Why would you switch people to Brave and not to Firefox..? Brave being a cryptocurrency scam should be enough to enough to turn people away, but I'd also worry about the position of a browser which is in a hostile relationship with the browser engine it's based on.
> You can use the browser without any of the crypto features, or the ad rewards program. They are opt-in.
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.
I disagree. I thought the ads and rewards programs were an interesting concept. I don't use them but interesting nonetheless when mainstream web ads involve all kinds of privacy invasion. Blockchain here was actually a good choice for implementing a simple and private payment system. Rather than send any signal about the characteristics of management, some people are looking at this as a guilt by association kind of situation because they don't agree with how some completely different group of people has implemented and used blockchain or engaged in pump and dump scams.
I don't like crypto so I was pretty skeptical of Brave when I first looked into it, but after reading about it it came not so much as them trying to piggyback on the crypto train but rather as them prototyping different funding models to see what sticks. I prefer this approach to Firefox's who is fully dependent on funding from Google to survive.
One of those prototypes IIRC was them disabling the ads that companies used to fund their operations, collecting crypto donations in a pool on 'behalf of' those websites, holding them hostage until the site signed up - and if they didn't sign up within some period of time keeping them for themselves [edit] ('putting them into the user growth pool' [1]).
> 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].
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"?
I believe that's more or less how it works today, although I'm not sure about the part where they eventually keep the money. The browser essentially blocks ads and rewards users with BAT crypto in exchange for viewing privacy-respecting ads run by Brave. The BAT is then credited to the sites the user is viewing based on time spent on the site. The rub is, as you pointed out, that not every site signs up with Brave and won't ever receive the BAT.
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.
> 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.
Red flag is fine “brave being a cryptocurrency scam” is not, without strong evidence for the scam portion of that statement pertaining to Brave specifically (either commenter needs to provide evidence or Brave being a literal scam needs to be publicly known and widely accepted).
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.
> think it's the word "scam" they were taking issue with
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.
Just checked on a fresh Nightly install, doesn't seem to insert tipping buttons anywhere if you haven't enabled Brave Rewards. I haven't, no tipping buttons anywhere.
I’m not as passionate about it as you, but I agree they broke their principal of being for the user by making it opt out. Among other issues, making it opt out makes it seem like large sites (like Twitter) endorse BAT. Maybe they do, but I doubt it.
> 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.
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.
Congratulations. You just managed to pontificate without making any actual contribution to the argument.
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.
> No one is arguing about the general case, but specifically about Brave as a browser.
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.
> 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.
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.
Was there any evidence this ever happened? I feel like people conflate "a browser with an ad-blocker, plus a separate incentivized advertising system" with something that literally inserted advertisements where the removed ones were.
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.
>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.
Replacing one ad system with another ad system/modality doesn't negate the presence of ads. It just changes the modus operandi. Much like getting your daily nicotine kick from vapes instead of cigarettes.
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.
For one you can disable the popup ads. Additionally you get paid if you do enable the ads. So it's quite a different system where the user is put first in both cases.
> outside of screwing over the content creator. You're visiting a site for content, and the one really getting paid is Brave
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.
You are getting paid as well. If you want to reward the content creator, you can.
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.
Not with BAT. But Brave buys the BAT it gives users from the open market using their ad revenue, as far as I know. Which means the creators can sell the BAT for real money, which does pay bills.
The creators that I do support get more from me in BAT than the zero dollars they get from my viewing of their content in Google/Facebook/Twitter/Youtube. This is what matters.
Then what about when Brave hijacked affiliate links en-mass for all users? No 'not required' as it was maliciously done in the background (until they were called out on it at least).
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.
No, it is not a better word. Please explain exactly what is fraudulent about Brave's business model. Who is getting duped? The advertisers, the users who receive their rewards in crypto?
> 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.
One side anecdote: just last week there was someone on HN arguing that "younger people were less susceptible to manipulation because they've grown surrounded by ads", and he gave the example of "fake news" being targeted and passed around by older people.
Reading about how something "makes you feel" reminded me of that. It's like people don't care about what objectively affects them or even trying to keep a sense of perspective.
It doesn't matter that it makes ZERO sense for a company with hundreds of millions of dollars in funding to risk their whole business by taking petty cash from donations or putting "fraudulent referral link" that could be discovered so easily.
It doesn't matter that Mozilla/Firefox depends on the dirty money from Google to do whatever they do, or that they shove "opt-out" products into their users and don't track back, and that their management is running the corporation to the ground.
It doesn't matter that Google is doing anything they can to make life hard for users of ad blockers, or that their "privacy features" protects their users from everyone but Google itself. It doesn't matter that Apple is only concerned about privacy as a selling point for their overpriced crap.
