerning corollary to this, is not so much that these sorts of responses "discourage" active project developers anyway, but that they de-incentivize future projects from even attempting to bother with hard problems, just because they observe enough of a backlash against previous solutions that they deem the risk-to-reward ratio not worth it, instead of actively exploring the space, when that's exactly what's needed to gain any sort of traction on long-term hard problems.

We already see this happening, with so much manpower going towards developing relatively safe "problems" like scaling social networks and/or optimizing ad delivery mechanisms, instead of encouraging people to try out different/riskier things. And that's the real crux of the issue.

1.) This issue should be prioritized because it makes the whole endeavor literally appear to be a scam to the exact people it wants to help by sending them money.

2.) It should be addressed by being opt in.

Both of which I did cover in my previous posts.

I get where you're coming from. But this is actionable advice with a very strong reason why it should be prioritized.

But yeah, I find it pretty hilarious how much like a scam those emails are going to sound, despite being legit.

This isn't analogous to collecting donations for a charity and then making a bulk donation. It's analagous to collecting donations for a charity, taking a cut of those donations for your troubles, and then depositing those donations in your bank account until the charity you supposedly collected for comes and asks for them.

If creators don't register after a decently long interval, the tokens flow back to the user growth pool. Users may choose to support only verified creators/publishers. As we scale up this user growth pool "powerball" effect goes away, and the BAT becomes more dear vs. fiat, so the pool lasts longer as grants and matching scale down in token quantity per user.

and then not depositing those donations in your bank account until the charity you supposedly collected for comes and asks for them.

Probably a typo :)

You need to ensure a 100% signup by video creators to ensure every creator gets paid and no money is in a hole. That's simply not possible; many creators are probably dead, unable to access their accounts, or unwilling to sign up for this service.

In that case, a very significant chunk of cash would be collected and never distributed. Relying on 100% adoption by creators to ensure no funds are miscredited is a miserable user experience.

Why not make it a "pledge?"

Will you ever refund the money, say if its not claimed in a certain amount of time, or if the content creator hypothetically tells you to go jump?

at any time, up until the policy changes. Users don't have to worry about what payment platforms their favourite creators support only if they are unworried about whether their money actually gets to those creators.

This comment reminds me of mp3sparks / allofmp3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AllOfMP3 , saying they're on the up and up, content creators just have to ask them for their royalties.

"Where does my contribution go if a publisher/website is not part of this program yet?

When there is about $100.00 USD in BAT for a specific publisher, from all contributors, Brave makes three attempts to complete the publisher verification process. We will hold unclaimed funds for a minimum of 90 days, after which it will be added to the UGP (User Growth Pool)."

https://brave.com/faq-payments/#formal-terms-conditions

revshare is complicated and governed by, among other factors, deals YouTube makes with various parties. Brave doesn't have access to any of that information, so they couldn't possibly know how to split revenue between the uploader of the video and all the other parties that might have content embedded in the video, even if it were their intention to do so.

Such issues came up in the old days, but they were settled without interposing themselves directly in my life. Back in the 90's, my music collection didn't start partially disappearing because of these things.

In such a video every currency unit inside youtube (Ads, Red, ...) can be split up automatically according to some per-video sharing agreement. Everything that comes through Brave has a single recipient, the channel operator (because Brave can't read this contract).

To put it succinctly, I think it's unethical for a platform to accept payment on my behalf without my permission.

(whereas yeah, I don't consider holding money in escrow unethical)

Final Tweet: "Ooops we invested all your money. Now it's gone. :("

Patreon is worse at this point because they have already demonstrated they will seize and/or not distribute funds to accounts they dislike. That's one step above Paypal levels of horrible business practices.

As for the "thrown away money", that's people's business if they want to do it with a relative chance of the author gaining that money.