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The truth is, this service was acquired last year by a US company. They didn't mention it or share the news with their users and they keep marketing themselves as "indie developers", including on their patreon https://www.patreon.com/ThreadReaderApp. In addition to that the original creator left, he is not working on the product anymore.

I didn't realise there was a competitor.

I wasn't promoting one over the other - just unaware alternatives existed.

Also didn't know it had ads, because all ads are blocked in my browser.

With ads between the tweets? BS

View it in Brave ;)

I won't use this shady software.

How is Brave shady? Or are you just trolling?

Probably the built-in cryptocurrency mining.

I think it's unfair to call it mining. You're simply able to be rewarded in their token if you allow ads. That is completely different from mining.

I think that it's shady too. I don't know much about Brave and don't want to know. To me a huge red flag is that Brave tries to push its Basic Attention Token (BAT). BAT is a token of low quality because of the following reasons.

1. The developers try to make up a reason to create another coin for something, that doesn't need a coin; 2. The relationship between the browser and the coin is not cryptographically strong and will never be — it's impossible to prevent fraud when their system is just a program that checks for certain condition (an ad viewed) and communicates to its backend, instructing it to give some address a coin. 3. The developers created a billion of tokens out of thin air and now try to give it some value. And traders do believe that it has some value.

I personally don't tolerate shitcoins even the slightest. Thus, I see Brave as nothing, but a browser engine with a content filter and a shitcoin embedded.

I hoped at one point Brave would follow more of a patreon-like model - block ads on pages and give the site my money in exchange. Unfortunately they've gone for showing me different ads.

That'd be a really nice feature

Brave does follow this patreon style model. There's a section in the Brave Rewards panel that mentions "Auto-contribute" which does what your describing.

You can also easily enable and disable Brave Ads while still contributing (though you'd need to fund your browser wallet)

Doesn't every single website have to opt in for this to receive any payment?

This is really hard to do because it involves a myriad of ad networks and payment systems. Others have tried to solve it but maybe Brave can? Dunno.

It sounds like you have something against cryptocurrencies as a whole and not their tokenomics as to me it seems the reasons for creating your own token for this case is fairly clear.

I completely agree with all your points.

However, to me Brave is the least-worse browser because at least it has a step inside the territory of blockchain-based browsing. It's the first browser that will add an integrated wallet by default (mainstream will never accept using the weird developer-centric MetaMask extension).

Brave has a history of acting shady.

For a while they would take BAT "donations" for any website, and would just keep them unless the site owner signed up to receive them. This stopped a few months ago.

The whole monetization model of replacing a site's ads with their own is questionable.

The whole BAT thing seems like a scam, they offer ways to buy them but no way to sell them.

Really anything that uses a cryptocurrency for funding has that "con stink".

"The whole monetization model of replacing a site's ads with their own is questionable."

Just to be more concise, they are not exactly "replacing" ads on the site. The built-in adblocker remove all ads irrelevant of the sites and if you enable Brave Ads (the coin thing, opt in), you get up to 5 per hour (configurable) OS native notification. The notification contains a text ad with a link. Even if you don't click on the notification, you get the coin.

We are not replacing ads on any site right now, and we won't do it without the publisher as partner, getting 70% of the gross revenue.

You can sell BAT via any crypto exchange or website. Coinbase, Uphold, Binance, etc. You can even choose to have BAT automatically convert to USD, Euro, etc.

I use an adblocker and support the developer of ThreadReader. So I don't see the ads.

> I use an adblocker and support the developer of ThreadReader

That sounds like a contradiction. If he uses ads it's so that his development gets supported this way.

“We value your privacy”

Always a good sign that they don’t.

Exactly:

"We value your privacy"

Click "Options" or whatever. Almost everything seems turned of (I guess it is an attempted dark pattern where they want me to believe it is off by default.)

Click "Third parties". See an somewhat complete list of shady "mainstream" tracker companies - or so I hope -there are literally hundreds of companies on that list, I counted by copying and pasting into a spreadsheet :-]

So much for valuing my privacy. Then again I guess it can be read to mean they value taking our privacy away.

Oh, but they do. The same way a group of muggers does when they stop you in a dark alley and say, "we value your money".

(Hell, they'll likely offer you an option to consent or proceed without consent to receive reduced experience.)

We value your privacy in much the same way fleas value dogs.

That's a nice analogy, can extend it a bit by offering a "reduced experience due to broken limbs"

"Your private information has value to us" would be a more honest wording.

They really do value it, though, at the price of the highest bidder.

Doesn't feel it's much different from original Twitter UI TBH.

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