I do not remember every story that has been posted about Brave since its inception. I always remember my emotional takeaway, which is that I don’t trust it.
My fuzzy memory on it is: something about brokering my private data, which I never want shared period, something about optimizing my relationship with ads which I want nothing to do with, something about a crypto scam.
You don't anything to do with ads? Just don't sign up to the rewards system. It's opt-in.
The "crypto scam"? What part of it is a scam, if at no point users are required to put any money or buy anything to participate? It is also opt-in, and the token exists mostly because it is the only way possible for them to pay users their share of revenues anywhere in the world without having to become a money transmitter themselves.
That's not a convincing rebuttal. A scam with a "free-to-play" tier is still a scam. Lots of carnies will let you play their scam game for free a few times, letting you get into the game for free is a popular trick for scammers.
With respect to Brave's thing specifically, it doesn't really seem like a scam to me. But I don't blame people for thinking it's a scam. If you reflexively call anything remotely related to cryptocurrencies a scam, you'll be right more often than not. It may not always be accurate 100% of the time, but it's a very good heuristic. If Brave wants to use a cryptocurrency and not be considered a scam, they have their work cut out for them. That's just the way it is.
There could be a downside for the advertisers, if they were being forced to buy the token to place the ads, but even that is not possible, because the ad campaigns are priced and paid in USD.
You are encouraging people to "think" something that you personally know not to be true.
IOW, you are not encouraging them to "think" anything. You are just feeding them a conclusion, and you are spreading a lie.
You might believe that is a white lie, but it's a lie nonetheless. Worse still, it's the type of lie that, if repeated often enough, damages all the reputation from honest people and destroys all chance of good work coming from the space. The lie becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
You can do better than that. I am not telling you to do a 180 in your opinion, or to support any crypto project in particular. But at the very least, stop feeding people with the conclusion and actually state the principles behind your reasoning.
Heuristics and "rules of thumb" help when there is uncertainty and when there is risk associated with a decision, but before applying an heuristic you can and should remove as much uncertainty as possible.
I am encouraging people to think something I believe to be true 99.99% of the time. It's called a generalization, and it's normal.
"Leave snakes alone." Most snakes aren't venomous, but some of them are. Just leave them all alone and you don't have to worry about which is which. Most snakes aren't venomous, but most cryptocurrencies are. Cryptocurrencies are much worse than snakes.
There is another word for it: prejudice.
> Most snakes aren't venomous, but most cryptocurrencies are.
Non-venomous snakes are not going to benefit from people touching them. There is no downside for the non-venomous snake if it is considered dangerous. It's actually an upside: lots of non-venomous snakes evolved to look like the dangerous ones because that gives them protection without forcing them to spend energy producing venom.
This is not true for people working in cryptocurrencies. Honest people need to be recognized as honest. If they are lumped together with scammers, they can not do their job. It's bad for them, and it's bad for those could've benefited from their work, but were (wrongly) scared due to prejudice.
You are not harming a snake by making a bad judgment call regarding its danger. You are harming honest people by making a bad judgment call over their work and their nature.
And it is working. 50M MAU and 100% YoY growth is nothing to sneeze at.
Oh, and then Firefox works just fine, too. Worst it has is... a builtin bookmark service? Oh, the humanity!
Just for perspective: Firefox is at barely 200M MAU, and declining every year.
It's still an Ethereum based coin, so there's other options but as far as cryptocurrencies go, it's far and away among the least scammy ones I've seen. Most others are either blatant scams or their value is entirely based on speculation.
Also, I'd really like to know what browser is being used by those complaining over "unethical behavior". Unless you are using Ungoogled Chromium or Vivaldi, your choice is almost certainly from an organization with a considerably longer "history of doing unethical things". Yes, Mozilla included.
There's no evidence that they'd do any better than their competitors over time. But some people seem to have a default ideological preference for Brave, similar to how many are theoretically opposed to "Big Tech" but suddenly don't seem to have a problem if Elon Musk were to become the replacement Zuckerberg.
As much as I loathe modern Mozilla's attitude towards doing things, people do hold them to an impossible standard. Browser development has to be paid for some way, and a thing like Pocket is a genuinely useful add-on service.
> As much as I loathe modern Mozilla's attitude towards doing things, people do hold them to an impossible standard.
And it's worse for Brave, because a lot of the arguments that people use against them are not even true.
The trouble with Mozilla/Firefox is that their ostensible supporters want the org to live on donations and are hostile to useful value adds like Pocket.
Firefox is ~200M MAU and declining.
My personal theory is that people don’t like Brandon Eich because of the prop8 stuff from 10 years ago and throw shade for other reasons.
This seems to follow the playbook of “I don’t like you for a reason I don’t want to talk about so I’ll find something to criticize even if it is illogical.”
I have absolutely NOTHING to back up that feeling, but I'm profusely against using any of their products.
Brave is now my default recommendation to “normies” as it’s easiest to set up and reduce the Bonnard of ads and it doesn’t track you.
I used to recommend Firefox but it’s huge and bloated and isn’t as easy to use any more.
It’s funny because it seems your social network is a bit weird if you have such a limited intersection of Brave+Qnuts.
Interestingly, I don’t know a single person irl who is a “qnut” (or at least admits it to me) but I know lots of sysadmin types with a decent chunk who use Brave. Probably 50% are “de googling.”