The actual text that all Brave users are seeing when they visit Lobste.rs is:
Blocking a cryptocurrency scam where the Brave browser pretended to be fundraising on behalf of a site without that site's knowledge or consent, then lied about funds being held in escrow and kept them for itself. For details:
It does this under some conditions (I haven't worked out which), but mostly it seems to give a "This site can’t be reached
The webpage at https://lobste.rs/ might be temporarily down or it may have moved permanently to a new web address.
ERR_INVALID_RESPONSE" message.
Which is probably a bug if pushcx wants to convey why they are blocking the browser (the issues are closed, so hard to let them know this)
As a visitor, if a website I browse decides to block the browser of my choosing, I'd be more inclined to stop using the hostile website than change my browser of choice. that, or faking my UserAgent.
Lobsters is invitation only: you have to find someone willing to sponsor you and your sponsor's reputation is tied to yours. In fact, the entire tree of sponsors is public. So people aren't just going to sponsor a stranger, and ostensibly people who use the site are well-behaved due to potential reputational impacts to both themselves and their sponsor if they misbehave.
In my humble opinion someone who went through all the trouble to get access and maintain it is far more likely to switch browsers to stay on the site. Then again I'm just guessing because I don't have access to lobsters myself! Perhaps it's just projection on my part.
Despite being a member of Lobsters for 5 years I've immediately disabled my account as soon as I felt the community becoming so hostile to brave users. I mean, I have no time to invest with a community that makes it so difficult to reach them and discuss any issue. Web is already painful enough.
Same. Brave is my browser of choice, because it's the only one that checks all of my boxes.
If a site blocks Brave, I'll just stop visiting said site. Same with pages that tell me to disable my ad blocker to view the content. No, sorry, you burnt that bridge down long ago, I'm not disabling it.
1. People couldn't buy BAT to send at the time (Dec. 2018) of the Tom Scott affair, all the tokens were virtual from our user growth pool, subject to our terms. No user funds. This does not excuse the right-to-publicity infringement that I addressed in another comment replying to you, at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42379166, but that wasn't your false claim here, so stick to your "collects money" canard, please.
2. Again with "secretly modifies referral links" canard. No, not "links", exactly two typed in domain names in the address bar, and no one can keep a secret with a URL attribute you can see in the same address bar, via devtools, and with network monitoring; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42354392. Think through your own argument more, please — no ready-fire-aim.
3. Injecting ads would be noticed by users, but you won't find anyone who ever saw us "replace" or "inject ads into websites". We tested the tech with placeholders on Slashdot in early 2016, but the placeholders were not ads and the test ended. Lack of evidence is enough here under normal rules of reality and discourse, or else this is an "are the ad injectors in the room with us now?" joke.
We'd have been roasted and likely sued if we had done any such "replace" or "inject" thing without publisher opt-in. Again, I urge you to think through your criticisms before replying carelessly.
EDIT: I'd forgotten about the NAA's "cease and desist" letter sent in April 2016, which was not actually a C&D even though its PDF filename called it that, because we never did anything to cease or desist from. See
The NAA (now News Media Alliance) complaint to us, misnamed a Cease & Desist Letter, went away. Later in 2016, this same group tried complaining to the FTC about Brave and Opera, see https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=a802b19a-7ba0.... That complaint also went nowhere.
It's not always the adware that you see that is the problem. They've hidden it in the past and there's no reason to think they won't again in the future if they aren't already
Off the top of my head there's that, collecting money for others and keeping it, and replacing ads with your own. All of which are adware/malware behavior.
How many "oopsies" do you think people are going to overlook before realizing you are just a scam artist?
I completely disagree with the slant on this summary. The ad business with The Google shaped American business and then quite a lot of the entire Internet. A company is formed to build something different, in that economic context.
I turned off my ad options in Brave as soon as I learned how. I do not participate in their ad market. Yet I find Brave a great browser for multiple reasons. Am I filled with angst and retaliatory drive because Brave tried to start an ad ecosystem ? Maybe for a minute, but compared to the winners in that space, and their almost uncountable monetary fortunes.. no. There is a business layer to society.
Personal characterizations of "scam artist" pale compared to the bigger scam artists, who wear suits and have expensive attorneys. Perfect is in short supply.
Let Brave Browser compete and make some people annoyed because of ads. Let me turn off my ad options and use their reliable browser.
How many falsehoods carelessly repeated from you before people consider you a liar?
