Brave launches 1.0(brave.com) |
Brave launches 1.0(brave.com) |
8.7M users!
Lighthouse doesn't seem to work properly, which I use Chrome for.
I prefer Firefox for trust in privacy.
Not to mention the massive privacy leak that is a public network of transactions, revealing browsing habits by way of advertising payments.
Brave: hey you want rewards? here's some notification ads
What's your agenda? Who's paying you to slander Brave?
In the early 2000s ads were simple images that loaded just as fast as everything else, and I didn't mind them much, even the cheesy animated ones. It's the delivery, not the content, that I abhor.
Because ads are basically useless? I can remember MAYBE a handful of times in my entire life where an "ad" has actually prompted me to look into/buy something.
Beside, Brave is chromium based. If you want to fight the chrome monopoly, go somewhere else.
I could be fine with a fork of Firefox with a preinstall uBlockOrigin, Privacy Possum, facebook container, etc.
Then turn off the ad feed in Brave and enjoy the built in ad blocking. If you would still like to fund participating sites through Brave you can fund your BAT account with your own money.
I see the downvotes coming yet it is true check it for yourself. Brave is so easy to fingerprint compared to Chrome it defeats any purpose ever to use Brave in the first place if privacy is your main goal. Removing all the Google bits from the Chromium base doesn't help since you are so fingerprintable.
Panopticlick needs to update their docs to make that clearer.
Oh, my. I am so scared. And Brave is of course a knight in shining armor ready to protect our shaken foundations.
It actually does happen, and I've used ad blocking software consistently ever since.
As for ads I am using adblock for ages. Not that I got a virus from internet, just do not like seeing ads when not asked.
The other group agrees the web is broken, but then claims that Brave won't fix things and will even make them worse.
I don't think that is true, but the thing is, we need to have something new here, and Brave is the only solution out there at present that is developed, is trying to address all the problems, and is reasonably usable by non-techies, and so I am using it and I urge everyone else to do so too.
To those people who claim Brave is awful, I say they should be working on something they think would better. I suspect they aren't doing that because they are just negative people, or they are trollers who are being paid by the present internet powers-that-be.
On the latter idea, its not just paranoia. If someone came up with a good alternative, people like the advertising networks would feel mortally threatened, and I think it is absolutely certain they would strike back with a massive disinformation campaign.
I just signed up as a content creator and added my website as a channel - interestingly my website already had some bat associated with it. Does this mean that some people have already donated some BAT to it?
Is that still the case even with FFs recent update to version 70[1]?
[1]: https://mozillagfx.wordpress.com/2019/10/22/dramatically-red...
They are all absolutely PACKED with ads. Try it yourself. It's ridiculous. Every other paragraph is separated by ads, overlays, click-spam news, auto-playing videos, etc. I tried easily 7 or 8 different sites before giving up and installing Brave.
This is just anecdotal, but I think the categories that are targeted at the broadest category of users, probably scewing towards older and female, are just being straight up abusive. And mobile seems to be particularly bad.
This situation is untenable. I guess sites and advertisers are just relying on a continuing influx of newbies to line their pockets, but really it's a scorched Earth policy that can't possibly continue as is.
1) It tries to also be a bit-torrent client but the downoad doesn't even survive a tab closing. Pretty frustrating to lose a big long download that way. 2) new tabs have a weird eye-bleeding background and there's no way to change it
I do not work for brave, mozilla, google or apple. I also have no stake in any of those companies nor do I know anyone that works for those companies. I really wonder how so many people in this thread can have a negative response when I personally have felt the complete opposite.
I do suspect it has something to do with employer bias.
[0] https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/1052#issuecomm... [1] https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters/issues/761 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999
This reeks of being an astroturfing account.
I'd like to add that if your Browser is trying to add a new dynamic of economics but your UX is terrible dealing with tips (fixed) and you're annoying users about needing a deposit. You're doing it wrong.
