[outsidetheparty]

> I feel the original intent, to be able to contribute directly back to page authors, was a noble one. It may not have played out as intended, but it wasn't a scam.

The original intent was absolutely a scam. They wanted to hide the ads that were already on websites, replace them with their own, then give a fraction of the revenue they just effectively stole from those websites back to them (but only if they knew to ask for it).

Also they were going to take over all the third-party tracking data for their own, while branding it as “privacy” — so much hand waving about "we don't run a MiTM proxy" (while hoping we didn’t notice it’s because they don’t need to be in the middle when they control the browser itself).

Absolutely brazen, and they kept changing their story in real time whenever people started to notice hey wtf is this. Happened to be able to find this in my posting history for example; in hindsight I wish I hadn't been so cowed by the fact that I was arguing with Brendan Eich Himself, because man what a load of horsepuckey he and his guy were delivering: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14464518#14465271

[LightHugger]

None of that is a scam?

The user and their browser decides what ads they see. Websites are not entitled to showing ads.

[outsidetheparty]

The parts that could most safely be described as "scam", to my point of view, are

* lying to users about protecting their privacy, while gathering and reselling more information than was possible with existing 3rd party trackers

* lying about "giving back to publishers", while actually coopting those publishers' revenue streams

Your "Websites are not entitled to showing ads" statement gave me a moment of thought, I have to admit: I don't see anything wrong with ad blockers, but I do think the ethics of ad replacers is pretty problematic. At best it makes Brave a parasitic entity feeding off revenue that would have otherwise gone to the content creators.

I'll reluctantly agree that that part on its own doesn't rise to the level of "scam" but I certainly don't think it's admirable.

[mrguyorama]

I think letting an advertising company have any control over content distribution or display is inherently a problem, so Brave signalling that they want to do advertising is pretty clear to me that they cannot be trusted.

Like, do Brave think google is just evil and that if someone else becomes the advertising behemoth things will be just rosy?

[outsidetheparty]

For sure. And their overall shiftiness whenever anyone calls attention to their plans ("oh, that FAQ's out of date," "oh that's a future feature," "oh that's not what we planned, even though it's exactly what we said," etc) doesn't exactly help make them seem like a trustworthy partner.