[freediver]

I did run a company and I feared making mistakes. In principle the best way to avoid making kinds of mistakes your users will hate you for is to put user interest first. By looking at Brave's profile I can not say they are living by that principle 100%.

For example, the decision to hijack links to insert their own affiliate links is not a mistake, it was a decision. These kind of decisions are not made by a developer in the team, it is a leadership level decision, coming from principles those leaders live by, and also one that does not put users first. On the contrary, it takes advantage of the users.

The principle of 'forgiving mistakes' applies only to honest mistakes. Otherwise we would all be browsing with Chrome/posting on Facebook/[insert currently hated company on HN here] and forgiving them all their 'mistakes'.

[patrickaljord]

Putting your users interest first needs to be balanced with remaining profitable so you can keep existing. It's hard to put your user interest first when you don't exist anymore.

This is why Firefox decided for example to support non-free mp4 or EME (DRM), even though it goes against their mission of supporting the open web. They decided that not supporting these features would kill their market share, relevance and revenue making it hard to support their users in the future.

When Brave made the decision to insert affiliate, they saw it as a way to help with their revenue which helps their mission without hurting privacy too much (they still block more trackers than any other browser in the market including firefox). Still, they rectified this quickly showing that they are not stubborn and are ready to sacrifice revenue for their users. Anyway, it's not easy to balance all this and you will be hard put to find saints that do it all perfectly out there, good luck finding one though.

[freediver]

> Putting your users interest first needs to be balanced with remaining profitable so you can keep existing.

Although this can be a sound principle for many, I do not agree with it. Brave is not 'entitled' in any way nor should the world bend to make Brave possible. It's a company like any other, with a product like any other and with, IMO, questionable leadrship principles demonstrated over and over again. The market will 'price' it accordingly in terms of market share.

If I was to build a browser (which btw I am doing) I would put 100% user interest first, at the price of not succeeding in the market. That is the only way I could sleep well at night.

[patrickaljord]

> Brave is not 'entitled' in any way nor should the world bend to make Brave possible.

I never said it was entitled, I said it had to balance things to survive.

> If I was to build a browser (which btw I am doing) I would put 100% user interest first, at the price of not succeeding in the market. That is the only way I could sleep well at night.

A quick look at the history of humanity will show you that even the most moral entities had at a point of their existence have to compromise with morality to survive, or made bad choices out of self-interest. Just like every single human being who has ever lived. I don't think you can never ever ever compromise on anything while accomplishing anything significant. By the way, do you plan on taking out mp4 and user freedom hostile features such as EME support in your browser?

[freediver]

You can balance things without making moral compromises. Making bad choices deliberately is different than making bad choices by a virtue of an honest mistake. For this particular feature Brave could have offered to split affiliate revenue with users 50-50. Then even if the idea was received poorly nobody could argue against the right to experiment and try to survive. Keeping 100% for yourself is greedy, shady and unnecessary not to mention uncovers that they don’t really put users first. Why not just run a bitcoin miner in the browser and keep everything for themselves? Where do you draw a line and say this company is not behaving like you are expecting?

[tripzilch]

> I don't think you can never ever ever compromise on anything while accomplishing anything significant.

I don't think you can never ever ever compromise on anything while accomplishing anything significant.

Not with that attitude you don't.