It's almost like Brave doesn't even believe in it's mission. There should be an intense focus on their product. That they are relentless at it. Because right now, it all seems half-baked.
https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/413
I still can't use brave to watch netflix on Linux. Its a great product and I love shifting the incentive of advertising away from intrusive data harvesting, but treating Linux like its a second class citizen means I won't use your product. Whats worse is that Firefox is 100% open source and Chromium is 100% open source and they both manage to get this working out of the box. There is no reason for Brave to not have working Netflix
edit: Also I know the library that decodes the DRM is proprietary, my point is the integration with it is open and available, no reason it can't be duplicated.
https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/413
The notification if very discreet, but it did have a button in the toolbar to promp me to install it.
Don't want to enable less secure legacy accessibility support.
https://community.brave.com/t/android-autofill-api-enabled-i...
Give Brave a piece of that moist and delicious $330B cake, because...
> That’s the inspiration behind Brave,” he added.
> there's never been a good ad in the history of advertising. 120 years and there's never been an ad that has stood the test of time and was fondly remembered like literature or a song. It is a profoundly anti lindy medium that exists in the now, forever
uninstalled, back to FireFox and DDG.
For the uninitiated, Brave lets users opt-in to Brave rewards:
- You set your browser to reward content creators with Basic Attention Token (BAT). You set a budget (e.g. 10 BAT/month), and Brave distributes it the sites you use most, e.g. if you watch a particular YouTube channel 30% of your browsing time, it will send 30% of 10 BAT each month to that content creator.
- As a user, you can get paid in BAT. You tell Brave if you're willing to see ads, and how often. If so, you get paid in BAT, which you can then distribute to content creators. Brave ads are different: rather than intrusive in-page ads, Brave ads show up as a notification in your operating system outside of the page. This prevents slow downs of the page, keeping your browsing focused, while still allowing support of content creators. And of course, Brave ads are optional and opt-in.
> Brave ads show up as a notification in your operating system outside of the page.
and then you lost me. Hitting people with notifications is an escalation of ad hostility, not a reduction.
Right now, you don’t have to interact with ads to get paid, though that may change in the future.
It’s way less intrusive than pop-ups and full screen interstitials, which I hate.
Disclaimer: I’ve been a Brave user/tester for a while.
Edit: if you decide to opt-in, you decide how many ads per hour you see. That seems like a reasonable trade-off.
Though I suspect popup system ads would become old soon too.
Also, their ads must be by definition content-unaware
Is trading dollars for BAT on an exchange and then loading those BAT into your browser's wallet such a bad alternative?
https://contributor.google.com/v/beta
Unfortunately, it only worked on Google ads, which is something like 40-55% coverage, so you would still see some ads from other networks. Not sure what they're doing with it now, but it was nicer than dealing with funbucks.
Flattr tried it a while back where you could set aside 5 euro per month, or whatever, and they would distribute it to the stuff you liked the most. But the transaction fees were high for them and it was hard to do super small payouts.
This is a crypto case that makes sense. I’m not quite sure how they will keep an exchange rate with the dollar as the only thing you can buy with it is cash to content. So you can buy BAT from Brave.
And it's not new either. Tried many times in the past, and ends up not being enough for 'real' users to care, but people will try to exploit it.
It was envisioned exactly like that
You can buy BAT and send it to a site owner.
1. How does this impact my taxes? Wouldn't this be considered an income?
2. If i don't collect it where does it go?
3. If my content is being hosted on something like youtube or github do i get it or does the site hosting it get it?
4. How do i go about claiming that i own this, and how is this even verified?
After reading their FAQ, basically to collect any money you need to sign up for an uphold account. In order to become verified on Uphold i need to provide a random company a copy of my passport/drivers license/etc to verify my identity. On top of this they also take 1.95% conversion fee for working with BAT. Ontop of the 5% that Brave already takes by default.
On top of this if you are lets say a Twitch streamer sign up for Brave Rewards, but Twitch doesn't sign up as a publisher on Brave. According to the documentation you apparently get nothing? Where do those tokens go if someone donates?
Once you verify, the tokens will leave the user's wallet and are put into a wallet (called a card) with Brave partner Uphold. If you want to convert the tokens to your local currency and put into your account, there's a "Know Your Customer" process that the government makes sure is enforced
Tax-wise, I'm not sure how that works (great question). Besides manually converting to your currency and depositing to your bank, Uphold has a debit card that will automatically do the conversion if you use it when shopping
They can attempt to send you BAT in the browser, but it shows that you're an unverified creator, so the browser essentially 'holds' the BAT and attempts to send to you for a period of time (I think 90 days).
