this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2024
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Why what's up with them? Asking cuz I don't know.
Tl;dr Brave’s ceo (founder?) has donated to legislation to abolish gay marriage in California.
Brave adds referral links to cryptocurrency urls.
And it is apparently collecting money for YouTubers and not paying them (I did not fully read that article myself)
What an absolute fuck-head
How does it even work?
Before displaying a page it searches the content and injects a referrer tag to the end of URLs that match certain things. This is done instantly.
E.g. If there's a Binance URL on the page it'll add something like
?ref=bravebrowser
Binance will pick up that tag and give them money for any sign ups. Brave do this for any crypto services they have affiliate accounts with.
The gay marriage thing is not a good look now, but it's worth noting that he's not trying to abolish it today.
And the referral link things is also old and it was walked back after it was discovered.
Choose your tools based on your needs because everyone will have some politics you don't like.
He may not be trying to abolish it, but he also, to my knowledge has not apologized, or done anything to show he has changed.
As far as I know, you are correct. My main browser is Librewolf and search engine is DDG. But I still use Brave when I rarely need a chromium browser or alternate search engine and he gains nothing from that.
Aight, found this. Apparently the twat donated 1000 dollars to some proposal in California that would ban gay marriage.
You know? Honestly, I don't care about that. They're free and open source. They have to make SOME money somehow. Referrals cost the seller rather than the customer. While this does count as an advertisement, it is still very low profile. So uk....I don't really mind that.
I was reading another comment, apparently they were swapping their referral link in place of your own.
WAIT, WHAT?!!! That's like cartoon level conning!
And I agree with you, if they were simply adding their referral link when you did not include one, nbd as long as that is going to support the free browser development. But if they were actually replacing your referral link with their own, that is some Mr. Burns shit for sure.
Didn't they also click ads when you clicked a link, invisibly in the background?
that's pretty much adnauseum except it doesn't prentend
Read the links of the comment you are replying to.
that's not reasonable. provide an argument with supporting links, not links without an argument
As a piece of software, nothing. It’s an open source browser, and has an added bonus of having many privacy settings on by default. Not even firefox can say the same, it comes with telemetry, pocket and whatnot out of the box.
But there are some fair criticisms about the company and its administration. For example, there was an incident years ago when you signed on a crypto exchange, it would swap the sign on link for their own referral link. They claimed this was an error and quickly patched it, but I don’t buy it.
You’ll quickly notice that a lot of people on lemmy passionately hate brave. So expect a strong bias and, as a result, truths but overblown, half truths and misinformation. Don’t ignore what they say but double check them.