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Comment by tomComb | Hacker News Reader

The person I was responding to had already read about the issues - I was confirming their existing impression and, more important, addressing the fact that they were putting them aside for a reason i didn't agree with.

The fact that you would attack me without understanding the thread (and use it as an opportunity to divert people to your Twitter) reflects badly on you.

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I don't see anything above justifying your "scammy" word, which is libelous thrown without back-up and therefore does reflect badly on you. But please, go on: justify it. I'll help by citing the dictionary definition of "scam":

Noun: a dishonest scheme; a fraud.

"fraud": "wrongful or criminal deception intended to result in financial or personal gain."

Also, as the tweet I linked above said, we didn't profit from either the fast-fixed error of showing unverified creators as being tipable with our token grants to users (we don't make money recirculating our own grants) or the refgate case (we turned off that future-share-of-trading-commission affiliate revenue with Binance).

Hanlon's razor explains these blunders without jumping to scam or fraud, which is a crime we have to fight on the Brave Ads front, so I take it seriously.

Should someone not use Brave on account of these two mistakes? Not for me to say; no browser is perfect. But they were not scams or frauds, and we fixed code and design processes to avoid anything like them in the future.

Please don't pretend you don't know what I'm talking about or that the idea that Brave is 'scammy' is anything new - Brave is very controversial and its ethical lapses have been discussed extensively including here on HN.

You went thru various dubious business models before you even got to your current incarnation.

But the most current of your controversies is covered here: https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2020/06/06/the-brave-we...

And discussed here on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23442027

That alone is enough for me to call Brave 'scammy'.

We never injected ads in publisher pages; we proposed doing this but only with publisher as partner and user opt-in. Brave Rewards are opt-in and put ads in the user's inventory, not the publisher's.

Gerard lies about us "hijacking links", which I'm sure he knows has a well-defined meaning: changing the URL of a link the user clicks on in a page. We've never done any such thing, either.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25841456

If you want to believe we did these things, you're believing misinformation. If you can't verify these claims are false, I can help; many neutral third parties can help too. But it seems to me you want to believe such misinformation. Why?

That's exactly why i think knowing that a famous and respectable person (in the sense that he already accomplished great things) is behind the project is important.

When someone creates a browser around token and adtech, and offers to be a gateway between content and ad money, it better has a serious reputation of integrity for me to even start digging into the technical details and see what it's really all about.

Until now, the whole project looked scammy because i only paid a cursory glance at it, because i didn't know who was behind it. Now that i've watched the podcast and understand the whole reasoning behind it actually makes a lot of sense.

Brave injecting its own ads in place of a publisher's own seems like a scam to me. Even if users knowingly opt into it.

Or collecting contributions on behalf of creators without their knowledge.

We don't inject and never have done anything like injecting ads into a publisher's own.

Why did you write this? Where did you read it? It's false, and you can check this by running Brave, even old versions that are still available. Please check your facts.

On collecting contributions on behalf of creators without their knowledge, the collection was a blunder but the funds were ours, from our token user growth pool. We were not taking funds from others. We fixed this as soon as I caught it, and I'm sorry I didn't catch it sooner.

Is this "repeal and replace" assessment inaccurate?

https://www.computerworld.com/article/3284076/brave-browser-...

Yes, it's inaccurate, and surprising for Keizer who is usually accurate. These are Brave user ads, they run in your ad slots (notifications, new tab pages). They don't go in publisher ad slots and never have.

Also,the fact that you, CEO of an aggressive US corporation, would try to intimidate me like that (with your talk of "libelous" etc.), to stop me from simply repeating the widely held impression that Brave is scammy, is well, really slimy.

Exactly the sort of thing I would expect from a CEO of "Brave".

I'm not making legal threats, and the US has weak libel laws anyway. The word fits what you're doing, though. Stop playing the victim and back up your scurrilous charge!

I'd already backed up my accusations, in the other reply, when I wrote the above.

Not that it's really needed when you know exactly what I"m talking about and are just feigning ignorance. Brave has been called out since their first attempts at finding anything, no matter how scammy, to make money at the expense of the web.

Congrats at finally finding something that sticks - few have done as much damage to the public web as you.

The only thing you've done is shown your own accusations to be false (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26138152). Ta!

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