You sign up at https://creators.brave.com/ for your website / reddit / github / twitter / soundcloud / etc and verification happens depending on the platform, then you're shown as a registered creator in the browser when someone visits.
You get the BAT donation and just like any income would have to consider tax implications.
I'm sorry, how is that not orders of magnitudes MORE intrusive?
The only major problem with this funding model that I can see is that it provides no incentive for users to contribute to the websites they visit at all. They can just as easily block ads and not replace that revenue with anything, which is actually the default behavior. It's essentially moving from a web funded by advertising to a web funded by donations; and based on past experience in using donations to fund open source projects I can't really see that model working out well for anyone but large, popular websites with minimal operational costs.
Though on the other hand, Brave does eliminate a lot of the friction associated with the typical donations model. Maybe they'll be more effective at soliciting donations on behalf of websites than previous efforts have been. It's hard to know for sure.
This is important. I’m already blocking ads. Brave at least let’s me give something back.
There is no world where I don’t run the strictest ad blocker available.
Do I have to solve captchas to qualify for brave rewards?
Can I make more money from being advertised to by being wealthy, and thus more valuable to advertise to or does brave capture all of that? Does no one capture that? Do I still get paid if I don't click through stuff? Do I get paid more if I do? How does brave verify that an ad has even been rendered? I doubt that it's terribly difficult to fool brave into believing that it has successfully rendered an ad at the maximum rate. Is it merely a violation of the ToS and if they "catch you" your bitcoins are forfeit? Is BAT a currency? When they confiscate your BAT, what is the legal process involved?
What if I want to launder a tremendous amount of money? Is brave going to suddenly make that a lot easier?
What if I have a massive botnet on the home computers of the elderly and I want to monetize it, does Brave help me do that?
In principle this may not be a very important distinction. However, I often think that I would stop blocking ads _IF_ the website I was looking at had actually vetted the ad I was seeing. I do not want to see so much garbage just for visiting a website. For example: I block all ads from theverge.com, not because their content is bad, but because I find the outbrain ads at the bottom of the page so asinine and tasteless that I'd rather not see any ads.
To continue on with theverge example, If they actually had selected the individual ads they were placing, I'd be totally fine with that. But I am not fine with them delegating that responsibility to another company that clearly is not up to handling the task.
But I see one big problem: For a significant amount of media, a browser isn't the most desirable content delivery mechanism. Take Youtube, for example. The web site is great on PC, but on mobile, the native apps are much better. There's no way those will add support for Brave Rewards, and the chances of the browser-based version catching up don't look so good either. Similarly, there's music streaming, podcasts, F2P games …
I don't want to be in a situation where I have to choose between accessing content in the way I prefer and jumping though hoops for the sake of shuffling those precious BATs around.
Equating the value I'd assign to a creator's work with the time I spend on perusing it seems quite iffy, too.
Meanwhile, Patreon already has most of these issues solved; in a super simple way.
I used to be interested in Brave because of their pro-privacy stance. The more I think about that BAT stuff, the less attractive I find the entire project. I can give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that they're idealists striving to build an ecosystem where everyone can help to create valuable on-line content, rather than entrepreneurs trying to syphon a portion of existing revenue streams into their accounts. But then I'm inclined to question their competence.
Even if it were closed-source, technically there's nothing stopping you from binary patching your browser to do the same thing. But then again, there's nothing stopping you from putting an ad-blocker in your normal browser; and faking clicks on your own website to "milk" advertisers is already a thing that has to be dealt with.
I don't think either Brave's model, or its being open-source fundamentally changes the issues facing ad-supported systems.
That part's simple: why wouldn't you want to create money from thin air?
1. The decision to base on Chromium is a bigger negative for me than any feature. We're all going to regret contributing to the One True Engine someday and it's going to be so painful to fix.
2. BAT is a pure money play. There's no inherent utility outside buying and spending. And Ethereum is nothing if not the biggest utility crypto out there. This is always one of those things in the Ethereum ecosystem where I point out that you didn't have to make yet another ERC-20 if your only play is money.
