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Comment by trpc | Hacker News Reader

1. Build a theme over Chromium

2. Add your ads and tracking system over it

3. Brand it as "X Browser"

This is not a browser, this is a skin over Chrome with a business model that's built over a crypto scam. Your army of online shills and your attempts to connect yourselves with reputable online entities such as Wikipedia won't change that fact.

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(Brave employee here)

The Rewards feature of Brave is what allows users to pay creators and also opt-into ads. This feature is completely optional though. It's off by default and users never get bothered about it

Brave is actually a proper fork of the Chromium code-base and builds on top of it, which is a lot more involved than a theme. The work that's been done is fairly significant if you wanted to give it a try. Even if you never enable Rewards, there are some great features and under-the-hood tweaks for privacy, Ad-blocking, and tracking protection

There's a list of ways that Brave deviates from Chromium here for quick comparison: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Deviations-from-...

I'm not sure I'd go as far as to say Brave is a scam, but it does extort companies and websites by effectively saying, "We're shutting down your monetization sources (no longer showing your ads). If you want that money (or a different cut), sign up for our platform instead."

Our users have rights to block or unblock ads, and to try our alternative ways of supporting sites. No site has an overriding right to force ads on its users, not by law or by the design of the web standards.

There have been another similar project called MetaMask[1], a browser extension exposes a payment API for tipping content creators. MM had their brawls with Google too like taking down from app market, so what Brave guys are doing is understandable.

It's interesting what devs from Brave think about previous attempts like MetaMask? Why didn't it take off, leave out difficulties with configuration for non-blessed users? Having BAT token based on ETH platform, how is it going to deal with ETH network congestion? If it's off-chain, who controls it? Is it possible to split profits from ads or tips in case a bunch of people are collaborating on the same piece of content?

[1] https://github.com/MetaMask/metamask-extension

MetaMask is more of a dev tool, has sharp edges, requires users to be expert and to bring their own crypto funds (Brave pays users to give back, or if the user signs up with Uphold, to take out), and most challenging of all, can’t send to a site unless it is Web3-enabled.

Look up Metcalfe’s Law. It is hard to grow if both sides of a protocol have to be upgraded at once for each peer-pair (user and website). We avoid that by helping users with a faster browser, so we grow just on the speed, safety, battery and data plan savings. Then we add options for tipping and donating that help users buffer (in browser, for 90 days) tips to unverified creators to attract the creators to sign up. This helps avoid the catch-22 trap of Metcalfe’s Law.

Brave isn't a theme to Chromium. We've made numerous changes to the underlying bits to strip out (or modify) anything that is not aligned with our principles of user-first, private and secure by default, and "Can't be evil."

Before Brave, users were already installing ad and tracker blockers in large numbers. By 2015 over 600 million devices were blocking. This is the result of an entire set of technologies evolving into surveillance capitalism, and users have little-to-no say in the matter.

Brave identified the problem, and focused on a complete solution. Simply blocking trackers (and the ads that rely on them) doesn't help the Web. In fact, it hurts the Web as it drives content we love behind pay walls, or offline entirely.

Brave created the Rewards program to better facilitate consumer-to-creator support. With Brave Ads, users can opt-in to seeing safe, private advertisements (matched locally on their device by adaptive machine-learning), receive 70% of the ad revenue into an in-situ wallet, and thus use those tokens to support their favorite creators in a private, anonymous manner.

Wikipedia is a stellar example of the type of site producing phenomenal content, that many of us would love to see continue on the Web. I've been supporting them with contributions over the last couple of days, and look forward to continuing to do so on into the future. How do you support the content you enjoy?

Please don't speak as if you give a single damn about publishers. """Your""" adblocking system blocks the ads that publishers get revenue from, you're simply saying, YOU CAN ONLY MAKE MONEY THROUGH US. WITH OUR VIRTUAL WORTHLESS CRYPTOCURRENCY. With enough users, your worthless cryptocurrency won't become worthless anymore.

The entire business model is disgusting and should be illegal to be honest.You're rebranding an entire huge project called Chromium and simply blocking revenues for publishers and wasting ads of advertisers unless they advertise and see ads THROUGH YOU and publishers get revenues through your worthless crypto-currency/

Lame. There's literally youtube channels popping out videos for how to pi-hole https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBXTnrD_Zs4

At least with Brave there is some hope of getting value back to the content creators.

Unless you'd rather paywall all the content?

Their business model is not nearly as disgusting as the modern advertisig business.

This comment breaks several of the site guidelines. We ban accounts that do that, and we've had to warn you multiple times before. Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules, regardless of how strongly you feel about browsers or business models?

Eye roll on this take.

If you have a better business model for content producers on the internet feel free to build it.

How about the business model the content producers choose for themselves, instead of one that is forced on them by a rent seeking company with good PR?

If I have ads on my site, I have no interest in someone replacing them and taking a cut.

Would you rather someone remove them and not pay you at all? Because right now that seems to be the direction we're heading in.

How does your site deal with ad blocking users? Do you block them from your website? Isn't it kind of nice that at least some of these users, despite not wanting your ads, still want to find a way to pay you, even going to the point of installing an alternate browser for the opportunity to do so?

And in any case, you could always block Brave users from your site if you wanted to. How's anything being forced on you here?

Let's say I put out a cookie jar out with a sign that says "Take a cookie, leave a dollar". You come by and take a cookie and leave a piece of string. You're not improving my business model.

The Brave thing is just a weird way to feel better about breaking an implicit social contract.

I don't think your analogy is valid unless you at least warn ad-blocking users that you don't approve of it. Otherwise the sign on the jar is more like "Take a cookie, and if you feel like it, leave a dollar."

I guess we disagree, since to me, serving ads with my page is making my position about wanting to show ads with the page pretty clear.

But even if it wasn't, Brave has special filters for sites that have anti-adblock measures, and it's spoofing the user agent to make it seem like regular Chrome.

Patreon already exists

Have you looked at their fees lately? You can expect to see as much as 12% of the value go to Patreon. Further, you have to give them personal information about yourself to play ball. Brave has a 5% fee on contributions, and we hope to reduce that even further as the system grows. Secondly, you enjoy anonymity in our system. Not even Brave knows to whom you're offering support.

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