We never collected others’ money for creators, the grants were from our user growth pool. My product people learned a lesson on “right to publicity”, however I should have caught the bad design on that front so blame me for not looking closely - which is not a scam, it’s an error.
Replacing ads with our own never happened. We talked about doing it with publisher opt in, but the triple conversion (pub would have to get enough nonblocking readers to switch to Brave, we would need to get of those users to opt in, then we’d have to sell pub on 70% revshare from ads to those converted users) odds too low.
Smearing me if you don’t like my politics is bad. If that’s not a factor then consider checking your facts before parroting such false or distorted stories.
I am with you and totally confused we are here discussing this.
Oh wait, every time I get a new computer I think you need to dismiss a couple of things. But _the rest of the time_ it is ad free browsing and watching.
If people are commenting otherwise, they either haven’t used Brave or are missing they are seriously missing something.
Yeah I don't know what they're talking about either. I believe they probably just aren't aware that the browser has settings you can configure to your liking
What about the constant Brave Premium ads? I got many notifications every day asking me to pay them, I couldn’t find a way to disable them. They had intrusive ads for premium in every new tab page as well.
Interrupting my work to ask me to send you money is unacceptable, Mozilla has never done that to me.
It’s really easy to disable that stuff. I use as my “incognito” browser, it has some of the best anti fingerprinting capabilities and I just have it delete everything when I exit. I know tor browser is better but tor network is just too slow for me to do casual incognito browsing
If you take a minute and go through the settings one time, I think you could figure out how to disable what you don't like and enable what you do like. I use several browsers but with Brave I haven't seen anything like what you're describing probably just because I disabled it in the settings
May I suggest Firefox plus an ad blocking extension such as uBlock Origin? Enable every option, opt-in to every list and the web reverts to something a bit more palatable.
I feel like I have to watch mozilla like a hawk to catch their latest auto-installed auto-optin user-hostile bullshit.
You'd think Brave would be the sketchy one but it has actually been wonderful and very consistent.
You can just block ads and not show any ads at all, the way Internet should be. All the crypto bullshit is trivially disabled. Your other major choices are basically Firefox (which is not to everyone's liking either) and Chrome, in which it'll soon be impossible to block ads at all.
They have to make money somehow. They're pretty upfront about the way it works. They just used a different idea than that of Google. You can also opt out of tailored ads. People like it because it's fast with a built-in ad blocker and some like the crypto stuff and the fact you can connect to Tor with it
It's surprising how much of the educated tech workforce subscribes to the "enemy of my enemy is my friend" logic. Software has come such a long way to reach the point where you don't need to buy a compiler or textbook on learning C to be a developer. It's entirely lost on a generation of people that feel like the internet can be "fixed" with microtransactions and "healthy" advertisements.
Brave itself is such a maelstrom of offensive ideas that I really am really surprised they didn't get sued into the ground after the Tom Scott incident. The people that still use Brave better know how to set their useragent - this sort of blocking won't go away anytime soon.
And as insult to injury, since it's based on the Chromium codebase, using Brave still supports Chrome's creep toward total browser monoculture, much like Edge.
Maybe they don't think injecting referral links is bad behaviour. It doesn't hurt anyone's experience, and often gives a financial bonus to both parties in exchange for creating a database record that doesn't tell anyone anything they didn't already know from the User-Agent string or fingerprinting.
"The content you see on a site may not be the content being sent" is a low-effort excuse, too: plenty of users don't want to see plenty of things that site owners want them to see, and use browsers that display what they want to see.
He did it with Brave, why wouldn't he have done it with Firefox if given the chance? Acting like it's a weird logical jump that someone who did something bad would have also done the same bad thing if circumstances were slightly different is bizarre
"As I understand it" is not true, but I'm curious whether you heard it from a Lobste.rs principal, or just some echo chamber spinning stories against us.
All the tokens in that late 2018 came from our user growth pool — we never misappropriate any user-bought BAT.
Just to be clear, are you saying that 100% of every BAT token that was pooled for a site has been distributed to the intended site? Or are you saying that only 100% of every BAT token that was purchased directly by an end user has been distributed to the intended site?
Is there a page somewhere with the information on the tokens for each site and their payouts status?
The only browsers with actually good adblocking on Android are Firefox (uBlock) and Brave (on par with uBlock.)
Firefox is plain unusable on Android if you don't use an upper-range device.
Nothing else comes close, either they're out of date (Kiwi) or they're using Chrome's built-in ad blocking support (Vivaldi). Microsoft Edge has eyeo's native ABP port but there's no customizability.