It's too late now, of course. But man, it would have been terrific to recommend a browser that blocked ads out of the box and wasn't part of the engine hegemony.
Last time I watched one of their speed comparison videos a few months back, it had several examples where their browser was actually never the first to render the useful page content, but was usually the first to stop spinning the spinner in the top of the UI (which, naturally, is what they choose to measure and report).
I think Brave's payment model concept is a very interesting idea for freeing the open web from the need for advertising, but I haven't been impressed with the way the project has been executed so far.
To be more specific, my issues with Brave are:
- Still uses the Chrome Web Store as main store
- Does not have an easy way to load packaged extensions from 3rd party sources
- Even after adding them as unpacked, you still get the same annoying popup every time you open the browser.
- I received notices that "My account was waiting for a deposit" the entire time, even though I never allocated any money to anyone
- Tipping amounts are fixed
I always saw Brave as "not chrome, and not as much of a change as Firefox", but their approach seem lazy, features halfassed at best and the sneaky anti-features that Chrome has been adding to push users to lock into Google stuff (see all my remarks about extensions) not addressed at all.
I'm using Firefox as main browser now, and I haven't been missing brave once.
A surprisingly big part of the Internet works as well or better and faster with javascript disabled, but sometimes it is actually needed and useful so I find this whitelisting method works well.
I tried playing around with the script blocking ability of native content blockers but never got it working properly, for one I think it can't block script tags only externa scripts.
But my recommendation, if you are giving Brave a try is to change the default to disallow scripts, and enable them as needed, it's refreshing to browse the Web without Popups 2.0 and all the other not so nice uses of JS.
(* only I've found with my limited searching)
It's pretty good, though I sometimes miss Safari with its amazing location bar autocompletion and ease of syncing with the iOS version. (Brave supports syncs, but it's not great, and the iOS app is nowhere as good as Safari on iOS.)
Brave does have some bugs. Since July or so, several sites (including my bank) don't work because Brave incorrectly [1] blocks their cookies, even with the "shield" turned off.
[1] https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/6099 and several others.
Things I don't like:
* Autocompletion is much worse than Safari. See screenshot comparison [1]. The results are dinky and hard to read, and rarely include history or bookmarks. For example, in the screenshot, if I type "p", it matches bookmarks and history, but the suggestions disappear if I type anything more, despite the fact that "photothera" is a substring.
* Brave's tabs (though the tab overview is nice). Mobile is just too small to show tabs.
* The fact that the location bar is filled with widgets that give only about 30% of the space to the URL.
* Syncing of bookmarks, history, etc. seems to randomly stop working. It's never really worked for me. Syncing should just work seamlessly with iCloud, and not require the manual step that it currently does.
* "Find in page" doesn't work for PDFs.
Plus, the privacy bugs (see my previous comment) that never get solved. Being aggressive about cookies is one thing; breaking non-abusive sites without any workaround isn't acceptable.
I don't really use private mode, so that's not relevant for me. I also don't use Brave Rewards, so the big icon in the address bar is annoying.
I tried the rewards/BAT thing for a while but after a few computer changes and losing my wallet through the process, I gave up and just block everything and contribute nothing. I'd like to get back into it but all of those transitions just killed it for me.
All that said, there's a lot of good stuff in here and I'm happy to be using it as my primary browser. Now that they're hitting 1.0 I may actually be able to recommend it to non-tech people.
If you would own a video streaming service (a startup!) and some company started to pay your users for viewing ads on your platform in some MagicMoneyCoins putting your pocket outside the cash flow, what would you do?
If you would want to receive organic traffic from your ads and instead start to experience crazy stream of incentivized ad clickers with near zero conversion rate, what would you do?
Imo the answers to these questions are not that pleasant for Brave. Maybe I'm wrong of course, like the most of times.
Seems like it might be better to just force the user to disburse those funds to the sites they visit.
>Use Google Chrome store so Google still gets every info it ever wanted and even more than before because your fingerprinting is more unique than with Chrome i.e. you give away your entire browsing history for free to Google
Whoever uses Brave shouldn't be surprised why advertisers and trackers now have an even easier time following you
If this is the case, it seems that Brave fosters the use of ads, not reduce it.
