People are going to complain no matter how they try to make money, but this should at least have been opt-in with clear consent. The alternative of course is being beholden to Google search referrals. They can’t photosynthesize funds.
Vivaldi, Brave, and their stans are getting their pitchforks ready, forgetting that they don’t have to do the hard work of developing an engine because Google already does that for them.
You’re being heavily downvoted because this instance is “a community of free software and privacy enthusiasts” as the title on the front page suggests, and this in particular is the !opensource community. Discord is the complete antithesis of this, as it is a proprietary application locked to a centralized server that also spies on its users.
That being said, there are modern alternatives to IRC, such as Matrix, XMPP, Zulip, Mattermost, or RocketChat. However, I think IRC is fairly good at what it does.
this, it’s a cryptomoney scheme. They need to promote Brave in order to increase the value of the cryptomoney token. There’s also an affiliate referral link program I’ve seen spammed a couple of times