You are not required to buy anything.
You are not required to invest anything.
You can use the browser without any of the crypto features, or the ad rewards program. They are opt-in.
There is no scam about Brave's program. Stop projecting. If you don't like crypto, fine. But to disparage it on false statements is beyond lame.
Please omit swipes like that from your HN posts. They're against the site guidelines and weaken your argument.
Nobody claimed Brave is forcing crypto down its users' throats. Instead, that their embrace of crypto signals characteristics about their management, culture and priorities. Some are attracted to that. Others don't care. Still others see it as a red flag. None of these positions rises to the level of disparagement, or accusing others of lying.
[edit] Past conversation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999
[1] https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1076187316748615680
> collecting crypto donations in a pool on 'behalf of' those websites
No. The rewards program is centered around the people. It just happens that the way to discover the people and address the payment is through some specific platforms (like Youtube, twitter, reddit, github, etc).
> holding them hostage
Nothing is held hostage. The only legal way that they can pay someone is if the person goes through KYC. The system can only recognize the recipient as "authorized to receive payments" if the creator has signed up to one of the partner exchanges.
> keeping them for themselves
This is false. Contributions were going to the user pool. Now they are returned to the original donor.
No, I think I'd be significantly angrier if they'd collected actual money and withheld it from its originally intended recipient and instead put it into a fund that they used to grow their business. That was actually more offering them the benefit of the doubt. Crypto tends to cloud a lot of judgement and relax the definitions of 'financial fraud.' If it were done with actual dollars they might already have met with the DOJ.
> Nothing is held hostage. The only legal way that they can pay someone is if the person goes through KYC.
So what you're saying is, you can't get it unless you sign up even though they'd already solicited the donations on your behalf. Got it. So exactly what I said. This wouldn't be an issue if they had people sign up first, right? Then they wouldn't be soliciting donations on behalf of unregistered individuals and the whole point would be moot.
> This is false. Contributions were going to the user pool. Now they are returned to the original donor.
Right, the marketing budget. They stopped after they got called out for it.
Exactly what I said.
[edit] Side-note, if they'd done this on the websites of charities, it may actually be illegal in a number of countries.
> Charity fraud is the act of using deception to get money from people who believe they are making donations to a charity. [...] Charity fraud not only includes fictitious charities but also deceitful business acts. Deceitful business acts include businesses accepting donations and not using the money for its intended purposes, or soliciting funds under the pretense of need. [1]
Now I'm no lawyer but soliciting donations that people think are going to a charity and instead putting them into your 'user pool' if 'unclaimed' sounds a lot like [1].
After your edit, but okay...
Anyway, what they did was no different than any other tip bot did on reddit, or any other company that needs to find a way to bootstrap a marketplace that depends on network effects: they made it easy for people to initiate a transaction and then would go after the other end to close the deal.
> The marketing budget.
The "User Growth Pool" was a literal pool of extra funds that would get distributed to the users beyond what they collected from the ad-selling. It takes a special type of cynic to think that they would use that as a ploy to increase their "marketing budget".
What I really don't get is why people are so sensitive against these actions only when the company is involved with crypto. Google and Facebook are making fortunes out of fraudulent ad views, and I can bet good money that you don't mind having them in your stock portfolio. But here is one company building a model on actual privacy and fraud-free ad views, and you are here calling for "financial fraud". For what? Eight people complaining about the improper messaging on their beta product?
How much did they get out of this "fraud"? A few hundred dollars, that didn't even get to go to their pockets? Is it really believable that a company with millions of dollars in funding and one of most successful ICOs from the 2017 craze would run such a ridiculously unprofitable "fraud"?
It's a great idea with a good implementation that's primarily marred by poor uptake. It could have been a game changer if it had been embraced. The idea that Brave still shows ads and essentially holds the revenue in escrow for a non-member publisher is somewhat uncomfortable. But I also realize the likely reason they did it that way is it's much easier to get a publisher on board if they can show that there's already engagement and revenue waiting to be collected.
I use Brave from time to time with the wallet and rewards disabled. It's a couple settings and you never see it again. I probably would enable it if publishers actually used it. As things stand now, why should I be willing to accept ads the publisher won't be paid for when I'm already unwilling to accept ads that do pay?
