> 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.
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.