Unsolicited Advertisements from Brave Rewards | Hacker News Reader

Unsolicited Advertisements from Brave Rewards

github.com

42 pointsresynth194330 comments

This honestly does not come as a surprise.

It's the same story - an unsuspecting update adds [ads|crypto|rewards|suggestions], users complain, and they apologize for having it enabled by default, and point out that to an option to turn it off, 10 clicks under.

Rinse and repeat.

Just use Firefox, and at this point the Chromium Edge probably takes things more seriously (including privacy) compared to the joke that Brave is.

While I prefer Firefox over other browsers, with 10 unchecked checkboxes (and counting) in my “email preferences” they are also guilty of using the same dark pattern.

And the damn notifications! You are on my phone for me to browse the web, not so Mozilla has access to my eyeballs!

Worst part is if you turn notifications off the share to device functionality doesn't work anymore

What notifications? You mean on Android? I've never seen any and I use the send functionality constantly.

iOS. These

https://cohan.me/images/IMG_3580.jpg

https://cohan.me/images/IMG_3688.jpg

There were more but I didn't start screenshotting till they felt like they were taking the piss

Wow, that looks really annoying. Must be an iOS specific thing then. Have you tried opening an issue on bugzilla?

Do you mean your Firefox account? That’s a little orthogonal to the browser I would think...

Isn’t this kind of the point of Brave? I don’t buy into BAT but Brave has always been a tool to popularize BAT. Why are these people using Brave?

Isn't the whole point of Brave that you are looking at ads for attention points? Why would you use Brave unless you're monetizing your own attention?

Me, I prefer to not look at ads at all.

I thought it's Chrome with some adblocking capabilities. ...and people just deal with all the other crap they're adding.

I currently use old firefox for pages where I need paywall extensions and Vivaldi (and occasionally the half baked new firefox) for normal browsing.

People are confused then, perhaps Brave needs to make its marketing clearer. It was born from cryptocurrency, to give utility to BAT. The entire goal is to monetize your attention to profit from ads and the mechanism is their cryptocurrency. The “other crap they’re adding” is the entire purpose - adblocking is truly secondary to popularizing BAT.

Last I checked it's free software. The point of free software is to do what the user wants, because the user is free to fork or patch misfeatures like those.

If it were proprietary, then yeah, it would have no point.

Normal Chromium is also free software...

Submitters: it's against the HN guidelines to rewrite titles to make them more sensational, so please don't.

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

(Submitted title was "Brave Hijacks Twitter, Reddit and GitHub with Advertisements")

This is very intrusive, as I found out a few days ago. It adds a tip button to Twitter, reddit and Github. It is useless in 99.99% of use cases because not only do the users of these sites unaware of BAT, but I don't tip everything I see.

I usually support brave but this was disapointing. I know I am using the browser for free.

Yep. I've pointed this out a ton of times. I always get downvoted.

Brave is a scam in this regard. It says it gets rid of ads but places them elsewhere. For example, when you close all of your tabs, an ad is the background for the dashboard view - which ironically shows you how many ads Brave has blocked.

BAT never say well with me, and the maintainers of Brave have only demonstrated why it shouldn't by being hostile to (well intentioned) critics on the issue tracker.

Just a sad project all around, and it's further sad to see some OSSers that I like be associated with the project...

What are the best alternatives at this point to Brave?

Chromium?

Why did you trust Brave in the first place ?

What are you looking for in a web browser?

Firefox. It’s way better than it used to be. It took me a few tries over the years to switch, but it now like it a lot more than chrome.

Check out Vivaldi, a much better browser for poweusers.

Vivaldi is closed source, I would not call it a "much better browser" for that reason.

Ungoogled Chromium.

Firefox, despite that some HN'ers bash them for not being perfect. And there is an occasional reCaptcha time-waster as "encouragement" from Google to switch.

Ungoogled Chromium, if you don't mind supporting the monopoly, and the (IMO) onerous upgrade path.

There's quite a difference between "not being perfect" and the continuous letdown and disappointment that is Mozilla management / decision making.

Mozilla just shattered an extension ecosystem and now there's like 10 extensions left. You can do store extensions in Nightly, but you now need a firefox account to do so. (And you have to press secret invisible buttons, not joking.) Non-store extensions are apparently canceled.

It's a power grab all the way down. We wouldn't make excuses if Google did that and we shouldn't make excuses if Mozilla does it.

Current Mozilla does not behave in a way that would demonstrate that they are a good steward for Firefox or the open web.

> Mozilla just shattered an extension ecosystem and now there's like 10 extensions left

The gutted extensions are exactly the kind that never worked in Chromium or another browser, so I don't see this as a disadvantage.

On the contrary, Firefox still has extensions that don't work in Chrome like Tree Style Tabs (it needs a userChrome.css to work properly but still)

Dissenter is a version of Brave with all the BAT stuff taken out.

(Yes, Dissenter is associated with bad people. No, I am not one of those bad people, I just use the browser. Yes, it is sad that this disclaimer needs to be written. Please don't downvote me.)

Really twisting the use of the word advertisement here, it's the complete opposite really. Then again I'm guessing most only read headlines and hear what they want.

A small donation button next to GitHub projects or Reddit posts is not advertising.

Of course it should have an option to be disabled, without a doubt but for the most part it's no more intrusive than using RES on Reddit.

> Really twisting the use of the word advertisement here

Yes, I thought Brave was injecting commercial ads into those pages, not the tips buttons. Still surprising, but much different for me.

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