So I think that, ultimately, it's not the use of crypto or the rewards program that comes off as a little skeevy. It's the idea that that stuff exists and the money never goes where it's supposed to go.
Yep, I agree with that. It gets a little guilt by association but that's not where the fundamental issue is.
It is completely insidious to the goals of this site that we allow lazy accusations that anything remotely associated with crypto is a scam without a shred of evidence.
Some other crypto being a scam or even holding the opinion that there are so many scams in crypto that it’d better if it was banned / disappeared is not a good reason for the behaviour we see in comments like this.
They reduce the discourse to a meritless shouting contest at best.
That's literally what the GP comment claimed. That it's a crypto scam. Scams usually try to cram a fictitious product down your throat.
> None of these positions rises to the level of disparagement
Calling it a crypto scam when it isn't one does.
I have no dog in this race. I use Safari and Firefox as products, but I don't have a deep enough connection to browser development and the web to feel like either is a part of my identity.
The original commenter substantiated their opinion [1] to a level that rises above deserving a caustic reply. That's all I'm saying.
That said, they still let you opt out and they are one of the few browsers that still have a culture of making the web better for the end users.
Somebody who says that all cryptocurrency stuff is a scam is strictly wrong, but substantially correct. If 95% of door-to-door salesmen are high-pressure assholes and I say all door-to-door salesmen are scum, then strictly I'm wrong but I'm still mostly correct. It wouldn't be fair to the innocent girlscout trying to sell cookies, but the kirby salesmen can fuck right off.
No one is arguing about the general case, but specifically about Brave as a browser. It's bad enough that people are trying to use their general bias about crypto as an argument against using the browser, you are going even further and saying that people should be guilty by association.
To follow your analogy, we are talking specifically about the girl scouts and you are saying you feel justified in branding them as scum because they happen to share a trait with door-to-door salesmen.
I'm telling you that the criticism against Brave's use of cryptocurrencies is informed by a well-warranted generalized belief that all crytocurrency schemes are scams. The only reason I don't slam my door on girlscouts is because it is immediately obvious to me that a little girl in a girlscout uniform is not a kirby salesman. I can see that difference plainly at a glance, without having to read or hear anything they say. To perceive the difference between Brave's scheme and a typical cryptocurrency scam takes a lot more effort and careful examination. It isn't fair to blame people for not putting in that effort, given the general odds in the cryptocurrency sphere.
The low-effort thing here would be to ignore this and walk away, to not leave a comment at all. Instead folks are writing out comments that Brave is a "cryptocurrency scam". It's hard for me to believe that it's too much effort to verify whether something is a scam but it's not too much effort to write a comment dismissing Brave.
This whole thread is a trash fire. Most comments are saying the same things over and over again and only a handful are even comparing Firefox and Brave. Does this really need to happen on any remotely cryptocurrency related thread? It just turns people off from using the site.
There. is. no. scheme.
What is so hard to understand about that? The crypto part from Brave is only if you want to receive a token.
They could change tomorrow to make the payments in greenbacks, and they would still have the same business model. But do you think that the people bitching about the browser would use it, if they suddenly learned they could win $5-10 per month? They wouldn't. They would just find another reason to complain or fight it, and those who actually want to use crypto would leave because they lost their chance to speculate.
I personally don't care about the success of BAT - though I still buy it regularly. My main interest is in finding an alternative economic model for Surveillance Capitalism. Show me any other company that is doing anything that can become a real threat to Google/MS/Facebook, and I will support it as well.
It's a scheme, a business plan. If my understanding of it is correct, it's not a scam but it's certainly a scheme.
> Show me any other company that is doing anything that can become a real threat to Google/MS/Facebook, and I will support it as well.
Wish I could, Mozilla certainly isn't such an example. Brave is unlikely to ever get their foot in the door because their business model smells like a scam. I don't think there are any viable technical solutions to the threat of Google/MS/Facebook, only political/legislative solutions. But if anybody proves me wrong I'll be thankful.
Brave is already at 60 million monthly active users, and growing. Firefox is 200M MAU, and declining.
They are already way past the door.
