Technology

I think we have far bigger problems than Brendan Eich in the tech industry. Far more people have suffered or died in recent years from tax cuts and austerity lobbied by by some of the biggest billionaires (i.e. Zuckerberg, Gates, Ballmer, Musk, Bezos) than from the causes Eich has funded.

Can we truly call ourselves humanitarians when we continue to lap up everything that big tech gives to us?

At best, we're hypocrites for cancelling Eich whilst simultaneously sweeping issues like worker exploitation, political/medical disinformation, erosion of privacy, etc from the rest of big tech under the rug.

Who cares? As liberal I'm sick of the mellow-dramatic outrage culture. People aren't perfect. Who knew? If you don't use brave what's the alternative? Google, who is much worse? Maybe "don't let perfect be the enemy of good" and stop using the lefts social capital to alien people over small personal gripes.

I notice people who write these types of articles never open themselves to the same sort of scrutiny.

I just read it all and I don't entirely agree with all the reasons that the writer stated to not use brave (the CEO donating to ban same-sex marriage and the idea of BAT in itself I find interesting and I like but I ended up disabling it because I got nothing from it and I read somewhere how they were taking the donations that people made to the creators that do not have BAT or know about it without telling the users) but let's say he got me to question whether I would recommend Brave anymore, either way with what Google is doing right now I'm recommending Firefox to everyone I know whenever I can for the cause

Why was appointing Eich as CEO so controversial? It's because he donated $1,000 in support of California's Proposition 8 in 2008, which was a proposed amendment to California's state constitution to ban same-sex marriage.

That has nothing to do with the software. And that's a tiny donation. I'm not going to stop using an excellent tool because one of the guys in charge is a bigot. If that were the case, I wouldn't be able to eat, drink, breathe, make a phone call, or do anything really. There's a lot of people out there. Some of them are bigots. We should work to reduce their influence but we can't boycott literally everything. Every alternative to Brave has at least one bigot involved in it, I guarantee it.

Brave’s replacement for ads doesn’t reward users in a meaningful amount

Not enough > 0, which is what you get without adblock. And I'm fine with occasional non-targeted and unobtrusive ads to help fund a service I use.

Brave’s BAT was built around the cryptocurrency ecosystem

Who gives a shit except crypto bros? And who gives a shit about crypto bros anyway?

Brave was also caught up in a privacy scandal in 2020, when it was revealed that the browser was adding affiliate codes to some URLs typed into the address bar.

Are these affiliate codes tracking you? No? Who gives a shit? It's more money for Brave, same webpage for you.

That should have been enough to swear off Brave as a privacy-centric browser forever, considering the entire point of affiliate links is to collect data about the user and traffic source. For example, when you click an Amazon affiliate link in a web article, the publisher can see the exact products you purchase in the timeframe the tracking cookie remains active

Brave blocks cookies by default. Unless they specifically made an exception in their own browser for these codes, then this carefully-worded paragraph is just bullshit.

Much like the rest of this article. Bunch of poo-flinging. "Brave is involved in crypto, here's all the bad things crypto has done, that's why you shouldn't use Brave". Stupid guilt by association and a lot of hot air. Bringing a smoke machine to make people think there's fire.

There's a lot of effort going into making Brave seem like a bad browser and I don't know why.