Brave’s browser has been autocompleting websites with referral codes | Hacker News Reader

Brave’s browser has been autocompleting websites with referral codes

theblockcrypto.com

57 pointsrfcenturies32 comments

I honestly assume that 80% of what I've seen pushing Brave against all basic common sense is astroturfing.

Just use Firefox! Why would anyone ever choose Brave when it is proprietary and better free alternatives exist? This company's track record of disrespecting their users and sketchy monetization is so blatant, and its creator is a homophobic tool who is responsible for all of us writing Javascript instead of Scheme.

FF 1. doesn’t support screen share on browser based video calls.

2. Is super slow on Linux.

3. Doesn’t correctly read the ctrl key on my linux laptop i.e., I can’t correctly ctrl+c/v and so on.

Switched to brave as an ungoogled Chrome.

I do screen shares on Jitsi in Firefox ESR on a daily basis, not really sure what your on about.

What stack are you using? Firefox is smooth on Debian 10 both in Gnome and KDE.

I think a good fraction of the Brave propaganda posts are from people holding BAT as a way to increase the value of their investments. This is actually one of most toxic aspects of cryptocurrencies: decentralized ponzi schemes by their vary nature encourage all holders to promote the scam endlessly in search of greater fools.

Firefox is just worst. I also found he Mozilla foundation too evil to support. Vivaldi is proprietary. Brave seems like the only reasonable choice.

In what way do you see the Mozilla foundation as evil?

I'm asking as a Firefox user that doesn't have this image at all. If you have things that I should read to update, I would be interested.

Maybe hypocritical? That's a grave sin when one of the main factors for choosing their browser is ideology. It is hard to impossible to buy that Moz://a is pro end user when they are in bed with Google.

Mozilla fired Eich over his private political opinions; they also run a lot of programmes with a very definite political slant. I wouldn't call them "evil" but as a conservative it's not a group that I'd like to support (but then neither is Google).

So you define evil as having a political slant while judging them based on the political slant you have?

That's not how evil works.

No, I explicitly said that I do not consider them evil. You're also misrepresenting the position of those that would consider them evil; they wouldn't be evil for "having a political slant", but because the specific political slant they have is evil (which again, is explicitly not my position).

EDIT: And also, they're arguably evil by virtue of, you know, firing someone over an inoccuous political position...

Hating a group of people is not innocuous.

I don't use brave myself, but I appreciate that it's actually taking serious efforts trying to fix the problem of ads. I'm kind of a little surprise hn seems to be so blind to this issue, considering the number of people here who are employed by companies that literally live off of ads. If ads are bad and annoying (which most here would agree they are) but I still want to support certain websites (because some websites produce good content that I value), there's no convenient way to do that right now outside of allowing ads on that website, which is not particularly desirable. Brave seems to be the only one seriously trying to address that.

Do you know of any other major effort being put into alternative (convenient) mechanisms for monetization? I'd be interested in looking into it if you do, since I don't use brave (Firefox has too many useful features to me).

I've seen a couple of comments in this direction across sites and would like to take a moment to point out that while advertisements are certainly annoying and a hassle, the root of the problem comes with the mining of behavior data that is then transformed into profile packages sold for advertising (and whatever other) purposes.

So, even if a browser is blocking ads, or changing the way ads are interacted with, the more important worry (imo) is whether the browser (or its features) are successful in blocking the behavior profile being built by aggregators such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc.

Yeah in my view there are 2 main problems with ads. One is as you say - collecting data profiles of people that are shared around with no respect for the user's preferences. The other is they are an unpleasant experience (resource hogs, obscure the content, etc). In my understanding, brave actually tries addressing both. For the issue of data collection, I believe its goal is to eventually enable (if it hasn't already) local profiling, so that you can still build profiles, but none of the data ever leaves your machine (and presumably they'd allow you to disable this feature - also it's open source so worst case you could always hack it out). For the user experience, since the ads (if you enable them) are served locally, they don't incur the same level of performance penalty as normal ads. Or (I believe) you can also just buy bat separate without ever enabling ads and use those to contribute to content creators (this is probably how I'd use it). I might have gotten a few details wrong but I think the overall direction is definitely worth exploring.