I get Brave ads as either on its main tab, or as separate notifications I get a reward for. I can believe there were variants on that, but I want more information about what they were.
from 2018
https://productmint.com/brave-business-model-how-does-brave-...
its worse
>In June, reports emerged, which stated that the company had been quietly inserting affiliate links for certain search queries without telling users. For instance, Brave had added a home widget for Binance a month prior, which turned out to redirect users via its affiliate offering.
The ideal situation would be to have no ads if the browser is (often) advertised privacy-first. But then we know the world isn't perfect. We work around tradeoffs.
As long as Brave keeps these contentious options transparent, I have no problems in supporting them.
I really wish I had focused on subscription growth instead of ad growth when I was in the content business (I had a few sites over 1m uniques per day). There's just something to delivering something so valuable that readers are willing to pay for it. You end up being much more focused on quality instead of driving ad clicks and directing your readers off site. That said, times have changed a lot, and people now seem much more willing to pay than 10 years ago.
To me that model is a lot better than the status quo. Content creators that I think are producing quality content get rewarded, while those pushing content to attract eye balls lose power.
Brave is a shady platform at a minimum; and has been caught in the past being actively malicious.
Web browsers are antiquated technology. IMO the original web UX is dying. I’m sharing data through private K8s + Kilo clusters. There is nothing “open” about a web of VC backed user interfaces and FAANG own private DCs.
I understand such economics are this websites bread and butter, but most of you produce b2b tools I have no use for. One could replace the web with AI bots posting the same content, I’d never know because I’m digging into ML generated games and other content on the down-low, with like minded hackers rather than existing in idolatry, white knighting in defense of of VCs and billionaires latest reskin of old technology.
Open ML generated content is going to do to digital media markets what open Linux did to Windows and MacOS; suck the profit out. I’m here for it and the evolution away from the web as we knew it.
The whole point of BAT is to reward people from removing ads placed by website owners and allow Brave to display ads of their own choosing and profit from websites that they have no involvement with.
It could actually be argued the whole 'privacy' angle they use is merely a way to justify the whole idea of ad-swapping. It's no different to what Apple have done with advertising of late.
Of course they justify this by saying the websites can take a cut, but that's only if the website owners know about it and forced against their will to do it.
It implies something has not been disclosed to users. Brave has been almost painfully honest.
> It could actually be argued the whole 'privacy' angle they use is merely a way to justify the whole idea of ad-swapping
Brave does not ad swap, and brave rewards ads show up as a browser notification, not inline with content. This idea came from a 2016 article where content publishers were afraid that Brave might launch with ad-swapping. Brave did get caught re-writing Binance affiliate links to their own affiliate code, but immediately discontinued the process.
If it's the website owners, I need you to explain what makes this worse to them than adblock. Because adblock isn't a scam.
I'd argue that website owners are being scammed by a company stealing profits. Brave is literally going "We don't think you should earn money from your visitors because of factors we decide, but we're going to show people on your website OUR ads because we picked them."
Adblock is just as bad. They block all ads and then go "If you've got plenty of money and want us to let your ads show to our users, you've got to pay us for the privilege."
They're literally like an Ad mafia.
I meant ad blocking in general, sorry.
> Brave is literally going "We don't think you should earn money from your visitors because of factors we decide, but we're going to show people on your website OUR ads because we picked them."
I don't see how this is any worse for the site than blocking all ads doing nothing else. At least as long as the users aren't confused, which they aren't, because the brave ads don't get put into the page.
If ublock cost money to use, would that be a scam?
If you tell me that Google/Firefox share their revenue with users and their ads don't collect personal data, I'll be rushing back to it.
There are some people however who do see the benefit of trading (directly or indirectly) their attention for services and products. These people should be able to do it without having to give away their privacy as well.
The thing is: we have two different business models. On both of them, ads are a reality. But one of them they are (1) opt-in, (2) private and (3) still give the user the power to "vote with their wallet", even if there is no money directly involved. The other is what we have: Surveillance Capitalism, big players exploiting user data and a total misalignment between producers and consumers. To me it seems pretty obvious which one is better and which one I'd support.
Absolutely all of this is either opt-in, or else trivial to opt-out from with a few clicks.
Mozilla is an entity that essentially exists at the whim of Google. Funded by Google to sit in the corner and be semi-relevant at best, so that Google can stave off anti-trust attacks on Chromium. It earns a half-billion dollars per year in revenue, and essentially pisses away most of that on MBA nonsense that has nothing to do with maintaining a web browser.