None of that matters... what matters is "how people feel about a story".
Is Brave perfect? No, of course not. If you browse /r/BATProject you will find me calling out them for selling out (they got a partnership with Solana , who paid handsomely to get integrated into the browser) instead of leveraging their user base to promote the decentralization with Ethereum. If they ever (deliberately) do anything against the users, then I'll be the first to join the opposition. But none of the things that people hold against them fits this bill. None of it is shady or unethical.
Well, it's deception which appears to be intended to result in financial gain. That fits the definition of "fraud" which I use. It's incredibly shady in any case.
There is no deception. They promptly admitted the mistake and corrected it.
It is a lot less "shady" than the billions of dollars every year spent in Google/Facebook/Twitter/Bing ads who turn out to be fraudulent and makes business owners with no way to actually verify and recourse, and Mozilla directly benefits from.
You constantly repeating your opinion does not transform it in fact. Once again, stop projecting...
> You do you.
You started the thread with the implication that promoting Brave would be akin to getting people into a scam. At least be decent enough to admit that you are only arguing based on your own bias.
Sorry, I'm not taking your arguments very seriously. You're arguing that no there's deception in automatically silently changing links to contain Brave referral links, or to making it look like donations are going to a creator when they in reality don't. I disagree, but if you genuinely believe that there's no deception involved in any of that, our disagreement boils down to a simple difference in opinion about what constitutes deception, which I don't think it's fruitful to argue about.
My only bias here is against browsers which change links out from under their users to benefit the browser vendor or make it look like the user's donations are going to someone who's not receiving them. Nothing more, nothing less.
You are taking every story around and passing the worst possible interpretation as truth, when all of them have been already cleared and/or shown that the accusation was baseless. When there was indeed an error, it was promptly admitted and corrected.
Judging by your grayed out comments, the only thing that shouldn't be taken seriously is you. Have a good one.
That retort of yours is impressive: A) the validity of what I'm saying has no relation to upvotes/downvotes, and B) all my comments in this thread have a positive score regardless.
In any case, you haven't even attempted to show that any of the accusations I've brought up are baseless; we both agree that my re-telling of the facts is accurate (otherwise you would've contested it), you just choose an (in my opinion) unreasonably charitable interpretation.
or, instead of using a gun to make your analogy sound scary, we could use something that actually occurs in real life like getting a car with a tape deck you don't want.
> And they really go out of their way to make it as hard as possible to disable/hide the wallet and all related crypto stuff.
I looked at the link you provided. I must say, as a dolt-level techie (74-year-old retired neurosurgical anesthesiologist) that the instructions appear VERY involved. I expected a simple on/off button but instead it's like something I'd find on HN....
First, it's opt in. So you'd only need to opt out if you'd opted in at some point.
The instructions boil down to: Click settings, uncheck Brave Rewards button.
The rest of the article tells how to disable new tab background ads, remove the rewards UI, and how to do it again on mobile...but these are more personal preference things.
Edit:
Just tested it by opting in. Easiest way for me was -
1 - Click settings
2 - Click Brave Rewards at top
3 - Click Manage Brave Rewards
4 - Click Reset
This actually removed all the checkboxes and such, and treats you as if you'd never opted in in the first place.
How can you argue it's not a scam? The BAT Cryptocurrency is merely used as a mechanism to justify stealing profits from website owners. It literally has no other use or value?
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.
I didn't mention that they ad-swap. I just refer to the fact they remove ads on the website but then display ads through the browser in terms of push notifications etc.
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."
> 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?
The problem is not ads, per se. The problem is (a) tracking and (b) ad-based business models who have misaligned incentives between users and advertisers.
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.
Brave has some "blockchain" based features, to appeal to those who are drawn to that hype. They make money by selling ads, either for crypto-related companies or else using a crypto-based mechanism.
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.
You can do either. Out of all Chromium-based browsers, Brave seems to be the only open-source, the most secure and transparent browser with a lot of development capacity.
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.
>You do know that FireFox gets paid for Google search referrals to this day right?
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.
Unless you are repeating the lie that we "hijacked links", the binance.{us,com} refcode bug arose from search bar code that does exactly the same kind of keywords-into-search-box client refcoding that Firefox uses to get paid by Google.
As opposed to building your entire product on your competitor's codebase?
That seems far more dangerous to me - at least Mozilla can make a deal with a different search provider (and they have, though I think it was kinda rough)
This thread is so surreal, way below normal HN standards, people blindly yelling their own truths, like we are discussing ie Trump.
