hello! i hope you’re having a nice day 
prologue:
i’m Tidyyy, and i have been using Brave’s browser for probably approaching 3 years now, of which, the last 6 months or so have been terrible; problems with gemini cutting out and unable to be relinked in december, followed by problematic browser updates all year with terrible communication from the staff, which has recently culminated in my profile being flagged - through no obvious fault of my own.
i have been scouring the forums for a couple months now, trying to piece together what’s happened, why these problems are being forced on brave’s customers, but also being respectful of brave staff’s time and effort under the general understanding that these are just temporary hick-ups in the software and the systems in place, and will all be fixed eventually. spoiler alert: they haven’t been fixed so far, and are unlikely to be fixed in the near future.
as a result, i have ultimately been trying to attempt to analyse and fix the problem myself, and this is the solution i have come up with:
solution:
the solution is quite elegant in it’s simplicity; block brave’s adverts. all of them. disable any and all brave’s advertising, because brave’s business model is to sell targeted ads to companies, but to share that revenue with it’s users. if your profile is flagged, rightly or wrongly, brave is not keeping their part of the deal, i.e. paying out a small percentage of the money made from targeted ads to us - the thing that, i’m sure, lured the majority of us to brave in the first place - so we should no longer be subjected to adverts ourselves, and yet we are. this is highlighted by the fact that it is in brave’s interest to NOT pay us our cut of the advertising money they make, and so it is of no surprise to me - having experienced brave’s customer service for the last 6 months, that they are not keen to swiftly rectify any falsely flagged profiles, which is why no-one is receiving any response to the multiple posts every day about the same issue from any staff member; it is almost as if they make more money by not paying us.
reasoning:
as stated above, brave’s business model is to have companies pay for targeted ads. if we remove ourselves from the pool of people able to be targeted, brave’s ad revenue - at least long-term - will suffer. the difference between “active users” of brave and those participating in the ads system will also begin to appear quite jarring to potential companies wanting to advertise on brave’s platform, as the opt-outs would be a clear indicator that brave’s adverts are simply not working as intended, and it will decrease the reach of any advertising campaign a company would likely want to run; if they can target 1.1x the amount of people for the same money, why wouldnt they? that’s smart business, especially on grander scales.
the reason this is the ONLY METHOD for dealing with flagged profiles is, again, quite simple; brave’s support staff have demonstrated to me over the last 6 months that they simply do not care about us. month after month they have pushed out terrible updates that have caused it’s users problems, and every month there’s a thread saying “yes we’ll absolutely do better with communication”, yet brave cannot inform any of us why we’ve randomly been flagged despite nothing changing for us, and no timescale as to when it will be fixed. the best i have received, from @steeven , @Mattches and other support staff via a ticket was a stock-standard copy-pasta of, basically, “we dont care, shut up and see if it changes”. that’s unacceptable. and the amount of new threads created on the issue daily confirms that it’s unacceptable for everyone else too. so what can we do? well, MAKE them care by targeting them in the pocket until we get answers.
FAQ:
“this isnt gonna help” - yeah, probably not, but i have exhausted all other options and this is the only one that, hopefully, brave will actually take notice of.
“what if the post gets removed?” - this is a forum. the definition of a forum is to have open discussion and to share ideas. if that is dictatorially silenced, we have bigger problems than having our profiles flagged.
“what if you’re banned for posting this?” - does it really matter? the forums have been no help either way.
“this is wrong, i have had no problems with brave” - good for you, buddy. enjoy. come back to this thread when you DO have a problem and nothing is done about it for 6 months.
step-by-step to block all brave’s ads (will be updated):
- click the three lines in the top-right of your browser and select ‘brave rewards’ from the menu.
- next to ‘brave private ads’, toggle the slider to OFF
- when you do this, you may see a little pop-up like this:
read it, chuckle to yourself, then close the brave rewards tab. - open a new tab. at the bottom you should see a ‘customise’ button with 3 horizontal lines next to it. click it.
- in the pop-up that appears, under the default ‘background images’, turn ‘show sponsored images’ to OFF
6)(OPTIONAL) in the same pop-up, hit ‘cards’ at the bottom on the left, then scroll down on the right to the final section, ‘cards’. turn this to OFF. - forget about rewards and get on with your life.
- (OPTIONAL) some time in the future, try signing in to your custodian (uphold/gemini) from brave to see if your profile is unflagged, and if it is, optionally reverse this process.
if you have more ideas on how to remove more ads from brave, feel free to post them so i can update this step-by-step guide for all those who follow.
in closing:
thank you for reading this forum post. i can only apologise that this is probably not the solution you would have liked, but i hope you can appreciate that i have used my time and patience trying to find a solution to the problem you are facing, with absolutely no success, and so i hope to save your time in sharing my experiences and solution.
i personally believe this to be a bug in the flagging system, but whilst brave continues to make money off us whilst not sharing the spoils, they will not be in a rush to fix it. hopefully, together, we can change that.
with love,
Tidyyy
this is just free speech…a user is giving his point of view and is explaining it as detailed and clearly as possible…and I believe that he and many others have those ideas due to the silence or lack of information that Brave’s mods must give users, when they come here to ask about some failure in the collection of rewards for viewing advertising…a reorganization is missing and there is a lack of people who can attend to user complaints…customer service in few words. I’m sorry for the 2 or 3 mods that sometimes appear to give some help, but this really got out of hand friends