Is my understanding right?
But users are increasingly more aware that protecting themselves from harmful ads also means stripping their favorite creators of support. This is where Brave steps in to offer a complete solution, rather than the partial solution of "just block and forget".
Brave Ads are opt-in, entirely private (data never leaves your device), and pay the user 70% of the ad revenue. By default, that 70% will flow out to the sites/properties you visit on a monthly basis. If you like, you can choose to keep some (or all) of it for yourself.
So we don't necessarily want a Web full of ads. We want a Web full of empowered users who have control over their data and attention.
Are you serious? Ad-blocking by default is a core part of the marketing and self-description. I'm actually amazed they replace ads instead of just "uBlock"-ing them. Sounds like a joke.
Look at the copy on https://brave.com/ and https://brave.com/download/
Are you telling me the average person reads "blocks ads" and expects it to mean "we replace ads with our own"?
#1 Brave advertise with privacy and speed while all they do is adding adblock.
#2 Brave replaces adds with their own adds. This basically means you get the same experience but cut off the income of the content creator entirely.
#3 Brave allows you to reward 3rd party sites. This system is so nice they even got legal issues as it was assumed as fraud.
#4 BAT. Brave advertise with consumer first. The best choice for the consumer would be Paypal. If there is an incent to stay with crypto currency Bitcoin or Ethereum.
Given Brave created their own crypto currency and base every model around that they can profit from Transactions/services with the currency too on top of the share they take when you use their add platform/feature.
Given the criticism its very hard for me to understand users sympathizing with the browser.
I don't personally mind the Chrome Web Store default.
I've since switched to Firefox, which is much better on Android than when I last tried it.
I use firefox on desktop, but found firefox on android to be a bit clunky the last time I tried it (years ago)
I use it pretty much exclusively now, and though it doesn't block all ads and doesn't have addon support yet, it seems to prevent the intrusive ones from being a problem. I do keep Firefox for Android around with uBlock Origin just in case, but I rarely have to use it.
On the good side, I like that I don't have to ever watch pesky ads on YouTube.
Overall however, brave-browser is great and offers a welcome change from traditional browsers.
About their Ad program - money are very small yet, for both: site owners & users.
The weird thing about Brave is that they raised $35 million from their crypto ICO, but that isn't like normal fundraising because you can only do it once. So they really need their real business to kick in and start working before they run out of that money, more than most venture-backed startups need to start making money.
Getting paid money to watch ads reminds me of AllAdvantage in the first dotcom boom. It seems cool at first when the system is juiced by investor money, but once advertisers realize the ROI is low, the money dries up.
We use Brave internally for all our development work and are also a Brave Certified book publisher for the web [1][2]. Please tip us to support the books we publish if you are a Brave user too!
I can vouch for the quality of browsing experience and speed that we have had in the past two years. One of the best features of Brave, which led me to set the browser as our default, is on a shortcut `Command + Option + N`. This shortcut opens a private window using Tor which is super useful, handy, fast and most importantly private. :-)
Creators: https://vimeo.com/372813874
Speed: https://vimeo.com/372813765
Privacy: https://vimeo.com/372736442
This one isn’t an ad; it’s a video of a speed test of Brave vs. Chrome and Firefox loading sites that millions of users access every day and doing much faster:
Brave Browser Speed Comparison 2019: https://vimeo.com/371512354
Once they offer browser sync of saved passwords and history, I'm gone for good chrome/firefox on every other device I own.
The problem is that I think ads may be worth even more than that to creators, which if you have any doubt about their efficacy should make you rethink.
LOL WTF, no!
But does YouTube get anything? To support their business
What if a user doesn't earn 10 BAT a month browsing?
It seems like that system would break down over time.
The budget of BAT you set each month comes from your wallet, and is essentially your personal donation to the various websites you use, it's not related to ads. This wallet can run out in the same way any wallet can run out, and you'd have to refill it.
The BAT you can earn from seeing ads is separate and unrelated to that. Maybe it goes into the same wallet but that's not important.
You can do none of them, one of them, the other, or both, but they aren't really two related features. They both just happen to use BAT as their money mechanism.
If you saw ads, you chose to see ads. And if you're worried about websites losing their monitization, you can disable the ad blocking too.