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.
It's a proxy war for Brandon Eich's political beliefs. Plus a few advertising webmasters thrown in who are really bent out of shape about an adblocker being enabled by default.
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.
People hate Eich and hate crypto, so they get bent out of shape. I don't mind the dislike, but the blatant lies and low information posting gets tiresome.
Rewards are off by default. We support GPO for disabling torproxy.dll, IPFS, rewards ability to be enabled, and the self-custody multi-blockchain wallet. Global shields GPO control coming soon.
You mean except for Chromium as well. All this talk about Manifest v3 which has already resolved most issues and delayed launch to finish addressing the rest literally provides more privacy than the approach before. Whether you want to make it easier for malicious extensions to spy on you is a different story, however I'd imagine that there are other filtering mechanisms outside the browser if you want to give adblockers more control.
I'm with you, my jaw drops when I see so much support for brave on hn. Super shady. Do they still replace website ads with their own ad network? (I'm all for blocking ads, but does this really not seem wrong to anyone?
I use Brave all day long and have never experienced this. I see no ads, so working as intended, I guess.
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.
They never replaced ads... that's another myth about them.
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.
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.
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.
No, what's super shady is people who are so entrenced in something that they defend and get aggressive when people talk negative about it.
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.
> Bundling crypto in a browser seems absolutely insane to me.
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.
Personally I really like the idea of micro-transactions. Brave’s cryptocurrency is one of the few models for them that’s more than white papers. Granted it was a bit shady seeming at first, but they’ve stuck to it and seem genuine.
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.
> 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 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.
I have noticed the same thing in multiple fora. Anytime there's any discussion involving brave, the comments are swarmed by rather vocal and hardcore fans and usually the discourse devolves into pretty extreme shilling.
I typically go through most Brave threads I see. There's vocal people on both sides, but a lot of the detractors are pretty much rehashing something they read in a hit piece, or some article that doesn't word things clearly. Yet people keep spreading the misunderstandings.
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.
Sometimes news articles get details wrong. There are no screenshots and the blog post they link to doesn't say anything about putting those ads into web pages. Are you sure this isn't just a bad description of the program they have right now? https://brave.com/brave-ads/https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360026361072-Bra... "Rather than displaying Ads on web pages, Brave Ads appear as push notifications, as background images on the New Tab Page, or as items in the Brave News feed. "
The article literally says that they are testing a feature for a max of 1000 volunteers - which is wildly, categorically different than deploying to your entire userbase using an opt-out model.
what are you talking about ? Do you know how ads work ? Brave is literally stealing and profiting from it.
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.
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.
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.
There is a very active segment on HN who has a raging hate boner for anything having to do with crypto, so much so that a pro crypto statement will get downvoted drastically in a few minutes.
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.
> (and my pro crypto comments usually recover to +3 or 4 a few days after
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.
They literally remove ads, that people and companies have paid for. Then they insert their first party ads that another company paid them for. Shady asf
> They literally remove ads, that people and companies have paid for. Then they insert their first party ads that another company paid them for. Shady asf
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.
yes profiteering company stealing ad revenue by utilizing open sources extensions to an open source browser... this seems like the new HN crowd would like this because BAT pffft
Have you actually used Brave? Can you provide actual evidence this is happening?
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.
Any form of advertising will eventually corrupt the platforms that rely on it to exist. I guess any platform which supports advertising will eventually turn into an advertising platform. Brave essentially is an advertising platform through their brave rewards (however complicated they make this relationship out to be) and likely will at some point start behaving like one.
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.
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.
I'm not a Brave supporter and hold no BAT, but for point #3 they only took back "promotional" coins that were given away for free for trying Brave. They don't take back "donated" coins from however one buys/earns BAT in the other methods. Not sure if they still offer this promotion.
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.
Yes, as many have parroted this defense the ad system is off by default. However, when you turn it on, it's effectively replacing the ads, and extorting content creators to say "if you want a piece of the Brave ecosystem, you need to play by our rules." This is why every thread about Brave turns into this conversation, and why it's clear to many of us the system is flawed. Repeating the same points about it being "off by default" doesn't change that Brave still uses this system, and it doesn't mean it will never change to be on by default. As Brave is a for profit company, I'm sure it will be at some point.
You're not having an honest discussion here, trying to spin this as if Brave gives the user more choice. What we're talking about Braves built in ad blocker and ad scheme. Users like myself in this thread have a right to call out what we feel is not an honest system.
> 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.
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'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).
> 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.
> They stripped the creators of revenue from the original ads and just kept the tokens/revenue from their ads.
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.
