"Publishers must verify ownership of their properties with Brave in order to receive contributions from Brave users. If a publisher has not verified ownership, then a user’s contributions will be held in reserve inside the browser for 90 days. The browser routinely updates an internal list of all verified publishers to determine whether a property can receive contributions. At the end of the 90 day period, any contributions marked for unverified publishers will be released back to the wallet. No funds leave the browser except to go to verified creators."
If you're not accepting money, you don't get to keep it but they give you a buffer of 90 days (which they didn't have to) and if the buffer is exceeded it goes back to the user wallet.
When someone commits fraud, gets caught, shows no contrition, and then takes a little step back so it's no longer obviously fraud, I think the emphasis in that sentence needs to be on "obviously", not "no longer". I wish they'd quit spoofing their User-Agent so it'd be possible to opt out of the new version of this scheme, but they'll only send an accurate header to sites that sign partnership agreements.
To claim it demonstrated intentional fraud rather than poor UX and rewards architecture in an early beta (which was immediately fixed) is simply not credible.
The only funds flowing through the system at that stage were from Brave's own marketing budget through the form of user grants.
The concerns were about theoretical, future issues if Brave ever broke out as a mainstream browser and rewards / payment solution.
Even now, a year after the issue was fixed, it remains to be seen whether Brave's payment system draws in anything more than Brave's own distribution of tokens (through grants and ad rewards to users).
As an early adopter I'm aware of honest, thoughtful criticisms (browser monoculture with Chromium) and... this is not one of them.
You claim I didn't make an honest or thoughtful criticism, but you didn't support that by disputing any of my facts or reasoning, and your only defense of Brave is that they were caught too early to successfully defraud anyone. Whether the money was taken directly from end users or indirectly from speculators in their ICO is irrelevant. They falsely represented themselves to users as site owners and they continue to evade responsibility by falsely representing themselves to site owners as different users. It is tediously prudent to want nothing at all to do with a company that does business through misrepresentation as a standard practice.
[0] https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/4641#issuecomm...
It's hard to overstate how absurd this is as you work through the implications: it means this business model is in conflict with the obvious goal of growing the ecosystem of verified creators as quickly as possible, and assumes incredible ignorance from the Brave team about likely revenue from users unwittingly donating to unverified creators.
The reality is without creators actively pushing their supporters to donate to them via Brave's rewards system the funding flow would largely be Brave 'promoters' pushing creators to use that funding channel.
Instead of this nonsensical explanation it's easy to understand the simple and correct one: Brave had an aggressive growth marketing strategy where they imagined being able to email unverified creators with emails about how much $$$ they could collect from users who had started donating to them, and in doing so accelerate verification of creators.
The stupidity here is that they didn't properly consider that some creators would rightly object to an implication Brave Rewards was an approved donation channel for that creator, which could theoretically risk cannibalising donations that would otherwise go through other channels (that it would likely be a negligible amount doesn't make it any less unethical). Brave did the right thing in fixing it in an early public beta, which is the point of public betas.
Your second criticism about user agent spoofing depends on a fundamental lack of awareness about the whole history of user agent strings, which is basically a story of challenger browsers spoofing the user agent string of the dominant browser within an ecosystem for compatibility reasons [0].
That you attempt to assert that UA spoofing is a nefarious practice (but presumably only for Brave, not for every other browser that does this, such as Chrome for Android which presents as Safari[1]) is yet more evidence of the low credibility of these criticisms.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_agent#User_agent_spoofing
#1 Money was re-distributed if donated and not claimed -> its not frozen infinite.
#2 There was no way to opt out -> its now opt in iirc
Besides that there are other critique points.
#1 Brave is controlling the add economy. They do this by blocking adds and offering their opt in add service(and gain 30% of the add revenue)
#2 Brave is using its own crypto currency to have full control over the money flow.
What additionally lowers their credibility is that they put false advertisement on their website.
This makes me wounder whats the incent to use brave.
with adblockers and google sucking more and more of the advertising pie websites are looking elsewhere for monetization
> Publishers must verify ownership of their properties with Brave in order to receive contributions from Brave users. If a publisher has not verified ownership, then a user’s contributions will be held in reserve inside the browser for 90 days. The browser routinely updates an internal list of all verified publishers to determine whether a property can receive contributions. At the end of the 90 day period, any contributions marked for unverified publishers will be released back to the wallet. No funds leave the browser except to go to verified creators.
> Previous versions of the Brave desktop browser worked differently. Until version 0.58.21, released on January 11, 2019, browsers with Brave Rewards enabled would contribute BAT to content creators whether or not they had verified. Brave would then hold contributed funds for those publishers in escrow until they’d verified.
This led to a lot of complaints sent to Brendan Eich and his employees, which they were understandably extremely upset about, but they did eventually drop support for said website.
It does raise an interesting point, though: at what point does BAT funding cross an ethical line? One can imagine even worse things than stalking being funded if there are no checks. But then defunding anything can be seen as a violation of free speech.
Not defending it in anyway. but strategically I feel like Brave should take the money, and just email the creator every 3 months saying you have X amount of money you can claim. Of course, if Brave is just profiting this money that's pretty shitty.
I don't click on links to be advertised to.
But in the case of Brave, they are essentially modifying the producers content without their consent.