Please don't take HN threads further into repetition of the same old flamewar. It gets tedious and inevitably turns nasty.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Apologies! I was trying not to come across as starting a flamewar but looking back it does appear it was.

> 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.