You don't have to care about or pay attention to any of that to use Firefox.
Neither of these two organizations are indisputably "perfect". If you are the type of person for whom your web browser choice is a component of your personal "identity", then attaching either of these logos to your own personal brand can be problematic.
However, wrapping up your personal brand identity in web browser selection is ridiculous. All of the above is essentially irrelevant nonsense. Meanwhile, back in the land of objective reality... the world has standardized on Chromium for better or worse, and so Brave has a bigger plugin ecosystem and far fewer if any compatibility issues with any website.
I currently only use Brave and Firefox on all my devices. Never liked the BAT crap Brave has built-in, but you can disable it and move on.
previously: Brave’s browser has been autocompleting websites with referral codes [2y ago, 57 point, 32 comments]
The change was transparent, the response was transparent, and it was reversed immediately.
You do know that FireFox gets paid for Google search referrals to this day right?
In comparison this was responded to and resolved 2 years ago.
Messing with referral codes to websites is not even remotely in the same ballpark as being paid for searches from the default search provider. It's asinine to compare them.
It may even hinder your motivation to build a browser that focuses on the user, and more to appease the person paying the bills (Google).
In comparison to a change that was in the browser for a day or so 2 years ago, yeah that's an asinine comparison alright.
And yes you seems to be one hell of a biased user, very hard to agree with you.
Why can't there be 2 alternatives to default Chrome, with their own strengths and weaknesses?
I personally prefer Firefox who is completely independent on code changes on chromium core code (but getting Google's money in same vein as ie Apple is) - once some privacy-removing code change is baked into whole Chromium codebase, Brave's main selling point is gone. But I respect them for offering the best-available solution on Chrome-inclined users.
BTW I use firefox and voted for those things Eich is against. Not that it should even matter, but it does. That's what this whole flamewar of a comment page is actually about.
YOU and I can.
For an organization it has to be GPO mass disabled.
Does Brave support GPO in AD/Admin templates in intune?
https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360039248271-Gro...
BAT is disabled by default.
Also, I love the useful little features they include like redirecting all http requests from www.reddit.com to old.reddit.com. One can also bypass paywalls at the NY Times and The Economist with the click of a button.
I use Brave daily and have never heard of this feature. How do I turn this on?
They have a built in ad blocker and only block ads, not replace.
The OPT-IN text notification ad service is separate. You can enable it to get text notification ads in exchange for BAT. It's OPT-IN and completely up to you.
It's ALWAYS been like that. At no time did they ever "replace" blocked ads.
What's really shady is how these obviously false talking points about Brave get perpetuated to this day, in every Brave thread.
-- edit @Accacin --
I was responding to a very specific false claim that they replaced ads being constantly repeated.
If you want to go on a general rant find another thread.
-- edit @411111111111111 ---
Nice biased article, that's exactly where this misinformation came from.
They say "replaced ads" then their only linked source to that claim is https://brave.com/brave-launches-user-trials-for-opt-in-ads/
Which talks about the BAT rewards program, which are opt-in text system notification ads shown in an interval. Not on the webpage, or while browsing, or by default.
-- edit @vegetable --
No you notice people bringing up 2 year old lies and people responding to them. The first people who act crazy are those saying these ridiculous statements like "Brave is a cryptocurrency scam!" Then the people who inevitably have to call them out, then comes the people who say the people calling them out are fanboying. It's a cycle that repeats over and over in every Tesla, SpaceX, Brave, etc. thread that for some reason (because the owners are hated) gets the same talking points spammed over and over.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: it looks like you've been using HN mostly for flamewar and ideological battle. Can you please stop doing that? It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for, so we have to ban such accounts.
I have been using Firefox for over 10 years now, and if they do something stupid I'll be on here complaining with everyone else. If they crossed the line I would definitely look for another browser.
The problem with Brave users seems to be that Brave can do no wrong. Bundling crypto in a browser seems absolutely insane to me. Remember all the shit Firefox got for bundling Pocket? Difference is, Pocket actually makes a little bit of sense in the context of a browser.
At the end of the day, it's thin veneer over Chromium and IMO they won't be able to block manifest v3 forever. Firefox can.