Firefox is not what it once was. It ships with many user-hostile settings enabled by default. For example: telemetry, Pocket integration, sponsored shortcuts on the New Tab page, sponsored suggestions in the search bar.
The knobs to turn off each of the 4 things I just listed are found in 4 different places within the UI.
Literally all of that is opt-in, except for the sponsored new tab page backgrounds, which are one toggle (and a separate one from having other rotating pretty backgrounds delivered at Brave's expense)
Ohh Don't forget Firefox, for all it's privacy preaching:
- 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.
... and once you do it (tbh the only thing I could care about is the telemetry thingie, but need to check details and I never see anything sponsored on new tab ) what are your objections against it?
yep, the respectful way all of these firefox additions that mozilla deems en vogue at the moment, is for them all the be opt in.
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)
I'm extremely critical of cryptocurrency, but what Brave is doing makes sense. Blockchain is useful for situations where you need proof of work with untrusted clients.
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 have never had any problem with Firefox on any website. It feels most time people say that, it is actually an addon that is the problem, not Firefox.
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.
You comment is a very important reason. Why not use constructive arguments to state your point?
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.
I am all for a business model that has an opt-in feature that generates revenue. I love Brave, and want to stick around, so I have no moral qualms with them making some money. I personally opt out, but I am grateful for those who use it. Their crypto system itself is quite benign - I tried it, and it required no investment on my part, so I don't understand where the "scam" is you speak of...
I WANT to switch to Firefox but the reality is that the experience is still sometimes rough compared to chrome. It’s the small things that gets me. On Mac, clicking a link when Firefox isn’t open sometimes opens two windows. Sometimes the keyboard shortcuts stops working if you just tab to the app as you have to click on it for keyboard shortcuts to start working etc. I know other browsers plays a lot of tricks to feel snappy but reality is that the tricks works, Firefox can at times “feel” slower doing operations.
Chrome has none of these issues and as an effect brave is good. That’s why I’m testing brave.
Being honest? I use Edge or Brave over Firefox because of compatibility edge cases and battery life. And while Mozilla might be the least bad browser vendor, they're not exactly great and dependent on Google for funding.
The edge case compat issues are rare for me, battery life seems the same, and FF is otherwise such a good, fast browser with nice extensions... I like it a lot more than Chrome now
I don't understand the "dependent on Google funding" statement that everyone mentions. Yeah, they're Google's bitch. But for what purpose? To act independently and make their own decisions, otherwise Google has a monopoly and they're screwed.
No, Mozilla's purpose is to appear to act independently while never doing anything that would upset Google too much. This incentive works even without Google ever even hinting at the funds being conditional on Mozilla being their bitch - someone who makes 3 million a year from a failing browser is not going to risk that setup.
Because many websites don't work well with Firefox engine. Video calls are one example.
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.
Its not, but a lot of HN folks are blinded by their own stupidity whenever they see the word 'crypto'.
The knee jerk reaction to that word shields them from any engagement in thought - it's just simply "some association with crypto? - it's terrible!".
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
They were, for a time, taking donations on behalf of websites despite those websites not knowing that brave existed, or the donors not knowing that their donation was going to an unclaimed wallet. I can't remember what happened to the BAT - held for them if they ever did pick up brave I think, but eventually dumped back into the BAT pool. That, and substituting Amazon referral links, engendered distrust that is hard to overstate. Do you think is just a crypto=bad thing alone? That wasn't my impression.
Not Amazon referral links. More like Firefox Suggest or the like: Write eg. "Binance" in the URL bar, and one of the results in the dropdown menu is a sponsored link to "binance.us" who are partnered with Brave. The feature had a bug that caused complete, valid URLs (ie. you wrote "binance.us") to be shown the sponsored link as a primary completion option.
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.
This isn't about just using cryptocurrency, there are absolutely uses of cryptocurrency which I wouldn't describe as a scam. Here's what's making me call Brave a scam: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33262620
Well, they did mislead people on where that crypto went at one point, and at one point also hijacked Amazon referral links. The anti-brave sentiment isn't all anti-crypto zeal, imo.
Edit: it wasn't Amazon referral links but companies that had partnered with brave.
The first mistake they fixed very quickly, and "mislead" is a bit strong – they were explicit in their terms about where the crypto was going.
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.
Oh, you're right about the autocomplete - which seems to have been restricted to not just binance, but a few other partnered companies - it might be a bit blown out of proportion - Still have to consider it and look at the UI; unwittingly using the auto-complete could be a dark pattern, like YouTube making misclicks on ads very easy. I'm guessing atm that that wasn't the intention or case. They did have to remove the referral links according the press release though right?
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