I'd say just plain wrong. My preferred browser on Android is Firefox, but I use Chrome too. It's a three year old $300 phone. Firefox runs much faster Chrome, but I suspect that's only because it has ad blockers.
I mean, the core thing they do has pissed people off: they're yet another attempt at an alternate monetization strategy for the web, but their approach do doing so is to basically forcibly insert themselves into the existing ways that websites and creators get paid, while not telling the users that the money they're collecting on their behalf might not actually be going to that site/creator (because the site isn't actually interested in having a business relationship with Brave, or they are but are still unable to get the money out)
pushcx undermines his case by mixing more and less legitimate reasons.
It's hard building a browser to be accepted widely.
Though Brave also does incredible research in security and privacy --- and actually deploys it to millions of clients.
The 5-8 settings toggles to turn off sponsored features are a small price.
Inserting their own referral codes into links was a bit far -- though with 1) explicit notification, and 2) a setting to disable it, I would find it perfectly unobjectionable.
Some of the complaints are legitimate, that brave team discusses quite clearly in GitHub issues how to bypass blocks, though in many cases this amounts to the same as bypassing paywall or registration blocks with extensions, something I presume is so standard among hn and lobsters readership alike, that its absence would be remarkable.
No referral codes ever injected into links, which mean those blue or purple text things you click on pages. The bug affected typed-in binance.us and finance.com only, we made nothing off it, and we fixed it right away:
The actual text that all Brave users are seeing when they visit Lobste.rs is:
Blocking a cryptocurrency scam where the Brave browser pretended to be fundraising on behalf of a site without that site's knowledge or consent, then lied about funds being held in escrow and kept them for itself. For details:
https://lobste.rs/c/bwbssx
https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters-ansible/issues/45
and
https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters/issues/761
Edit: repeated below comment.
As I understand it, Brave added a "donate to lobste.rs" link when viewed in their browser, and then kept all the money.
If you are using Brave, confirm any donation (and maybe anything else involving money) in another browser.
It does this under some conditions (I haven't worked out which), but mostly it seems to give a "This site can’t be reached The webpage at https://lobste.rs/ might be temporarily down or it may have moved permanently to a new web address. ERR_INVALID_RESPONSE" message.
Which is probably a bug if pushcx wants to convey why they are blocking the browser (the issues are closed, so hard to let them know this)
I've only see the ERR_INVALID_RESPONSE in all my attempts.
Checking in incognito set me right. That message didn't go up for quite some days.
Agreed. That is the only message I've seen on Brave mobile (Android), which I'm using to post this.
I use Brave for privacy. I have all crypto BS disabled.
I previously assumed that a TLS cert change on lobster.rs was at fault. Wasn't aware that any message was intended for me! I'm glad to learn of it!
PS: I now see that Chromium is at fault for hiding the message. :(
As a visitor, if a website I browse decides to block the browser of my choosing, I'd be more inclined to stop using the hostile website than change my browser of choice. that, or faking my UserAgent.
Are there any other choices? :D
Lobster's barrier to entry is high enough (shades of gmail invitations) that in my humble opinion most people will choose the site over the browser.
What? Why is that?
Lobsters is invitation only: you have to find someone willing to sponsor you and your sponsor's reputation is tied to yours. In fact, the entire tree of sponsors is public. So people aren't just going to sponsor a stranger, and ostensibly people who use the site are well-behaved due to potential reputational impacts to both themselves and their sponsor if they misbehave.
In my humble opinion someone who went through all the trouble to get access and maintain it is far more likely to switch browsers to stay on the site. Then again I'm just guessing because I don't have access to lobsters myself! Perhaps it's just projection on my part.
And to be clear, “misbehave” also means having a dissenting, unpopular opinion.
Despite being a member of Lobsters for 5 years I've immediately disabled my account as soon as I felt the community becoming so hostile to brave users. I mean, I have no time to invest with a community that makes it so difficult to reach them and discuss any issue. Web is already painful enough.
Do you have a different username there? I couldn't find your account.
They've changed their username. It's visible in the log.
It's now inactive-user on lobsters but it does not matter much anymore. I had changed my username few times on Lobsters.
I was on there for while, but I wasn’t really impressed by it. I prefer reddit even with all the chaos there.
Same. Brave is my browser of choice, because it's the only one that checks all of my boxes.
