> If I remember correctly their first scandal was them injecting their own referral link during signups on cryptocurrency platforms.

Before that they were soliciting crypto donations on behalf of creators without their knowledge or consent.

https://web.archive.org/web/20181224011529/https://twitter.c...

Their whole business model of "block ads, and then show our own" is just so gross. I'm shocked anyone was ever happy to support it.

It's surprising how much of the educated tech workforce subscribes to the "enemy of my enemy is my friend" logic. Software has come such a long way to reach the point where you don't need to buy a compiler or textbook on learning C to be a developer. It's entirely lost on a generation of people that feel like the internet can be "fixed" with microtransactions and "healthy" advertisements.

Brave itself is such a maelstrom of offensive ideas that I really am really surprised they didn't get sued into the ground after the Tom Scott incident. The people that still use Brave better know how to set their useragent - this sort of blocking won't go away anytime soon.

Most judges aren't really all that interested in hearing cases because someone was offended. Usually there need to be damages, or laws broken.

Turns out the world isn't bsky.

You can just block ads and not show any ads at all, the way Internet should be. All the crypto bullshit is trivially disabled. Your other major choices are basically Firefox (which is not to everyone's liking either) and Chrome, in which it'll soon be impossible to block ads at all.

They have to make money somehow. They're pretty upfront about the way it works. They just used a different idea than that of Google. You can also opt out of tailored ads. People like it because it's fast with a built-in ad blocker and some like the crypto stuff and the fact you can connect to Tor with it

And as insult to injury, since it's based on the Chromium codebase, using Brave still supports Chrome's creep toward total browser monoculture, much like Edge.

The only browsers with actually good adblocking on Android are Firefox (uBlock) and Brave (on par with uBlock.)

Firefox is plain unusable on Android if you don't use an upper-range device.

Nothing else comes close, either they're out of date (Kiwi) or they're using Chrome's built-in ad blocking support (Vivaldi). Microsoft Edge has eyeo's native ABP port but there's no customizability.

> Firefox is plain unusable on Android if you don't use an upper-range device.

Interesting one - I generally found it to be the other way for me. Chrome was sluggish on my older phone, but Firefox was faster.

I'd say just plain wrong. My preferred browser on Android is Firefox, but I use Chrome too. It's a three year old $300 phone. Firefox runs much faster Chrome, but I suspect that's only because it has ad blockers.

that's never been my experience.

my Snapdragon 662 phone has never been able to juggle more than one tabs on Firefox without it OOM'ing, while I could on Chromium-based browsers.

I mean, the core thing they do has pissed people off: they're yet another attempt at an alternate monetization strategy for the web, but their approach do doing so is to basically forcibly insert themselves into the existing ways that websites and creators get paid, while not telling the users that the money they're collecting on their behalf might not actually be going to that site/creator (because the site isn't actually interested in having a business relationship with Brave, or they are but are still unable to get the money out)

As I understand it, Brave added a "donate to lobste.rs" link when viewed in their browser, and then kept all the money.

If you are using Brave, confirm any donation (and maybe anything else involving money) in another browser.

"As I understand it" is not true, but I'm curious whether you heard it from a Lobste.rs principal, or just some echo chamber spinning stories against us.

All the tokens in that late 2018 came from our user growth pool — we never misappropriate any user-bought BAT.

Just to be clear, are you saying that 100% of every BAT token that was pooled for a site has been distributed to the intended site? Or are you saying that only 100% of every BAT token that was purchased directly by an end user has been distributed to the intended site?

Is there a page somewhere with the information on the tokens for each site and their payouts status?

At that time we had no way for users to buy BAT they sent — it was all from our grant pool.

In any event, a creator might not sign or could fail to collect, so those grants came back to us after a 90 day timeout if I recall correctly.

> Is there a page

https://bravebat.info/

Maybe they don't think injecting referral links is bad behaviour. It doesn't hurt anyone's experience, and often gives a financial bonus to both parties in exchange for creating a database record that doesn't tell anyone anything they didn't already know from the User-Agent string or fingerprinting.

"The content you see on a site may not be the content being sent" is a low-effort excuse, too: plenty of users don't want to see plenty of things that site owners want them to see, and use browsers that display what they want to see.

Yikes. Thank god Eich never got a chance to poison Firefox with this.

Why would you think he'd do that? That is a rather strong insinuation.

He did it with Brave, why wouldn't he have done it with Firefox if given the chance? Acting like it's a weird logical jump that someone who did something bad would have also done the same bad thing if circumstances were slightly different is bizarre

Eich founded Brave, which is doing this.

Ah thanks, missed that.