The reason why “the internet is broken” is because of ads. Ads incentivize tracking and clickbait. In the end, ad companies, such as Google and Faceboook, act in the interests of advertisers, not users. Brave is an ad company.<p>On the other hand, companies which are supported by user donations act in the best interests of users. This includes websites such as Wikipedia and the Internet Archive.<p>Brave <i>does</i> offer the option to make a “tip” to websites, but it’s hardly necessary to have Brave be the middleman for all user donations.
Am I the only one who uses brave with all bat stuff off? It's a fork of chromium that's up to date, completely open source, ad blocking and fingerprinting defeating built-in, reader mode, etc. Chrome but just better.
What kind of information from the user does Brave hold and/or give to their ad publishers? And for how long? You are going from a situation where many ad networks receive pieces of information (ok, google 90% of the time) to a single ad network receiving 100% of information, which I don't think is good. Not to mention Brave becomes the gatekeeper of which content publishers receive BAT and I remember there was controversy over them banning someone's account because they didn't like the content.<p>I'll stick with uBlock, thanks.
I will not use Brave because I disagree with the legitimacy it gives to ads on the web. I want an ad-free web, or at least an ads-in-anything-like-their-current-form web. If that means the web is 1000x smaller than it currently is, then fine - most of the web today is total garbage anyway. I don't care about jobs supported by ads, because they're another form of 21st century bullshit job and we can invent some other forms of bullshit job to replace those lost to an ad-free web.
I never really looked into BAT and only use Brave on mobile (mostly then as its UI for its javascript switch is far better than dealing with uMatrix on firefox mobile).<p>I had no idea that the whole thing is yet another altcoin IPO with excellent marketing. They really must be laughing all the way to the bank...
being in the camp of "nothing ever good comes from adds", I've never considered Brave.<p>A browser is a remote code execution engine for attacker-controlled content. Looking at their bounties on H1 <a href="https://hackerone.com/brave/hacktivity" rel="nofollow">https://hackerone.com/brave/hacktivity</a> they are still solving problems which Mozilla and Google have researched and extinguished long ago. I don't trust Brave to get the security right. Also Ethereum is a scam and doesn't scale but that's a whole other topic.<p>As for their claims around paying content generators with their fake monopoly money, this article was absolutely on point.
I've been clicking the desktop ad notifications like a madman. Earning BAT, then taking that BAT and converting it to an interest bearing stable coin token in DeFi (~8%). Some of the BAT I earn, I also convert into ETH so I can pay for gas, making my transactions 'free'. It has been a fun experiment in playing with this stuff, but it certainly isn't going to make me rich or anything.
The way Brave is doing it currently though makes it look worse than snake oil. Why would they advertise a fingerprinting if it actually makes your fingerprint more unique? Why would they advertise Tor although using it inside Brave makes you instantly unique???<p>If this wasn't the case I'd not have a problem with it. This way it just seems like a huge scam (which considering you can just use Firefox with some add-ons it probably is Mr. Brendan Eich)
“...its built-in advertising network and Ethereum-based crypto token exchange system.”<p>I really don’t think that that’s a selling point. I really think most would think this is not a browser’s job.<p>Also, not our job to help Eich displace Google. As users, this is not our concern at all.
I'm grateful to the author for the detailed analysis of the cryptocurrency part of the grift. Before I'd never got past the "Brave is taking ad revenue from publishers and keeping it for themseleves" part in any detail.
> The idea that a single user browsing the web could have earned Brave anywhere near $25 in ad revenue is (coming from someone who worked in the ad industry for a couple years) completely absurd.<p>Wait, is that what my attention is worth to the online ad industry? I would gladly pay <$25/month to not be tracked for ads. (Or, even better, enjoy that as a consumer right protected by law.)