Almost everything wrong with the modern Internet can be traced to payment being difficult. If you could get small donations to sites, they'd be able to pay for themselves and wouldn't need to rely on your friendly neighborhood mega corp and ads. Crypto's promise was to provide that, digital money you can move around globally over the Internet fast, easy and without a middle man. So it's makes a ton of sense to have that in the browser. That crypto currency so far falls quite a bit short on delivering on that promise is a separate problem.
> Remember all the shit Firefox got for bundling Pocket? Difference is, Pocket actually makes a little bit of sense in the context of a browser.
Pocket never made any sense at all. Why would you bundle some proprietary service into an Open Source browser instead of improving the built in bookmark and download functions of your browser? Software-as-a-service is a cancer that should never ever get anywhere near a project claiming to be about privacy.
I’d rather pay for articles than have ads blasted everywhere. YouTube premium as an example is very worth it! However when you subscribe to something like The Economist they still blast ads at you. Also I really don’t want to pay for one off subscriptions everywhere, especially when they don’t even turn off ads.
Long term, blocking ads isn’t viable, nor is it even really ethical.
Sure I’m bummed that brave didn’t go another route and try to get a group of publishers in on the attention token rather that the sorta shady interception tactic. Still Firefox is in a position to try and make a federated micro transaction system, but haven’t tried.
Pocket makes people mad because we expect Mozilla to be better. By the way, where is the source for the server side of Pocket? I can't find it anywhere, Mozilla lied about it. Whatever Brave did wrong doesn't excuse anything Mozilla does wrong, nor vice versa. They're all snakes, corrupted years ago by Google's influence, kept alive suckling on the teat of the biggest monopolist in the room. Both of them.
Not liking the product or the company is one thing. Not liking crypto is perfectly understandable (I don't have any real interest in it either). But I wish people could just say they don't like it, or make informed criticisms. In most cases it's painfully obvious people have never even fiddled with the browser and simply trust hearsay.
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3284076/brave-browser-...
Brave will remove the ads from a site, that a person/company has paid for to ad provider. The ad provider thats supposed to pay the website host / content creator / whatever.
Now Brave will insert their own ads and that another company has paid them to insert. So they are stealing and making money from the effort that someone else is expecting.
I can't understand how this seems negative to anyone. There is a certain assumption that any Brave user would have an ad blocker anyway.
What is the alternative?
What are you talking about. They are stealing from content creators / whom ever took the time to create the website to begin with and taking their money. They are literally leeches.
I don't care about the ad business and believe there are better ways to do this, but this is scummy stuff.
Use an ad blocker or whatever you want but this is another company profiting from it.
The ads go in the browser if you decide to turn them on. You can also turn off the ad blocker and have both, if you so desire.
I'm pretty sure having new tab ads and push notification ads does not leech off websites.
Ad blocking by itself is arguably leeching, but that's clearly not your argument if you suggest using other ad blockers.
Yes but we are not profiting from stealing ad revenue from content creators.
>I'm pretty sure having new tab ads and push notification ads does not leech off websites.
You wouldn't be using a browser to access content, and give them a reason to show you ads.
Brave's ad blocking and advertising are separate things - the adblocker is basically pretty much like uBO, but written in Rust and integrated as part of the browser.
Brave Rewards is a separate module that lets users watch ads that get delivered as toaster popups. Brave uses a part of the revenue to buy BAT from the open market and gives it to users who viewed the toaster popups. The company also operates a tipping service that lets users give those crypto tokens to content creators they like. (Since Brave buys the tokens, the tokens will have a buyer who pays with real money from the real, normal advertising business).
Second, the browser did actually start being built on top of Gecko - as far as I know they had an Electron-like solution just with Gecko, and used that for the first versions of the browser. Later they transitioned to being a Chromium soft fork.
Do you have a company that depends on advertising? I hope it fails. I use firefox btw, and I block all ads.
However that is a minority (and my pro crypto comments usually recover to +3 or 4 a few days after), and most of us are here because we like good technology.
So that is why Brave is relatively popular here: we don't think it is shady.
This is more general than crypto. I've seen a recurring pattern where a comment of mine gets downvoted pretty quickly after posting, and then gets upvoted hours (or days) later.