If a site blocks Brave, I'll just stop visiting said site. Same with pages that tell me to disable my ad blocker to view the content. No, sorry, you burnt that bridge down long ago, I'm not disabling it.
Really? The reason wouldn't matter, the specifics of the situation wouldn't matter? You just make a rule and then you don't have to think again?
I think notifying users that their browser is malware is good personally
Even if that's a lie?
What do you call a program that collects money for creators and keeps it, secretly modifiers referral links, and injects it's own ads into websites?
Any program that did one of these things would rightly be called malware and Brave has done all three.
None of that happened. Look into it if you don't believe me.
All three have happened. Look into it if you don't believe me.
I did and all 3 were lies.
Can you elaborate?
1. Brave doesn't inject ads into websites and never did.
2. https://brave.com/blog/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/
3. https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=BrendanEich
Please look into it yourself, don't make others do the thinking for you.
"We investigated ourselves and found we did nothing wrong"
Everything we did was observable:
1. People couldn't buy BAT to send at the time (Dec. 2018) of the Tom Scott affair, all the tokens were virtual from our user growth pool, subject to our terms. No user funds. This does not excuse the right-to-publicity infringement that I addressed in another comment replying to you, at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42379166, but that wasn't your false claim here, so stick to your "collects money" canard, please.
2. Again with "secretly modifies referral links" canard. No, not "links", exactly two typed in domain names in the address bar, and no one can keep a secret with a URL attribute you can see in the same address bar, via devtools, and with network monitoring; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42354392. Think through your own argument more, please — no ready-fire-aim.
3. Injecting ads would be noticed by users, but you won't find anyone who ever saw us "replace" or "inject ads into websites". We tested the tech with placeholders on Slashdot in early 2016, but the placeholders were not ads and the test ended. Lack of evidence is enough here under normal rules of reality and discourse, or else this is an "are the ad injectors in the room with us now?" joke.
We'd have been roasted and likely sued if we had done any such "replace" or "inject" thing without publisher opt-in. Again, I urge you to think through your criticisms before replying carelessly.
EDIT: I'd forgotten about the NAA's "cease and desist" letter sent in April 2016, which was not actually a C&D even though its PDF filename called it that, because we never did anything to cease or desist from. See
https://www.techspot.com/news/64391-publishers-call-brave-ad...
https://brave.com/blog/braves-response-to-the-naa-a-better-d...
The NAA (now News Media Alliance) complaint to us, misnamed a Cease & Desist Letter, went away. Later in 2016, this same group tried complaining to the FTC about Brave and Opera, see https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=a802b19a-7ba0.... That complaint also went nowhere.
I wondered why it stopped working for me
Are they able to stay in business because they enriched themselves on early BAT token shitcoinery? Yes, yes they are.
I love brave. By far the best browsing experience. Gets rid of so much garbage adware.
Brave replaces their adware with their own adware..
reading with Brave now, seeing no adware
It's not always the adware that you see that is the problem. They've hidden it in the past and there's no reason to think they won't again in the future if they aren't already
We didn't hide "adware", probably you are thinking of this:
https://brave.com/blog/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/
We made $0 off it, it was a blunder, we fixed it right away. But if you mean something else, please let me know.
Off the top of my head there's that, collecting money for others and keeping it, and replacing ads with your own. All of which are adware/malware behavior.
How many "oopsies" do you think people are going to overlook before realizing you are just a scam artist?
I completely disagree with the slant on this summary. The ad business with The Google shaped American business and then quite a lot of the entire Internet. A company is formed to build something different, in that economic context.
I turned off my ad options in Brave as soon as I learned how. I do not participate in their ad market. Yet I find Brave a great browser for multiple reasons. Am I filled with angst and retaliatory drive because Brave tried to start an ad ecosystem ? Maybe for a minute, but compared to the winners in that space, and their almost uncountable monetary fortunes.. no. There is a business layer to society.
Personal characterizations of "scam artist" pale compared to the bigger scam artists, who wear suits and have expensive attorneys. Perfect is in short supply.
Let Brave Browser compete and make some people annoyed because of ads. Let me turn off my ad options and use their reliable browser.
How many falsehoods carelessly repeated from you before people consider you a liar?
We never collected others’ money for creators, the grants were from our user growth pool. My product people learned a lesson on “right to publicity”, however I should have caught the bad design on that front so blame me for not looking closely - which is not a scam, it’s an error.
