This comes from the people distributing an ad-fuelled cryptocurrency called "Basic Attention Token". I'll take their word with two grains of salt and a tall glass of water, please.
Why is that? Because most of their revenue is from ads.
How does Brave make money? With ads.
Privacy-centric positioning makes sense to capture a part of the market. But the mis-aligned incentives are there for Brave just as much as they are for Google.
Are they better right now than Google? Probably. Is it smart to trust a company that only makes money with ads with control over your browsing experience in the medium term? Not so much.
It's quite amusing to me how well their marketing works.
What we need is a browser that can exist as a viable business without being chained to ad revenue.
No they are not.
Brave exists as a privacy-centric alternative. If they start violating user privacy, it would remove all incentive to use their product. There would be no reason for Brave to exist. It would be marketplace suicide.
Google exists as a privacy destroying organization. They can't hide this fact and they have never really tried to. And they can't stop now because their reason to exist would likewise be gone.
Disclaimer: I work for Neeva :)
What people (myself included) seem to really object to most are privacy invading personalized ads. These don't just provide benign info, they are actively taking something that belongs to you --- your privacy.
The more benign alternative is context sensitive ads --- ads based on the topic at hand. If I search for "pet supplies", I can tolerate and maybe even appreciate a few ads for dog food and flea collars. This might be distracting for cat owners but this is something I think most would be willing to accept in exchange for the "free" service.
DuckDuckGo seems to be growing very nicely with context sensitive ads.
Machine learning is local; can't be evil. They are committed to not going public. I suggest doing some more research before making assumptions.
If you’ve been around long enough, you know they’re at least paying YouTubers to use and promote the browser without any disclosure. Who knows how far past that they are going.
How do you know that? You sound jealous.
I'm not aware of anything recent though, last fiasco I'm aware of was something around 2020 I think, though I doubt they changed
Sources please?
Being annoyed daily by ads in exchange for some obscure crypto currency which might be worth something in the far future doesn't seem like a proposal to me that could convince a lot of people.
So I wonder, how many Brave users actually do opt-in? More than five?
I think it's 8M+ users that have opted into ads. I could be wrong though.
Also, their creator compensation program is quite terrible, which Tom Scott has documented quite thoroughly. It's all designed to feed back into Brave's cut, slowly siphoning your ad money to line their own pockets.
The alternative is Firefox (the browser they didn't let Brendan Eich ruin), or stock Chromium with uBlock. Ungoogled Chromium works great too, and hell I'd probably consider using a webkit browser before I'd reach for Brave. Or Vivaldi, for that matter. At least they don't have a goddamn crypto scam being engineered in the same offices where they build the browser.
> What about their huge conflict of interest in getting nearly all their funding from Google?
It's better than getting all of their funding from a 30% cut of your ad revenue. At least Google is funding Mozilla out of pity.
This is absolutely not why they are funding Mozilla.
Creators get whatever Brave users donate to them. Perhaps creators should remind their users to donate?
Creators don't get whatever Brave users donate to them. Brave doesn't pay them, they dangle a bunch of meaningless tokens in front of their face (again, using their own likeness without consent), and tell them to make an account if they want a fraction of the revenue that they would have received otherwise.
Uhhh… Your HN profile says: “serious discussions only”