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.
