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by bongobingo1 1400 days ago
All I remember brave for is some crypto nonsense, and looking at wikipedia it seems they were doing some kind of suspect "content creator payments" that were opt-out and not forwarded?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)#Controvers...

At the face of it, it sounds like they had a "Donate to platypus" button but you'd only get the donations if you knew to sign up with them on the back end? Gross.

3 comments

It's opt-in for people to choose Brave over another browser.

It's opt-in for creators to accept payouts.

All the complaints mentioned in your link were resolved 2 years ago. Brave returns money to donators if the creator doesn't sign up within 90 days. And creators status with Brave is clearly prominent in the UI.

The list of sketchy stuff in Chrome over the years makes Brave look saintly. And Firefox and even Safari.

Depends on the person. As someone who values the environment I don't want any crypto stuff in my browser. Totally not saintly for me.
BAT is built on top of ETH which is moving to proof of stake.
The "crypto nonsense" is the Basic Attention Token. If you enable ads, you get paid in cryptocurrency for your attention.

Completely optional too. First time I've ever seen an advertiser allow users to simply turn off the ads. Plenty of people use Brave on mobile just for the built-in ad blocker. It's not as good as Firefox + uBlock Origin but it's still a huge improvement over Chrome.

Why is it "nonsense"? Seems like a good thing to try and see if it works as a way to pay content creators. Maybe it doesn't, we will see. But why call it "nonsense"?