Someone from Brave: actually we don’t replace existing ads at all, here’s why
Person 2: no one cares what you do or don’t do with existing ads!
I don’t have any connection to Brave but I find it odd they’ve become some kind of hate figure here on HN. Their iOS client IMO is quite good. Their privacy is miles ahead of the other options. But merely by trying to be privacy first they get crap for not always being perfect. See also: Signal, OpenPGP, Firefox.
If by "other options" you're purely referring to "the 5 most popular browsers", you're mostly right. Brave still uses much more telemetry than UnGoogled Chromium and Vivaldi, so make of that what you will.
On the topic of telemetry, I just updated it and launched a new window to find an immediate call to vialdi.com/rep/rep passing along 25 distinct pieces of information, including what appears to be a distinct 16-character ID (key: _id). Another 6-character ID (key: pv_id) was also passed along for the ride. I'd have to take a closer look into the traffic to determine how sticky these are to the user, device, or browser instance.
Anybody interested can download Telerik Fiddler (or the HTTP Toolkit) and conduct a cursory review of the network activity as well. Vivaldi does still come out near the top of the list of browsers though. For example, they don't send keystrokes to Google or Bing behind the scenes as you type. That's a unique restraint not commonly observed in browsers today.
Example: “Oh this person works for Brave, don’t trust them.” Or in reply to the post explaining what sounds like a bug in the application being misread as a way to grift money from traffic, “No revenue made? So you got caught before you got paid?” Or the clarification that Brave browser ads are confined to the browser and OS UI followed by repetition of the same insisted point that they “block then replace browser ads,” while the rep seems to have explained quite clearly opt-in browser ads are not presented inline to the webpage content. It is, sorry to use a tired comparison, “Reddit behavior.”
I recently saw a note by dang in a Bitcoin thread about how crypto tends to generate repetitive arguments on HN and it seems like that blind spot for the community may have eclipsed Brave by association (maybe in addition to HN’s negativity towards anything ad related). I keep scrolling further expecting to learn something salient about why I shouldn’t trust Brave but instead I see a bunch of people beating on a community rep.
Instead, I'd like to just respond to this small bit of your comment, if you don't mind:
>I keep scrolling further expecting to learn something salient about why I shouldn’t trust Brave but instead I see a bunch of people beating on a community rep.
A lot of anti-Brave comments are flat out wrong, factually incorrect, or just pure conspiracy/hate. A lot of other anti-Brave comments used to be true but aren't anymore. A few anti-Brave comments still are researched and reasoned.
But it feels to me like any and all comments critiquing Brave instantly get either heated responses from Brave fans and/or dismissed entirely by Brave employees, regardless of their validity, which doesn't breed good discussion and typically devolves into argument and/or personal attacks (even from the Brave reps, which probably doesn't help their brand image).
Brave has made a lot of mistakes over the years (both in bugs and business decisions they've since reverted). From the company/rep's point of view, they've made mistakes, learned, and improved. From the haters' point of view, the company's laundry list of shady scandals has decimated any trust left of what their reps say, especially when defending what looks like The Next Big Scandal. When those same reps dismiss what is or used to be a legitimate concern (for example, injecting affiliate links into URLs) as just "Brave doesn't do that", it only reinforces whichever perceptions people already have about Brave (those for-Brave see haters with invalid critique, and those attacking Brave see a rep gaslighting or dismissing what they believe to be true).
I don't know what the solution to repair Brave's brand is for haters, but it's probably somewhere between acknowledging the mistakes of their past (instead of framing every response in the ultra-present-tense "Brave doesn't do that") and/or providing better educational materials for people to actually learn how Brave works instead of just vaguely knowing "they hide ads, but also show ads, but also something about cryptocurrency, but only if you watch their ads?"
This problem is all too common though in all parts of life. Someone does something with a good intention for the betterment of people/society and then some others who are not on the other side of the status quo have have to come bring negativity because all they have in them is destructive and constructive (hate vs compromise/support)
Me: Brave guy used a lot of words but what they said was they remove ads from one place and move them to another place, that's still replacing ads.
That's not you.
1) Forced upon the user, rewards them in no way for their attention, harvests their data, auctions them off to a sea of third-parties, and may in fact be dropping malicious scripts onto their machine for client-site execution.
and
2) An opt-in model which harvests no user data, rewards users with 70% of the revenue for the ads they choose to view (the user controls frequency caps), and gives everybody (not just the wealthy or well-off) a way to support content creators.
And you feel the second one is the "disturbing" model?
1. I can continue to use Vivaldi and uBlock origin as a completely open-source and so far flawless combo
or
2. Go out of my way to switch to a browser with dubious privacy claims, a goddamn personal cryptocurrency and (the cherry on top) a developer who spent the better half of his afternoon tracking me down and asking me why I don't like their browser.
I think I'm good.
Also, Vivaldi is entirely moddable.