Meh.
I actually drop people on Patreon when they start adding ads or sponsors into their podcasts or videos. I would rather people be fully supported by their fans instead of double dipping into both fan support and adverts.
Because ad blockers are just add-ons, they can be circumvented. Also, many ad blockers allow advertisers to pay them to allow their ads to get through: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:G3lu90...
But: you can also not enable ads and buy BATs yourself. This gives you a single system to distribute donations to content you enjoy.
Which is actually quite an interesting concept, since it is low effort/automatic for the user and yet allows small contributions.
Of course it also gives Brave a potentially huge position of power, which is my biggest problem.
If the BAT system was run by a independent non-profit and not browser specific it would be more appealing.
But since BAT is an ERC token, how can they control who gives money to whom, and indeed do they even know that?
Wasn't that the concept behind Flattr (minus the non-profit)
Option 1. block all ads, publishers receive no revenue.
Option 2. block all ads, user opts in to unrelated ads, user can choose to give some of the proceeds of seeing those ads to publishers they utilize.
How can (2) possibly be worse than (1)?
It instead uses MacOS notifications to show ads which open new browser tabs when you click on them. So it does block ads entirely and then shows it's own ads through a separate channel.
That said, my mind tends to automatically start strategizing the long game, and I'm uncertain how valuable people who have to be paid to look at ads are to advertisers? I mean, Certainly some advertisers would still be interested. But enough to displace the current model? I'm just not sure.
Ditto. The long game seems to be to become an alternative Google of sorts. In the sense that Brave becomes the ad delivery middle man to every web user like Google and FB currently is.
With regards to the current business model, I don't think it's broken at all. What is broken is the expectation that because users find most internet content so worthless that they wouldn't ever consider paying for it that some alternative revenue modal surely exists to keep the current system afloat. It's a flawed assumption. These new ad modals are just lipstick on a pig. The underlining product is already not valued enough to charge for (like crappy news articles and hastily written blog posts). No new monetisation modal will fix it.
Business model for whom? For Brave? Or for the website owner?
If the website owner isn't involved in this choice, then this is racketeering. And racketeering is an old business model.
News organisations do not offer anything of consistent high quality that people are willing to pay for though. I have no faith that quality will improve if only we all switched off our adblockers and clicked some ads. People's propensity to read clickbait will not decline as a result of higher revenue from advertising. Most people aren't willing to pay for news because most news is worthless.
> what will news articles become? ads
This has already been the case for a while. I hope ad-blockers push them so far from legitimacy that they actually die off somewhat. When they had ad revenue bottom of the barrel "news" could survive regardless of the market not wanting to give them any money directly.
I'd probably use a browser that blocked all trackers and ad networks that do tracking/user profiling but did allow other kinds of ads. If enough people did that, the ad tech companies would have to evolve and target the producer and content rather than the consumer. That would be a big step forward IMO.
there will be fewer of them which is a good thing because the signal to noise ratio of journalism is about one to two magnitudes too high, they will be smaller and funded by communities who have authentic interest in keeping them alive rather than be incentivised to maximise engagement, and I'd wager they'd be more responsive to the needs of their readers and members.
Google is the steward of Chromium and Manifest v3 is just the beginning. When a single corporation has Total Control over what goes in to their codebase, we're going to see more and more abuses making it increasingly difficult to maintain healthy forks. Given the tipping point of users, certain websites now simply refuse to work with any browser but Chrome.
It’s just a renderer that calls home with hardcoded references to Google’s services. You can’t avoid Google if you use Chromium’s source code without patching it [1].
Edit: Why do so many new accounts (green text) post to any thread about Brave?
well, except for the fact that it's still a chromium browser and google really sets the general agenda for all chromium browsers.
On desktop I browse differently, and use extensions, so Firefox with uBlock Origin works perfectly for me on desktop
ungoogled-chromium A lightweight approach to removing Google web service dependency
ungoogled-chromium is Google Chromium, sans dependency on Google web services. It also features some tweaks to enhance privacy, control, and transparency (almost all of which require manual activation or enabling).
ungoogled-chromium retains the default Chromium experience as closely as possible. Unlike other Chromium forks that have their own visions of a web browser, ungoogled-chromium is essentially a drop-in replacement for Chromium.
