I happen to like that counterpoint. It doesn't feel like damage control, it feels like what they're doing, is worthy of discussion and they don't shy away from it.
Depends are which side of the table you’re sitting at.
I like Brave and many other people do. Just look at any of the other HN posts about Brave.
Since I like Brave, from this side of the table it looks like the anti-Brave people come out in full force to try to spew the same old crap and badmouth Brave. At the point it is the tired old crap, which most has been debunked already.
With the referral program and integration with a cryptocurrency, anyone can shill for it. It's hard if not impossible to know if someone promoting Brave has a stake in BAT or not.
Those that are showing Braves many problems ("badmouth") don't have a stake one way or the other except to warn people.
There is hardly a significant website out there with a higher concentration of Google and Microsoft employees than Hackernews, in light of which that's quite the baffling comment to make.
That’s a romantic view. There’s folks on HN working for direct competitors of brave. I doubt that everyone defending brave is a shill, or that everyone criticizing it does so with the purest intent as you’re suggesting.
The only real competitors for Brave are other cryptocurrencies, which yes there are many. I feel there's plenty of reasons to not like Brave and few if any are about suggesting a superior cryptocurrency.
The only non-compromised Brave users I've come across are mobile, and they are the ones that find using the Firefox add-ons menu to install uBlock origin too complicated. They are unlikely to learn the BAT system.