This is another reason why you shouldn't comment on voting - in addition to being against the HN guidelines (which should be a reason by itself), comment score can change drastically in the 2-hour edit window. Just don't do it.
You're presenting a very persuasive argument for using Brave[1].
1. They automatically block ads.
2. By default, they show no other ads.
3. If the user wants to see ads, the user can opt-in, and then only receive text ads OOB (of the actual content).
I don't think that I've ever had such a joyful reaction to a feature-list in software before.
Thank you.
[1] Downloading it now as I write this.
You keep saying "stealing", I just downloaded (and am now using) Brave, and with a clean install it shows no ads. No "normal" ads nor their own ads.
I just don't wanna see ads; why is that wrong?
It's opt-in. I downloaded the browser, I am using it, and I see no ads, and Brave makes no money of ads.
In order for me to see ads, I have to go into the settings and turn on the flag.
In order for Brave to profit, the user has to go into the config and turn some setting on.
I fail to see how this is stealing, because Brave does not get revenue unless the user takes some specific steps.
Maybe a screenshot? Literally anything.
I’ve been using Brave for a while, even before the crypto stuff but all, and I mean all of that can be turned off. I haven’t seen an Brave ad in place of where a typical ad would be. Ever. That kind of defeats the purpose of Brave, doesn’t it?
The only reason I known internet ads still exist is because of Chrome forced on my work computer.
Even if this does not happen in a reasonable timeframe, it is indeed a question how long it will take before chromium itself is corrupted by the same influences.
How so?
I think it's reasonable to dislike crypto for any reason you choose, but merely having a crypto wallet feature (that you're free to never use) doesn't mean that something is a scam.
Scam is a pretty powerful word and shouldn't be bandied about so casually.
1. Brave replaced ads on creator's websites with their own ads.
2. Brave's ads generated some sort of tokens, that the creator then could claim and cash out.
3. Brave happily collected those tokens on behalf of creators who didn't want to be a part of the scheme (e.g. Tom Scott). They stripped the creators of revenue from the original ads and just kept the tokens/revenue from their ads.
Points 1 and 2 are mostly correct, but it's not like it replaces a banner with their own banner but they still show you ads while blocking other ads. I feel the others saying it's wrong are not being honest, the result is the same: a site owners ad is not shown and a Brave ad is. It's an extortion scheme IMO.
If you turn the BAT rewards on, you get system text notifications at intervals, it's not anywhere on the site or triggered by browsing.
They are two completely different features. The adblocker is a basic utility for everyone.
The BAT rewards is an optional program you can enable if you want extra tokens.
It's a real user agent, as in, for the user.
Users also have a right to enable a separate rewards text system notification ads program if they so choose.
If content providers want to paywall adblockers they can choose to do so.
People can't seriously be complaining about this given that everyone here is basically upset that Chrome is making changes that impact ad blockers?
Brave Rewards is a separate module that lets users watch ads that get delivered as toaster popups. Brave uses a part of the revenue to buy BAT from the open market and gives it to users who viewed the toaster popups. The company also operates a tipping service that lets users give those crypto tokens to content creators they like. (Since Brave buys the tokens, the tokens will have a buyer who pays with real money from the real, normal advertising business).
> 3. Brave happily collected those tokens on behalf of creators who didn't want to be a part of the scheme (e.g. Tom Scott). They stripped the creators of revenue from the original ads and just kept the tokens/revenue from their ads.
As far as I know, this was a Brave-held extra pool of BAT they had to kickstart the whole tipping system. If a creator wasn't onboard, they held the BAT for 90 days and if the creator hadn't signed up by then, returned it to the pool to be directed by the users again. I don't know if it happened to the users' own BAT, but in any case Brave didn't hold onto the coins.
The original UI back when the whole thing happened was pretty bad at distinguishing whether a creator was or wasn't a part of the program, if old screenshots are anything to go by. They fixed the UI to be clearer.
It's been a long time, but what I remember was the tokens went back into a pool that were used to pay out other creators who were signed up. Not sure if I have the details right, but when I looked into it I came away feeling like it was in good faith, though misguided.
Here's a hacker news discussion about same issue but affecting Tom Scott rather than the lobste.rs people: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999 (archive of the linked tweet: https://web.archive.org/web/20190203094117/https://twitter.c...)
