https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)#Controvers...
They've since corrected both of those things, but those are enough for me to choose not to trust them as an organization.
- 2018 Rewards Update documented at https://brave.com/rewards-update/
- Affiliate Codes explained at https://brave.com/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/
- The Tor/DNS issue resulted from https://brave.com/privacy-updates-6/
They're not saying Brave did anything intentionally wrong, they're just big enough mistakes that it's not possible for them, personally, to trust the organization.
> those are enough for me to choose not to trust them as an organization
> On 6 June 2020, a Twitter user pointed out that Brave inserts affiliate referral codes when users type a URL of Binance into the address bar, which earns Brave money. Further research revealed that Brave redirects the URLs of other cryptocurrency exchange websites, too. In response to the backlash from the users, Brave's CEO apologized and called it a "mistake" and said "we're correcting".
Seems intentional... Don't insult our intelligence and tell us that this was an "accident" or "unintended mistaken".
Briefly, we added a way for users to support Brave without having to make financial contributions. They could simply opt to use one of our affiliate codes for a few poplar sites/services.
We added a feature to Brave which responded to user search input, and offered affiliate links for relevant results. You can see a screenshot of what that looked like at https://brave.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/image3.png. This didn't involve any user data, didn't rewrite links on pages, didn't redirect network requests, or touch the area of privacy/security in any way. Seemed like a good idea :)
When the feature actually launched, users quickly realized that the logic was handling fully qualified URLs in additional to search input. You can see a screenshot of that at https://brave.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/image2-1.png. This was the mistake that needed to be corrected.
I hope that helps clarify things a little. Again, there was no impact to user data or privacy, and Brave made $0 on this feature. Thankfully, our community is attentive, and yields prompt feedback when mistakes are made. Fortunately we were able to resolve the issue quickly and get a fix out to users.
Always happy to chat if anybody has any other questions about Brave.
And to be clear, I'm highly doubtful that the users were all aware that there was no relationship there. Framing the distinction as being between "verified" and "unverified" creators is disingenuous IMO: On any other platform, creators being "unverified" would mean they'd signed up, but just hadn't confirmed some details yet. The comparison of the check-marks to Twitter is also very strange, Twitter's own UI would prime users to think that a check-mark signified a notable user, not just any user who'd signed up. Whereas Brave's "unverified" users have no relationship to the company whatsoever.
Perhaps this was all just naivete on the part of Brave, but it's very concerning to me that a company which (presumably) intends to become the de-facto method of monetising content could possibly be so naive as to how their actions would be perceived.
1. You don't donate to people via twitter.
2. The people on twitter actually signed up for twitter.
If you actually think it was a mistake then perhaps stop defending it. If you don't think it was a mistake then stop explaining away to controversy by saying it was "naive UI/UX".
For chrome doing it, the same applies to Brave as those people would have visited binance.us regardless of if Brave inserted their referral code link there.
As for what others do, traffic attribution is common. Open Firefox and perform a search from the address bar. Long before you press Enter, Firefox has already sent keystrokes off to Google.com (assuming you haven't changed your default search engine), along with a tag on the URL identifying Firefox as the source of the traffic.
0: https://support.binance.us/hc/en-us/articles/360047428793-Re...
It is still an example of traffic attribution, as is the case with Firefox sending your keystrokes to Google asynchronously (marked with the Firefox identifier). This is how Firefox continues to get paid, by sending users over to the Google search engine. In the case of Brave, this identifier was shown to the user prior to any network activity. That isn't the case with Firefox (and nearly every other popular browser).
No, creators did not have to be savvy enough to make their own ERC-20 wallet. We worked with Uphold at the time. Creators could verify with Uphold (a wallet would be created for them), and we would then send Brave's BAT (earmarked for the creator by Brave users) from our own settlement wallet over to the creator.
It's a mistake to assume something is nonsense or bad just because crypto is involved. Provided that you can convert it to something usable, it doesn't really matter if you're paid in dollars, BAT or something else.
That's ~400 dollars at current BAT prices ($0.49) or ~1200 dollars at the price BAT was ~1 month ago ($1.50).
It's not a lot, BAT value isn't very stable and I'd make more money with Google Adsense, but this comes from users that block ads anyway. 400 is better than 0.
I like Brave and many other people do. Just look at any of the other HN posts about Brave.
Since I like Brave, from this side of the table it looks like the anti-Brave people come out in full force to try to spew the same old crap and badmouth Brave. At the point it is the tired old crap, which most has been debunked already.
Those that are showing Braves many problems ("badmouth") don't have a stake one way or the other except to warn people.
The only non-compromised Brave users I've come across are mobile, and they are the ones that find using the Firefox add-ons menu to install uBlock origin too complicated. They are unlikely to learn the BAT system.
Neither consider Brave any real threat. Another commenter said "romantic view" - I think that applies here.
How do you know this?