Replacing ads with our own never happened. We talked about doing it with publisher opt in, but the triple conversion (pub would have to get enough nonblocking readers to switch to Brave, we would need to get of those users to opt in, then we’d have to sell pub on 70% revshare from ads to those converted users) odds too low.
Smearing me if you don’t like my politics is bad. If that’s not a factor then consider checking your facts before parroting such false or distorted stories.
I am with you and totally confused we are here discussing this.
Oh wait, every time I get a new computer I think you need to dismiss a couple of things. But _the rest of the time_ it is ad free browsing and watching.
If people are commenting otherwise, they either haven’t used Brave or are missing they are seriously missing something.
Yeah I don't know what they're talking about either. I believe they probably just aren't aware that the browser has settings you can configure to your liking
What about the constant Brave Premium ads? I got many notifications every day asking me to pay them, I couldn’t find a way to disable them. They had intrusive ads for premium in every new tab page as well.
Interrupting my work to ask me to send you money is unacceptable, Mozilla has never done that to me.
I've used Brave for years and have never seen them. In fact, I didn't know "Brave Premium" existed.
It’s really easy to disable that stuff. I use as my “incognito” browser, it has some of the best anti fingerprinting capabilities and I just have it delete everything when I exit. I know tor browser is better but tor network is just too slow for me to do casual incognito browsing
If you take a minute and go through the settings one time, I think you could figure out how to disable what you don't like and enable what you do like. I use several browsers but with Brave I haven't seen anything like what you're describing probably just because I disabled it in the settings
Meanwhile, with, say Orion, I don't have to disable the adware in the settings because it doesn't ship with adware.
> Gets rid of so much garbage adware.
My brother in Christ you are literally using the Blink engine. Your daily driver is the equivalent of an adware jalopy.
Not so. The Chromium bits have the native tracking goo we neutralize, see https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Deviations-from-....
Instead, I don't visit the sites which drown me with ads, and subscribe to good websites directly.
No need to use harmful software.
How is it harmful? It’s never take a dime from me and it’s easy to turn off the crypto/ad junk
May I suggest Firefox plus an ad blocking extension such as uBlock Origin? Enable every option, opt-in to every list and the web reverts to something a bit more palatable.
Doesn’t work on iOS. Is there a good alternative there?
Orion browser made by kagi seems good!
In my experience, on my PC, it uses more CPU. Also, I use "search by image" a ton. So not having that or "open image in a new tab" are deal breakers.
Yes, I know I could install an extension, but I don't think I should have to install an extension for every feature that is missing for my use case.
I use “Open image in new tab” on Firefox all the time. Maybe the site you’re using is doing something in JavaScript to block it?
ctrl+shift+right click overrides any such js
I feel like I have to watch mozilla like a hawk to catch their latest auto-installed auto-optin user-hostile bullshit. You'd think Brave would be the sketchy one but it has actually been wonderful and very consistent.
But Brave is garbage adware.
If an elite closed community wants to ban a browser, who cares.
s/elite/elitist/
This is nothing new, Brave has basically been a malware since launch.
If I remember correctly their first scandal was them injecting their own referral link during signups on cryptocurrency platforms.
I just can't understand why some people, especially some people on HackerNews, keep using it. Of you think Google is bad, Brave is the antichrist.
Their whole business model of "block ads, and then show our own" is just so gross. I'm shocked anyone was ever happy to support it.
You can just block ads and not show any ads at all, the way Internet should be. All the crypto bullshit is trivially disabled. Your other major choices are basically Firefox (which is not to everyone's liking either) and Chrome, in which it'll soon be impossible to block ads at all.
They have to make money somehow. They're pretty upfront about the way it works. They just used a different idea than that of Google. You can also opt out of tailored ads. People like it because it's fast with a built-in ad blocker and some like the crypto stuff and the fact you can connect to Tor with it
It's surprising how much of the educated tech workforce subscribes to the "enemy of my enemy is my friend" logic. Software has come such a long way to reach the point where you don't need to buy a compiler or textbook on learning C to be a developer. It's entirely lost on a generation of people that feel like the internet can be "fixed" with microtransactions and "healthy" advertisements.
Brave itself is such a maelstrom of offensive ideas that I really am really surprised they didn't get sued into the ground after the Tom Scott incident. The people that still use Brave better know how to set their useragent - this sort of blocking won't go away anytime soon.
Most judges aren't really all that interested in hearing cases because someone was offended. Usually there need to be damages, or laws broken.
Turns out the world isn't bsky.
