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by BrendanEich 334 days ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43336441 (ladybird)

You go build a web engine. I've done it enough and the fight for user rights is a level up now. Brave would have died on the Gecko or Servo hill, and quickly, if we'd been foolish enough to charge up it.
1 comments
sfink 334 days ago
Not that it matters to anyone, but I feel a responsibility to say it: Brendan, you were right and I was wrong about the CEO pay. It still doesn't bother me as a thing in itself, but it now seems like a critical trigger in the cascade of events leading to the MBA types taking over.

I still disagree with a lot of the HN crowd's complaints about Mozilla, and think we're still serving an important function for now. The bulk of the complaints are applying hindsight to decisions that were difficult at the time, and suggesting alternate paths that are ludicrously unrealistic or optimistic. Other complaints are on target, but way overblown. But the complaint that management has been taken over by the industry-standard hype-chasing short term value extraction mindset? I can't point to any evidence that says they haven't. (Admittedly, it's hard to find a company these days that hasn't...)

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BrendanEich 334 days ago
Brave rejects that extractive mindset.

People see crypto in Brave and shout "hype", but this is false: we started with the premise that blocking ads by default would require a way for users and creators to get paid or pay, especially for users to get paid. This rules out credit cards, and ACH is way too onerous. We started therefore with a two-sided Bitcoin based user-pays-voluntarily prototype, Brave Payments. Brave Rewards using BAT for a three sided (advertisers pay users who may then pay creators) followed.

More generally, we are Web3 builders, we want decentralization including of payments and finance.

People now see "AI" and shout "hype". We've had ML in the browser and of course in Brave Search for years. LLMs are not going to reach human intelligence, they still need work, but they're a useful front end to search. Not hype, better than ten blue links or the SEO-degraded, Google-cross-promo-infested SERP that doesn't even show blue links above the fold on my phone. Being able to post followup prompts with large context is especially useful.

I agree with you on CEO pay. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43156176 for estimated grand total. Around when the Yahoo! deal failed, it seems Mitchell and the MoCo board made a pact for big pay (rumored $250K/yr to board members for doing little). If merited by results, defensible. As things turned out (not merited), red meat laid out as bait to second-rate MBA/McKinsey types who can be successor-looters while the Google deal pays.

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