There have been ... incidents in their development.
At one point they misrepresented themselves as collecting donations for bloggers who a) had no relation with Brave and b) didn't want donations or monetisation of their content.
At another point it seemed like they were intercepting ads on pages and replacing them with their own ads. Not sure exactly what the truth of that situation is.
Yeah, tokenisation, BAT etc. HN is extremely sceptical about cryptocurrency, IMHO with very good reason.
As mentioned by another user - under the covers they inserted their own referral codes into links to online vendors.
All in all it's a sequence of dodgy decisions that tell me they put money above honesty.
For a group that's largely bet their fortunes on internet companies, it's kind of funny that anything crypto is so toxic here, but that's probably the reason.
The actual browser is under good technical stewardship from what I know. It's essentially not-evil Chrome with an optional crypto-for-ads monetization model, a crypto wallet, and some primitive default privacy and adblocking tools.
It suffers from the same technical deficiencies as Chrome (installing addons is harder than it should be, addon API is weak compared to firefox, Google controls the "store" for extensions), but I'd recommend it over any other Chromium-based browser.
My particular gripe with BAT is noted here[0] and AFAIK nothing has changed; you still have to use their KYC-compliant platform to ever exchange BAT for real-world money, as they'd much rather you re-donate the BAT to websites via brave's reward system instead of ever exchanging for USD.
Other problems that they'd had:
- were inserting referral tokens into the URL when visiting popular websites, so presumably brave was getting a lot of referral credit[1]. In particular it seems to be bad-faith to inject referral codes since Brave really isn't driving traffic to these sites, unless when you type "crypto" it autocompletes "binance.us".
- They've since stopped doing this, but previously tipping BAT to a website or creator meant users would lose that BAT with it basically being held in escrow until the website/creator did their own KYC and redeemed the tokens.[2]
You can still donate your BATs to institutions and websites (or should I say "pay for not having ads", at least this is what is being marketed for). I mostly contribute to wikipedia, as it is always in need of new donations and I like the idea of not having trackers/ads on it.
Probably because it's a browser wrapped in a crypto wallet, and there is virtually no use case for cryptocurrencies that are not powered by scams or crime.
I'm not saying there couldn't be, but so far, the entire ecosystem is just burning gigawatts of energy to sell jpegs of monkeys.
Oh yeah, and it removes ads from web pages and then shows its own. I'm always surprised people aren't more offended by that.
i use brave and i have never used its crypto tooling. it's effectively an up-to-date chromium fork with a bunch of extra features and privacy-respecting defaults.
Also, because their build system is closed source; my personal perspective is that if I cannot build your project, it is not "open source"
I have taken some inspiration from AUR (https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/brave) and I think I got it to compile all the way through once, but that's not nearly the same as how easy it is to build -- and then run -- Firefox every day
People on HN can both like that some piece of software is OSS and dislike it for other reasons. For example, Chromium is also open source, and most criticisms of "Chrome" aren't exactly limited to the closed-source additions (like Widevine and enhanced grammar fixing) Google puts in after the fact, eg. Manifest v3 which will touch both Chromium and Chrome.
Interesting, I don't think I've noticed the same criticism for Brave. But many times when it has come up in discussions at work, people will say they don't want to use it and don't trust it because Brendan Eich is behind it. He donated money to Prop 8 in California many years ago (which at the time, was very popular. More than half the people in California supported it), and he was fired/cancelled for it (long before the term "cancel culture" was a thing). Unfortunately for Eich, the culture shifted radically during that time, and he became a target (see OkCupid[1]). IIRC it was like 7 or 8 or so years after Prop 8 that the news leaked, and like most Americans Eich had changed his mind on it. But it didn't/doesn't matter, he has been branded and is forever tainted.
Oh interesting, no I don't have a source for that. Just something I've read a bunch of times. Probably falls into the "if you repeat a lie enough times, it becomes true" (although I don't know that there was nefarious motives behind it, could be honest mistakes like mine)
At one point they misrepresented themselves as collecting donations for bloggers who a) had no relation with Brave and b) didn't want donations or monetisation of their content.
At another point it seemed like they were intercepting ads on pages and replacing them with their own ads. Not sure exactly what the truth of that situation is.
Yeah, tokenisation, BAT etc. HN is extremely sceptical about cryptocurrency, IMHO with very good reason.
As mentioned by another user - under the covers they inserted their own referral codes into links to online vendors.
All in all it's a sequence of dodgy decisions that tell me they put money above honesty.