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At one point they were scummy enough to automatically add their referral codes to any Amazon link you see. Lots of people today still mindlessly recommend Brave, and thatā€™s whatā€™s wrong in general with the ā€œbut the UX is so niceā€ mentality.

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47 points

Lots of people today still mindlessly recommend Brave

It starts to feel astroturfed at a certain point. The last week or so has been crazy.

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13 points

I would bet my left nut they astroturf

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10 points

Theyā€™re cryptocurrency scammers; do you expect them not to hustle?

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15 points
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At one point they were scummy enough to automatically add their referral codes to any Amazon link you see.

To be clear, that means Brave is ā‘  invading their usersā€™ privacy, and ā‘” stealing money from web publishers.

The point of referral codes is to reward web publishers for referring users to a product; leading to the user buying a product that they otherwise wouldnā€™t.

Your browser isnā€™t introducing you to a product. For it to insert referral codes for the browser vendorā€™s benefit is stealing money.

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6 points

Its almost like UX is one of the most important things for a user of any given program. šŸ„“

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-9 points

If you really dig into the whole ordeal it was a software error, not some malicious idea to steal links from creators.

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18 points
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How exactly does one accidentally insert affiliate data on links? At some point someone wrote that code, which is malicious in itself, even if the activation was accidental.

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7 points

Itā€™s also strange that it happened twice, first with amazon links, then they started injecting affiliate data for crypto platforms instead.

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1 point

Itā€™s possible they had ads with referrals but accidentally modified all amazon links

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-22 points

Whatā€™s so bad about that?

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18 points

Itā€™s without your consent.

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-23 points

Most of the stuff that happens on the backend of any software goes on ā€œwithout your consentā€.

You clicked on a webpage.

You were brought to that webpage.

You werenā€™t tracked, logged, or had your data exploited or anything. All that happened was Brave got an affiliate bonus.

Now if the companies in question were angry at Brave for doing that, I could understand. But why should we, the users, give a shit?

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9 points
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Why the fuck should your browser get a share from your amazon shopping? Itā€™s doubly galling since they pretend to care about user privacy.

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