> If I remember correctly their first scandal was them injecting their own referral link during signups on cryptocurrency platforms.
Before that they were soliciting crypto donations on behalf of creators without their knowledge or consent.
https://web.archive.org/web/20181224011529/https://twitter.c...
And as insult to injury, since it's based on the Chromium codebase, using Brave still supports Chrome's creep toward total browser monoculture, much like Edge.
Maybe they don't think injecting referral links is bad behaviour. It doesn't hurt anyone's experience, and often gives a financial bonus to both parties in exchange for creating a database record that doesn't tell anyone anything they didn't already know from the User-Agent string or fingerprinting.
"The content you see on a site may not be the content being sent" is a low-effort excuse, too: plenty of users don't want to see plenty of things that site owners want them to see, and use browsers that display what they want to see.
Yikes. Thank god Eich never got a chance to poison Firefox with this.
Why would you think he'd do that? That is a rather strong insinuation.
He did it with Brave, why wouldn't he have done it with Firefox if given the chance? Acting like it's a weird logical jump that someone who did something bad would have also done the same bad thing if circumstances were slightly different is bizarre
Eich founded Brave, which is doing this.
Ah thanks, missed that.
As I understand it, Brave added a "donate to lobste.rs" link when viewed in their browser, and then kept all the money.
If you are using Brave, confirm any donation (and maybe anything else involving money) in another browser.
"As I understand it" is not true, but I'm curious whether you heard it from a Lobste.rs principal, or just some echo chamber spinning stories against us.
All the tokens in that late 2018 came from our user growth pool — we never misappropriate any user-bought BAT.
Just to be clear, are you saying that 100% of every BAT token that was pooled for a site has been distributed to the intended site? Or are you saying that only 100% of every BAT token that was purchased directly by an end user has been distributed to the intended site?
Is there a page somewhere with the information on the tokens for each site and their payouts status?
At that time we had no way for users to buy BAT they sent — it was all from our grant pool.
In any event, a creator might not sign or could fail to collect, so those grants came back to us after a 90 day timeout if I recall correctly.
> Is there a page
https://bravebat.info/
The only browsers with actually good adblocking on Android are Firefox (uBlock) and Brave (on par with uBlock.)
Firefox is plain unusable on Android if you don't use an upper-range device.
Nothing else comes close, either they're out of date (Kiwi) or they're using Chrome's built-in ad blocking support (Vivaldi). Microsoft Edge has eyeo's native ABP port but there's no customizability.
> Firefox is plain unusable on Android if you don't use an upper-range device.
Interesting one - I generally found it to be the other way for me. Chrome was sluggish on my older phone, but Firefox was faster.
I'd say just plain wrong. My preferred browser on Android is Firefox, but I use Chrome too. It's a three year old $300 phone. Firefox runs much faster Chrome, but I suspect that's only because it has ad blockers.
that's never been my experience.
my Snapdragon 662 phone has never been able to juggle more than one tabs on Firefox without it OOM'ing, while I could on Chromium-based browsers.
I mean, the core thing they do has pissed people off: they're yet another attempt at an alternate monetization strategy for the web, but their approach do doing so is to basically forcibly insert themselves into the existing ways that websites and creators get paid, while not telling the users that the money they're collecting on their behalf might not actually be going to that site/creator (because the site isn't actually interested in having a business relationship with Brave, or they are but are still unable to get the money out)
Thanks for posting this! I was bitten by this since last weekend and I didn't think to share here.
pushcx undermines his case by mixing more and less legitimate reasons.
It's hard building a browser to be accepted widely.
Though Brave also does incredible research in security and privacy --- and actually deploys it to millions of clients.
The 5-8 settings toggles to turn off sponsored features are a small price.
Inserting their own referral codes into links was a bit far -- though with 1) explicit notification, and 2) a setting to disable it, I would find it perfectly unobjectionable.
Some of the complaints are legitimate, that brave team discusses quite clearly in GitHub issues how to bypass blocks, though in many cases this amounts to the same as bypassing paywall or registration blocks with extensions, something I presume is so standard among hn and lobsters readership alike, that its absence would be remarkable.
No referral codes ever injected into links, which mean those blue or purple text things you click on pages. The bug affected typed-in binance.us and finance.com only, we made nothing off it, and we fixed it right away:
https://brave.com/blog/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/
Anyway, thanks for your comment.
* binance.com
I hate soellcorrkt
I mean, it’s a scammy browser, so I don’t think there’s much news worthy here