As for blocking the existing ads until the unlikely future where the brave style of ads becomes so common that the ads as we know them today entirely disappear - that's definitely a valid question. It doesn't help to be on the brave model if websites are still able to collect your data anyway. I think brave might have some special features helping obscure the data but I'm not too knowledgeable on that.

Brave seems to push the line as to what is acceptable ways to monetize the browser. Every time they will just call it a mistake and "fix" it, but why do they keep trying to push the limit? They had the "safe" ads replacing websites ads. They had the "shadow accounts" wrt the tip thing. Now they're trying to sneak in referral codes. How many "oopsies" do you get in good faith?

https://twitter.com/brendaneich/status/1269512276605759489?s... Et seq. Stop repeating falsehoods.

Well that's not my twitter (nice dox attempt) but since that poster didn't know the history and is here on HN, I've got some links wrt ad replacement [1] and the shadow accounts + tipping where you don't know you aren't even notified you received money until you break a certain threshold and if you don't claim it within a certain amount of time it gets "recycled" back into the growth pool [2] conversation.

I did mention that Brave "fixes" these issues when the public inevitably freaks out, but it's still worth noting the pattern of intent.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/01/mozil...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999

People, especially non-technical people, still don't ask themselves, how can a company be profitable from a browser? Especially if the browser itself is 100% made by another company but the license permits to be used and rebranded by others. Brave browser is nothing but skin and some config modifications to block Google tracking. But how can a company that raised 42 million dollars make money from a skin and some config modifications that can be developed by a student in his weekend?

The real business model of Brave is obviously to gain enough market share by smearing Google, the company that actually created and still developing the browser, and block its main resource of revenue, Adsense and then make money by replacing the blocked ads with their own, of course this time "private" ad platform. In the mean time they can play with cryptocoin scams but in the end this is the only viable business model. Take and rebrand a browser as "private" alternative to evil big corp that created the browser that their entire business relies on, block ads, wait until gain enough market share and then extort publishers and advertisers to migrate to their own ad platform.

Can't wait to see what scummy monetization tactic brave is found to be using next.

Here's a question for any employees of brave who happen to be reading this: how did this get out the door? It's not like this is the first time the company has been found doing something that most people disagree with, and the fact that it keeps happening means that the process is still very much broken. I have not yet seen any response from brave that gives me confidence that the company has changed from when they were taking youtube donations of creations not signed up to the BAT program

I don't see this as particularly problematic if it's not replacing an existing referral code. It should definitely be opt-in and more transparent though.

In fact, as a Firefox user, I would like to be able to activate a feature that would make Firefox the default beneficiary of affiliate rewards linked to my purchases. After all, I would not be visiting this website without it.

Am I missing some way this could be hurting someone?

Brave is getting paid for having their referral code used, but they aren't actually referring anyone. The people that accept referral codes are being ripped off in a sense.

Brave has a partnership with Binance. They aren't replacing random affiliate links as your comment suggests.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23442027

The Brave web browser is hijacking links, and inserting affiliate codes (davidgerard.co.uk)

205 points by davidgerard 1 hour ago | 82 comments

David is obsessed with smearing me, and fact free high spin as ever. We hijack nothing, no link rewriting. But what is more, based on user feedback, we are flipping the default on Brave site suggestions to “off”, even though it was aimed at showing the value of omnibox Binance affiliation where, if it worked, we would share back with users via BAT. Good job tanking this effort, and helping Chrome cement Google’s monopoly. (Firefox is dead.)

Are there any good alternatives to Brave? Read the twitter response from their CEO and it was terrible...

Ungoogled chrome, firefox and vivaldi.

You must know about Firefox right?

Pretty nuts, he asked one fellow why he liked his own comment, which seems super juvenile. And, he's just repeating ad nauseam that they will "never revise typed in domains again", which leaves a lot of wiggle room to me in what they will or won't revise with ref codes.

If it’s associated with a cryptocurrency, it’s a scam. Just a matter of uncovering the details.

Please don't post unsubstantive comments to HN, or shallow dismissals of other people's work. Maybe you don't owe cryptocurrency better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

He's not wrong though.

A comment needn't be wrong to be bad.

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