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.
