There are so many better alternatives to brave for those that want to donate to content creators or just browse the web. I have never understood the fascination or usefulness of brave. I would caution people against using it.
If an affiliate link offering (shown plainly, and prior to any navigation event) worries you, wait until you see what other browsers are getting away with. If you're using Chrome, Edge, or Firefox, your browser serves as an out-of-the-box keylogger, sending each keystroke off to Google (Chrome and Firefox) or Bing (Edge) as you type into the address bar. Even an unintentional pasting of sensitive information gets transmitted.
This has not been the case for a long time.
Any effective solution in this space is going to be controversial. Brave is far from perfect, but it is much better than allowing Apple or Google to control your browser and doesn't require any tech expertise to use. Those companies generally don't apologize or revert their scummy practices.
Back in 2018, Brave gave tokens from our own UGP (User Growth Pool) to users. These tokens could then be directed to websites, YouTube channels, and more. If the intended recipient wasn't verified, the tokens would go into a settlement wallet. But note, the tokens people were sending were almost entirely those which they first received from Brave (it was not yet possible to earn rewards at that time). So users were getting tokens from Brave, then earmarking those tokens for content creators.
More details at https://brave.com/rewards-update/
The latest affiliate link controversy was from 2020 [1] Weird ad browser notifications is not that old [2]
Probably others. Happy to be wrong, I haven't researched it much, but what exactly is the case that they have a good track record of any significant length?
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/8/21283769/brave-browser-aff... [2] https://community.brave.com/t/turning-off-brave-notification...
For more technical people, ungoogled-chromium [1] is probably the cleanest option. It's completely free from ads, telemetry, "pings", "experiments", and the like.
It made me contribute to content creators way more than I have with Flattr (now owned by scammy EyeO, remember them?) or with Patreon. I can not do any of that with any other offering.
Lastly: what telemetry?
Yes. "Oh, another unwarranted mention of Brave!"
Isn't Hacker News a website on things that gratifies own's curiosity? How does an article about how to get started with a browser that isn't new is supposed to fulfill this requirement? By making us ask ourselves these questions?
These mentions which just look like ads need comments like yours at the top of the post.
It's not even hard! The presentation of a new version with interesting new features would fit the bill.
Brave is my favorite browser. It's the best web experience out of the box. No digging into settings to specify my default search engine (DuckDuckGo), ads are blocked by default without having to turn on extensions (which I see as an attack vector).
Im sure there are more but all the bells and whistles Brave touts you can get elsewhere and you are not using a product from a company that has shady practices
I personally treat all software with a level of distrust. But brave has done things which all point to a certain behaviour in which people should think twice before using the product. You can get the benefits of privacy that Brave touts from other browsers. If you want to donate to content creators, plenty of ways to do so as well.
> 1. Reveal who is paying for advertisements, how much they are paying and who is being targeted.
> 2. Commit to meaningful transparency of platform algorithms so we know how and what content is being amplified, to whom, and the associated impact.
> 3. Turn on by default the tools to amplify factual voices over disinformation.
> 4. Work with independent researchers to facilitate in-depth studies of the platforms’ impact on people and our societies, and what we can do to improve things.
> These are actions the platforms can and should commit to today. The answer is not to do away with the internet, but to build a better one that can withstand and gird against these types of challenges. This is how we can begin to do that.
I read the blog post as claiming that deplatforming / silencing isn't the answer. A lot more (outlined above) is required.
> 4. Work with independent researchers to facilitate in-depth studies of the platforms’ impact on people and our societies, and what we can do to improve things.
I'll help you. These two are the overt censorship.
When (often hyper-partisan like Snopes) fact checkers are the ones determining what you can see based on THEIR OWN interpretation of "hate speech" or "inciting violence" then that's censorship.
Alternatively, if you don't want to see something on Twitter / Parler / Gab / etc, just don't follow that person instead of calling for them to be censored.
"more than just the temporary silencing or permanent removal of bad actors from social media platforms"
And of course, they want to be part of determining who, exactly, is a bad actor.
Those other things are also called for in the post, but the actual post title was "We need more than deplatforming" (emphasis added). In other words, mere deplatforming / silencing isn't enough, according to the post.
ProtonMail indicated potentially entering the browser space: https://twitter.com/ProtonMail/status/1347930110553419777
I've tried Brave and it looks and feels good. And the ability to donate to random Twitter users directly from the browser interface is a brilliant and innovative feature that I intend to start using.
Brave has ads, including annoying desktop pop ups!
Brave does have ads in the browser's empty tab. I'm fine with that, if that's how they monetize it. I've even clicked on a few because they were interesting to me, which I haven't done in years on any other platform.
When you launch Firefox for the first time, you're already being setup and prepared to be served to Google. Your data and more are being primed. The address bar serves as a key-logger, and your inputs (before ever explicitly navigating anywhere) are being sent to Google.
Brave's ad notifications are opt-in; you have to turn them on. You decide their frequency. They're built on privacy. Users in a common region (e.g. United States) share a regional catalog. Your browser downloads a copy of this catalog, studies it locally, and decides when/if it should show any of the ads listed therein.
When a Brave Ad is displayed, 70% of the revenue goes into a digital wallet. When you see an ad in Firefox, there's a good chance you just lost a little bit of your data, and received nothing in return. In Brave, these rewards stack up, and can be passively or actively distributed to the sites and properties you appreciate most online.
Also, by this logic any text field that does something with your input before explicitly pressing a submit button is also a keylogger. That just doesn't make sense.
Last I checked (briefly after it was released), I didn't care that much for the right leaning comments. But maybe it has improved or it can be filtered.
You keep linking to the affiliate suggestion as though it were something alarming; it isn't. And that's the response from those in the InfoSec community. To pair this mistake with the ominous warning that Brave "can potentially watch and track your every move" is silly.
I suppose you use a browser coded in rust by mother theresa?
(Note that I am not expressing a personal preference.)
I simply don't get BAT.
We pivoted to the BAT, built on ERC-20. This relieved us from large fees and heavy network congestion, as well as enables us to do things like create a User Growth Pool (300M BAT) to drive growth. As an example, we recently sunsetted our referral program which generated more than $13M in rewards for publishers. Initially we had planned to stop the program after $1M had been distributed, but a healthy UGP enabled us to go much bigger.
There is no animus towards BTC today. In fact, for our verified creators (https://creators.brave.com), we'll even auto-convert your received BAT into BTC (or ETH).
