This comes from the people distributing an ad-fuelled cryptocurrency called "Basic Attention Token". I'll take their word with two grains of salt and a tall glass of water, please.
The brave-hate meme is self perpetuating at this point. Brave is privacy-oriented out of the box. You have to opt in for the ads and crypto. Isn't that what everyone has been asking for? opt-in instead of opt-out? I'm convinced that Google is behind a smear campaign against Brave. If Brave got real traction it could be a serious threat to their business.
Google is often dismissively called an ad company.
Why is that? Because most of their revenue is from ads.
How does Brave make money? With ads.
Privacy-centric positioning makes sense to capture a part of the market. But the mis-aligned incentives are there for Brave just as much as they are for Google.
Are they better right now than Google? Probably. Is it smart to trust a company that only makes money with ads with control over your browsing experience in the medium term? Not so much.
It's quite amusing to me how well their marketing works.
What we need is a browser that can exist as a viable business without being chained to ad revenue.
But the mis-aligned incentives are there for Brave just as much as they are for Google.
No they are not.
Brave exists as a privacy-centric alternative. If they start violating user privacy, it would remove all incentive to use their product. There would be no reason for Brave to exist. It would be marketplace suicide.
Google exists as a privacy destroying organization. They can't hide this fact and they have never really tried to. And they can't stop now because their reason to exist would likewise be gone.
I would use Google if they didn't consistently behave poorly and provide a poor privacy. I did use them for a long time. I'm not opposed to ads. I'm opposed to their behavior. Once Brave starts behaving poorly I'll stop using it.
I wish you all the luck in the world with your search engine. But I can't help but think you may have missed the mark with your business model.
What people (myself included) seem to really object to most are privacy invading personalized ads. These don't just provide benign info, they are actively taking something that belongs to you --- your privacy.
The more benign alternative is context sensitive ads --- ads based on the topic at hand. If I search for "pet supplies", I can tolerate and maybe even appreciate a few ads for dog food and flea collars. This might be distracting for cat owners but this is something I think most would be willing to accept in exchange for the "free" service.
DuckDuckGo seems to be growing very nicely with context sensitive ads.
I was about say, before the trolls responded, that I'm about 50/50 on it being that and it being that Eich hasn't stayed cancelled, that he's done well for himself despite that, which just infuriates a certain crowd here. But then they came and made that point for me. The pleasant surprise is how they are a minority even here. And in my recent years in the tech world, I discovered that half of my coworkers used Brave. They don't care what the vocal minority thinks, and neither do I. The Brave community grows anyway.
A substantial number of those critical of Brave haven't put in the time to understand how Brave works. Example: David Gerard doesn't know the difference between a link and an address bar.
Brave hate is a meme because any time anyone wants to talk about anything internet, 100 accounts come out of the woodwork to tell us some Chromium wrapper is the second coming of Christ. The rest of us are sick of all the promotion and get chippy in response.
If you’ve been around long enough, you know they’re at least paying YouTubers to use and promote the browser without any disclosure. Who knows how far past that they are going.
I'm still skeptical how that could reasonably work on an opt-in basis.
Being annoyed daily by ads in exchange for some obscure crypto currency which might be worth something in the far future doesn't seem like a proposal to me that could convince a lot of people.
So I wonder, how many Brave users actually do opt-in? More than five?
Plenty of users in /r/BATProject fighting to get their $2/month earnings into their bank accounts. Average person thinks passive income, $5 or $10, is pretty cool. It buys a coffee or tea.
I think it's 8M+ users that have opted into ads. I could be wrong though.
The topic at hand is whether or not people's hate towards Brave is legitimized. I'm explaining to you how people come to despise the browser and it's developers. You can take it or leave it, but you can't act surprised when people come out in droves to tell you that they don't want to use a browser developed in-house by the same people directly commoditizing the attention market.
Well, I actually respect the guy for creating JS and his work in the field but I'd never willingly support a person donating money intended to stop certain people from having basic rights.
A very distant second is the whole chromium bullshit
But out of hundreds of negative omments I've read across several posts, yours is the first I've heard that mentioned the ethics of a founder. That's got nothing to do with the comment I responded to, and if it was the reason for everyone else's hate, it's awfully strange that it's never mentioned.
I politely disagree. When I use Brave, I always see these "Tip" buttons on GitHub, Reddit and Twitter despite going out of my way to disable Brave's Rewards scheme. It really grinds my gears when a product forces these sort of schemes onto me (hence why I mainly use Linux instead of Windows), so I uninstalled Brave.
At least you get paid for having your privacy treated as a commodity. If these people are selling indentured labor, then google is straight up promoting slavery. Brave is obviously the lesser evil.
It represents a clear conflict of interest with the way I intend to use the internet. There are no half-measures with advertising, there will be no crypto in or around my browser. If they wanted to make a case for using their browser over Ungoogled Chromium, they shouldn't have started by shilling their own shitcoin.
Also, their creator compensation program is quite terrible, which Tom Scott has documented quite thoroughly. It's all designed to feed back into Brave's cut, slowly siphoning your ad money to line their own pockets.
So what's your alternative? Firefox? What about their huge conflict of interest in getting nearly all their funding from Google? Seems worse if you ask me. At least Brave maintains independence.
Brave doesn't even do that. They're still beholden to Google's rendering engine, still forced to complain about the same changes and get dragged around on the same lede. Using Brave is no worse than just installing Chrome and forgetting about it.
The alternative is Firefox (the browser they didn't let Brendan Eich ruin), or stock Chromium with uBlock. Ungoogled Chromium works great too, and hell I'd probably consider using a webkit browser before I'd reach for Brave. Or Vivaldi, for that matter. At least they don't have a goddamn crypto scam being engineered in the same offices where they build the browser.
> What about their huge conflict of interest in getting nearly all their funding from Google?
It's better than getting all of their funding from a 30% cut of your ad revenue. At least Google is funding Mozilla out of pity.
> Also, their creator compensation program is quite terrible, which Tom Scott has documented quite thoroughly. It's all designed to feed back into Brave's cut, slowly siphoning your ad money to line their own pockets.
Creators get whatever Brave users donate to them. Perhaps creators should remind their users to donate?
Perhaps Brave shouldn't use other creator's likenesses without their express consent, and shouldn't treat their second-rate crypto as a legitimate or desirable currency to be compensated with. Why would I want to be paid in a centralized shitcoin where King Homophobe takes 30% and the revenue is generated by skipping the ads that would have otherwise just supported me directly?
Creators don't get whatever Brave users donate to them. Brave doesn't pay them, they dangle a bunch of meaningless tokens in front of their face (again, using their own likeness without consent), and tell them to make an account if they want a fraction of the revenue that they would have received otherwise.
