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Comment by pushcx | Hacker News Reader

https://twitter.com/ummjackson/status/1076221401353207808

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.

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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.

Thanks for your feedback.

> 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.

The 'spend it on their own stuff' is the illegal part, not the going door to door collecting money part.

You most certainly can go door to door and solicit donations to a charity you have nothing to do with...as long as you actually fulfill the contract.

You might want to cite your “most certainly” because I’m far from sure that’s true in all jurisdictions.

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.

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