The article should be entitled "Brave Executive Team is Brilliant."<p>Brilliant in two ways: (1) they are an ad company that has fairly successfully wrapped itself in a Klingon Cloaking Sheild made up of "open source" and "pro-privacy" atoms; and (2) they did an ICO at a perfect time (peak of hype with BC soaring) and ease of implementation (Etherium). It was so good (bad) that it brought a tear to my eye.<p>Getting back to the article, I felt that the grade school "Daddy-O" interludes were unnecessary and distracting but I otherwise really liked it. And the illustrations were boss!<p>In fact, I liked it so much that I wanted to buy the author a coffee. So I clicked the link and...I was taken to some startup payment service that made it a chore to pay $3, so I bailed. I thought that was ironic as that payment site reminded me of Brave. Intermediating a common transaction with useless clutter and therefore foiling it.<p>So the Brave exec team and founders made a nice chunk of change and have perpetrated a ruse. But, luckily for users, they balanced Karma by producing a mighty-fine browser. Its capabilities rank it among the best.
It’s been almost 30 years and I still don’t understand why browsers exist. Isolated client-server apps were always better. Except that app design now emulates the browser. Soon we’ll have wasm apps that look and feel like windows 1.0 and call it revolutionary.
Similar points to this critique, previously on HN:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21776990" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21776990</a>
Misleading title. I thought it was going to eschew the cryptocurrency stuff and focus on the fact that it's a just Chromium with some built-in privacy features, which is the only reason I use it.
Quote: "You’re going to be browsing the web anyway; you’re going to be inundated with ads anyway;"<p>Naaaah, Firefox with uBlock Origins and Privacy Badger makes sure I don't see ads, but thank you for trying.
I'm a big fan of Brave!
Not only do I have a mostly ad-free web experience but it also saves me bandwidth and time. 22 hours saved in one year to be precise.
Hey there @rudism, I'm glad you found out about Brave, thanks for sharing about it! You should consider verifying yourself as a brave publisher so we can tip you on this platform that you're "not going to use any time soon" :)<p>My brave browser tells me:
"
rudism.com: Not yet verified
This creator has not yet signed up to receive contributions from Brave users. Any tips you send will remain in your wallet until they verify.
"
<a href="https://brave.com/transparency/" rel="nofollow">https://brave.com/transparency/</a>
To have a better idea of creators and advertisers volume.<p>But hey Rudis is probably right. Everything should be free and no one should get paid for work. lets not even try to fix or attempt a different economic model. We're all so happy with the current one...
Totally off-topic but I really liked the CSS/design for this site. Simple layout, nice choice of fonts, and a sensible and easy-to-read colour combination for this "wall of text" style presentation. Nice one.
Brave is brilliant at mobile design is what they're brilliant at. I find Chrome and Firefox on Android unusable because of how much better browsing with Brave feels. Firefox Lite and Microsoft Edge get closer to the pleasure of using Brave on mobile but neither comes close to matching it since Firefox lacks the reliability of Chromium browsers (I know, boo choosing browsers based on usefulness) and Edge has a fetish for bloated sub-menus.
The author discovered how capitalism works. Everything that has value, has it because there are people willing to pay for it, not necessarily because it has value or purpose. To use a tangible example instead of a virtual one - go read how diamonds have been pumped up by the mining-cutting cartels to be perceived as very valuable while in fact it's very hard to convert them to cash without a significant loss. PS. I've read recently that to move large money in times of crisis it's best to use diamonds, rubies etc. over gold or cryptocurrencies (cash is a non-starter, too much space). Well good luck with converting these stones back at purchase value. It boggles the mind that people can't see how much freedom 24 seed words give in times of crisis. You could move a billion dollars stashed in pages of a harlequin novel through every border & customs check and nobody would ever know. Try that with physical materials.
If you can have the same ad free experience without a token doesn’t that make the token redundant and in long term Occam principle dictates it won’t catch on.
One of the problems with BAT is that ERC20 doesn't scale so as they get more users, they will need to cut back on the frequency of payments. Also, a lot of that value is absorbed by the Ethereum network as transaction fees (GAS).
Brave is indeed very fast and particularly on mobile it is useful that the ad blocker is built-in. Thigh I think for most normies the fact that no plug-in is needed is underrated.
I haven't opted in to ads. They pop up as notifications on mobile and it is very annoying.