EDIT: Oh, and we can't forget the time when they silently changed links to contain their own referral codes: https://www.theblock.co/linked/67594/braves-browser-has-been... (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23441605)
The knobs to turn off each of the 4 things I just listed are found in 4 different places within the UI.
That defaults to Crypto ads, Crypto "sponsored backrounds", Crypto wallet and Brave news.
- Hijacking all your DNS requests to Cloudfare by default
- installing a scheduled task to Windows PCs to phone home your Windows default browser setting choice (And if you delete this task it gets re-installed again at each update)
- Firefox Studies are OPT-OUT. I've seen a study active on initial install already (and sometimes THREE studies running at once in a recent Linux install).
- Google set as the default search despite many privacy oriented options available
- Unique ID generated upon install.
- A marketing company metrics enabled was included in Android/iOS (see link). See above about Unique ID and IP address collection to see how this could have been abused.
I have used FF daily since basically Opera went Chrome-clone. BUT having to research how to turn off all these things above and what you mentioned with telemetry etc over the past few years has REALLY sat bad with me to point I am ready to jump ship as well and let them figure out themselves why they continue to bleed users. Bring back Colorways again for v106 along with cutesy sayings?? UGH. But FF still is the lesser of evils imo among desktop browser choices.
https://www.ghacks.net/2021/04/18/mozilla-will-remove-leanpl...
Now I'd have to tell them: install Firefox, then go here and click this, go there and click that, etc.
Firefox advertises themselves as user respecting but falls short frequently and that disconnect riles people more than being abused by google and chrome who we generally know don't care about respecting users at all (unless it's profitable)
Firefox's entire revenue model is "get money from Google", how is that not a concern? Ultimately Firefox's money comes from advertising. Brave is trying to find a way to monetize the web that doesn't require user tracking and ads.
Not grandparent poster, but I have been using Brave for a few years. I disabled/removed all the crypto bits it just works as a better Chrome-compatible browser. I would have liked to use Firefox, but some websites didn't work well with, and at the time I tried it was slower so stuck with Brave.
I even have a relocation Mozilla also have mentioning this, and if I remember correctly it was like 99% of the time people blamed Firefox it was a actually an addon that was the problem.
Brave has an option to use BAT to pay content creators, and to earn BAT by opting into viewing ads. That's all. I've been using Brave for years, have the option turned off, and never see any of it. Could you explain where the "scam" is?
Firefox has become a political organization. I used it since the "Phoenix 0.1" days. Stopped using it when it was taken over by hateful activists.
Brave initially launched using bitcoin micropayments [1], but they had a very hard time getting any traction, since people weren't really willing to pay to not see ads. Launching their own cryptocurrency seemed like an OK idea, and it seems to have worked out well.
It’s a browser, not a “crypto scam”
Chrome has none of these issues and as an effect brave is good. That’s why I’m testing brave.
I really tried this time, 9 month of Firefox.
Monitor, Relay, Pocket, Focus, VPN. Who cares.
All while defunding the one project that might ensure their relevance - Servo.
(And also once attempting to defund Thunderbird)
So I picked the most practical example, which was Brave. Mind you there is nothing scamming about it. I have no use for it (but I do like the idea of being able to give small direct awards to people for great posts), so I just turned it of.
Much less scammy than what google and chrome does.
This phenomenon early on was even targeted at simply cryptography based security (Although not super common on HN thankfully), since the word 'crypto' was associated with the software.
Ironically, it was born as a response to the crypto-crazed people that had the same thoughtless reaction in reverse
The issue persisted, as far as I know, one day. The response was to both fix the bug and make the feature be off by default.
Edit: it wasn't Amazon referral links but companies that had partnered with brave.
Not sure the Amazon link thing is true at all. What I remember is that there was a Binance referral link that was built-in to the browser, which would show up at the top of auto-complete when you started typing "binance" in the URL bar.
I'd argue that the UI of the brave donation feature had been a dark pattern however, even if they made it so unintentionally.
> They added UI to the browser to claim users could pay individual site creators who'd signed up, but had scraped the names and photos of site creators who'd never heard of them. Brave planned to take the payments after they were unclaimed for 90 days. When caught, they claimed the funds were held "in escrow" but later admitted there were holding the funds themselves. Story broke here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999