[rglullis]

Really? That is quite odd.

Users receive crypto if they join the brave rewards system. The rewards are directly related to Brave's revenue from their ad network - the notification ads. Advertisers put money for a known reason and a quantifiable investment. It's all opt-in. Users don't need to put any of their own money to be able to withdraw the rewards they receive. It's as much the opposite of a scheme as it can be.

What would you take to get you to take another look at it, to see it for yourself?

[teddyh]

Any system which involves money and is not immediately obviously simple to understand is almost always created in order to steal people’s money.

[soundnote]

The Brave system is pretty simple, though? They sell ad space, people buy ad space. Brave shows you ads and keeps a cut, they give their users a cut. Brave has a tipping service which lets users tip sites they like. End result is advertisers can advertise, and people making content get some of the ad money, the setup's just built to not track people.

The big concern there is that ads that don't track are generally less valuable so even widespread adoption of Brave's system would cause a decrease in ad revenue, same as Apple's recent anti-tracking changes.

[rglullis]

It's incredible. I think Brave/BAT is pretty much the only project in the crypto space that has a straightforward answer to "how do you guys plan to make money?" question, yet it is called "outright corrupt" and implied they are stealing from users somehow. I really wonder why there is so much cognitive dissonance.

[smoldesu]

Just speaking personally, but every time I've ever confronted a Brave dev online it's been among the worst experiences I've ever had. Every time I try to espouse an issue that I have with the design or architecture, I get lambasted for sharing it and then they insist that I'm objectively wrong. Browser preference is ultimately subjective, like your choice of editor or operating system: the least you can do is explain your mentality in a way that isn't ostracizing to technical users, otherwise you're no worse than Apple with pocketing your 30% and leaving the users out to dry.

[rglullis]

I don't know if your choice of words was intentional, but if I am developer and you come to confront me - I would also be more aggressive in the communication.

> Every time I try to espouse an issue that I have with the design or architecture

If you start a conversation with "issues that you have", you are going to have a hard time. Always. Starting with "issues that you have" is bad because (a) it assumes that you know more than the developers who have done the work of designing and addressing the trade-offs of the system and went through the actual work of developing the solution, (b) it assumes that your needs are more important than those of other users who are satisfied with the solution and (c) places the burden of solving your issue onto their shoulders while offering nothing in return.

In other words: no one likes a know-it-all.

If you start the conversation with the intent of understanding why things were done in a certain way and why certain design choices were made, you will be more likely to get in an engaging and productive conversation than just showing up with a laundry list of things that you'd like to see "fixed". By asking why instead of "confronting" design choices, you are more likely even to get them to recognize when a choice is sub-optimal.

I follow a good part of the lead members in Brave on Twitter. I've seen a lot of conversations from them with other people. Most if not all of them are working with false assumptions and don't even bother to question themselves. Those that come right away aggressive against them or assuming malice are indeed met with brashness. It might seem rude, but I would probably do the same after fending off the 100th random person on the internet accusing you of things you haven't done or demanding that you do something about the token price.

Those that come with the intent of understanding and assuming good intentions are way more likely to be treated cordially.

[smoldesu]

I'm not a Brave dev, I'm not going to steer your ship for you. I'm coming here, outright to tell you that the amount of hand-waving that your dev team does is suspicious at best, and it's starting to become the laughingstock of the browser wars. Brave's rhetoric is remarkably similar to a plethora of other crypto scams taking over, which doesn't make BAT's sketchiness any more palatable. Your issue is deeper than optics, it runs through whatever management thought it would be sane to incorporate an ERC-20 wallet in my goddamn browser. If I have to explain the issue with wanting my programs to do one thing and one thing well, we probably have irreconcilable opinions.

This is not an issue on Firefox, Chrome, or even Safari god forbid. These browsers are the main contenders because they're simple, and just browsers. Trying to build an "everything machine" is what made Internet Explorer such an unbearable slog, which is why all of our modern browsers are defined more by their limitation than their capabilities.

Again though, these are not my problems to fix. Brave has already burned their bridge of trust by involving themselves in crypto (and pocketing a portion for themselves, worse yet), so I have nothing more to do here than kick back and watch your development slowly turn back into a Mozilla-type org again.