There's a pretty ridiculous amount of astroturfing going on in these comments.
As a long-time Chrome user, I have a set of useful extensions that have become a part of my daily browsing experience. I found converting to Brave an easy transition since everything I’m used to in Chrome is still available, right down to the developer tools.
As far as I can tell, Brave is basically Chrome with built-in Adblock and anti-tracking, plus an innovative mechanism for user-controlled advertising and content-author micropayments. I’m very impressed.
(not advocating for Brave, I'm a happy Firefox user. Just saying...)
Also don't know what you're talking about with items 3-4, I have 3rd party extensions loaded, it was pretty easy, and I don't get any error messages on startup.
Also I love the fact that all the Chrome extensions work in Brave.
It seems more like "Chrome, with some plugins" than anything else. It's a shame really, I like the concept of the BAT project, I'd be interested in using it as a plugin for Firefox, but I'm not interested enough to switch browsers and lose all the features and plugins I'm used to in Firefox.
You can start here: https://github.com/brave
#2 Brave Ads are opt-in. You can alternatively fund the sites you visit on the web by putting BAT into your wallet directly and having the browser automatically distribute funds based on which content you spend time on per month. The entire idea of Brave is that people were already using ad-blockers, so I'm not sure how this is worse for content creators.
#3 ???
#4 BAT is an ERC-20 token - it exists on the Ethereum blockchain. Not sure why you think BTC would be better than that. Honestly not sure why you think Paypal would be better than that. At this point, anyone can transact the currency easily and quickly without any intervention from Brave. I can convert BAT to DAI right now on a decentralized exchange in less than a minute and have a virtual currency pegged to USD even if I don't bank with USD. At the moment this process is somewhat technical, but it overall seems very pro-consumer to me.
The entire service is opt in making it also not guaranteed for the content creator to receive the reward.
This should lead even in the best case to a notably worse outcome.
ad 3: https://outline.com/fJm5C3
ad 4: i explained the issue in my other response.
Regarding criticism 2, you have to opt-in. Otherwise brave is just a browser with adblocking capabilities built-in.
I don't understand criticism 3, but then again I have just been using Brave without opting-in to the BAT portion so I'm out of the loop on that.
Regarding 4, why would Paypal be the best choice? Paypal has shown they will close your account and confiscate your money pretty much at their whim. Using a non-BTC/Ether crypto token at least means your Brave wallet isn't a big fat target for crypto thieves.
I think the success of patreon et al have shown that people in fact are perfectly willing to pay content creators, they just hate ads.
This was partly an big issues as even tech savvy streamers on YouTube had issues getting the currency. This makes the end user less likely to use this feature at all.
Twitch’s bits are a great example of this system.
I'm not really sure how I feel about the idea that everyone should be accumulating money on all these things. It kind of devalues things to have people trying to make a lot from micropayments mixed with a more hobby web. I think I've eventually turned away from everything that had some get rich quick schemers show up.
So yeah, all they have to do is to peg their currency to the dollar and it makes the whole discussion trivial. You get your content, content creators get paid, Brave get paid.
1. Github.com wants X% of BAT for hosting the FOSS project.
2. A set of core contributors want X%s of BAT, with the owner getting Y%.
3. #1 and #2 combined.
Note that, with the current ad system, there is some fraud detection in place for fake clicks. But if users receive tokens when the browser "shows" an ad, which kind of abuse detection could there be if the browser or OS or whatever just filters out the ad?
Although Mozilla has had it's own questionable stuff going on, I still believe in the Mozilla organization. We need browser engine diversity, and with Microsoft Titan/Edge engine going away, the only alternative to Blink/Webkit variants is Gecko (I wish Microsoft would just open source their Edge engine).
I honestly don't want all that shit in the core of the browser. They should be extensions, so you can take the things you want. It's why Jenkins seems like crap when you first use it compared to other build tools, until you leverage the ecosystem of Jenkins plugins.
Your second sentence is true for adblock plus, but not ublock origin
For example in the press high quality investigative journalism is dying because people would rather get stuff for free and it's much cheaper to pick up stories from somewhere else and give it a sensationalist title.
