Brave is interesting because it's taking a firehose to the current ad-tech system, and anyone who's spent time working in ad-tech understands it's is a towering

Brave is interesting because it's taking a firehose to the current ad-tech system, and anyone who's spent time working in ad-tech understands it's is a towering inferno of fraud and abuse. Some don't like Brave's approach of an alternative, opt-in ads / rewards system because in their view everything crypto-related or ads-supported is scammy. That's an understandable perception: a significant number of crypto enthusiasts appear to be scammers pumping pyramid schemes, and we've already established the ad-tech industry is a towering inferno. But technically I think you have to concede Brave's on-device ad relevance model is a better way (and the only conscionable one) to run an ad system that delivers relevant ads to interested users, and even directly reward them for their attention. If you think ad-supported anything is a non-starter, then you'd just never enable Brave Rewards, or use another browser (although they're entangled in the current ad-tech system so...) What you say about 'VPN fallacy' makes little sense. By default Brave is the most aggressive in blocking trackers, adware, and spyware compared to Firefox and Google — and this is actually a problem for Brave. Follow their web-compat issues on Github [1] to see the kind of things they're dealing with (an example of the very problematic and kind-of-unresolvable issues that come up include the Duolingo issue [2]). Users can disable shields on a per-site basis to deal with these things, but it's an open question as to whether this kind of friction will increase or decrease, and whether it's a barrier to larger adoption. There is no question though that the Brave team have the most commitment to privacy compared to Firefox and, of course, Google. Your statement that the Google spyware Brave has removed in their Chromium derivative has been replaced by some mystery sauce is based on...? I do find it curious that whenever this little challenger brand pops up on HN there's a predictable surge of hot take / bad take commentary which aggressively tries to paint a picture of Brave as anything but a plucky challenger brand full of technologists who are expending a lot of energy on privacy, security, and moving browsers forward. The accounts trying to shop a myth of Brave as a low-rent scam operation will inevitably find buyers for various reasons, but you'd hope technologists in the main will do their research and ignore, or even become curious as to what is driving this continued negative opinion-shaping... I did mine, and I fell for Brave due to a desire to opt-out of the worst of ad-tech surveillance, get a faster browser, and participate in a novel attempt to bootstrap a frictionless crypto / tipping / payment economy. Not all of these novel ideas will work, but they're worth exploring. For now Brave's been a dream, and when I accidentally use another open test browser for normal browsing, I'm taken back to a gross dystopia of a web experience. [1] https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/projects/17 https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/projects/17 [2] https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/3725 https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/3725