It's why online newspapers are struggling because people would rather read shitty blogs written by quacks promoting alt-truths, for free, than pay $2 per month.
Note, however, that accounts posting opposing views on a topic doesn't count as evidence of astroturfing—only evidence that people have opposing views on the topic, which is the most routine of internet forum facts.
Lots more explanation: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....
And unless you believe in ghosts putting the calls home back when you aren't looking, that isn't a problem for Brave [1].
[1]: https://brave.com/brave-tops-browser-first-run-network-traff...
1. Send your BAT to Coinbase or similar (a couple clicks)
2. Sell BAT to Coinbase in major currencies
If you prefer an approach that requires no centralized middleman, you can:
1. Convert BAT to ETH on a Decentralized Exchange (DEX)[0]
2. Sell ETH on something like LocalEthereum[1] to get your local currency.
You could also:
1. Convert your BAT to DAI (stablecoin pegged to USD) on a DEX
2. Put up the DAI for loans on a decentralized lending platform like Compound[2], where you can currently earn 5.22% interest on your DAI loan.
Yes, admittedly this is a more intensive than existing solutions, and things require multiple steps and some setup to get working. But it's really not that difficult once you get started, and the friction is getting less and less every day. If and when the Ethereum team can actually release Eth2.0 with scaling and other such stuff, you will be paying actually negligible fees on such transactions.
[0] https://dex.ag/ [1] https://localethereum.com/ [2] https://app.compound.finance/
What I miss most using Firefox is the ability to customize almost everything.
And who tells me brave is not tracking me? If anything they have even better data than eg Google.
The parent never claimed that. And since the ads aren't tied to specific sites I'm not even sure how that would make sense.
>And who tells me brave is not tracking me? If anything they have even better data than eg Google.
Feel free to examine their privacy policy and their source code. If you find they are doing something contrary to what they claim please be kind enough to share your findings. Just as you would for Firefox, Linux, or any other open-source software.
Until then, it's fine to be sceptical but can you please dial back the inflammatory "propaganda war" rhetoric. It's unnecessary.
>A Zero-knowledge proof or Zero-knowledge protocol (ZKP) is a cryptographic method wherein the identity of the proof bearer is separated from the authenticity or truth of the proof – the cryptographic proof requires no extra trust or knowledge to be verified by its recipient. The system used by Brave is based on Anonize.
I’m not against ads that aren’t intrusive and don’t mine my data and try to target me.
I’m not against targeted ads because I think the ads are bad. I’m against the data necessary to target ads because it can be misused (law enforcement, politics, mental health, etc).
That's irrelevant. In general the content creator gets to choose how their content gets monetized. They own the copyright after all.
That ads blocking isn't considered yet a copyright violation in the court of law probably has to do with the upsides, like protecting against malware and privacy.
But blocking ads for commercial reasons, like Brave is doing, only to replace those ads with their own, that's just racketeering and I hope to see them lose in a court of law.
---
> I do not want to see so much garbage just for visiting a website
Then stop vising that website and go to alternative websites that treat you better. Voting with your wallet works.
Also a lot of websites these days offer subscriptions. I bet for example that 99.9% of HN visitors don't pay for subscriptions to their favorite publications.
Which would just go to show how self entitled we feel to getting other people's work for free.
---
Note that I am using browser extensions, like uBlock Origin or Privacy Badger, but I'm only doing so for privacy reasons.
And I'll never trust Brave with my privacy, sorry.
> Note that I am using browser extensions, like uBlock Origin or Privacy Badger, but I'm only doing so for privacy reasons.
is, I think, very relevant to the entire discussion. With the way browsers work, and the way the web works, blocking ads is well "within" the allowed scope of the internet. I, you, we never explicitly consented to browser tracking. It was created when there were no rules. After it had been happening for a very long time, it was added to large TOS & Privacy agreements, and by then, was so ubiquitous that we had no where else to go.
Publishers have power over you to put ads in their pages and track you across the internet. I have a problem with both the quality of those ads and the method in which they are delivered. I still have some power over whether or not I see ads, so I chose to exercise it.
Just because a content owner copyrights the content does not mean they can control the user’s environment once the content has been provided to the user - unless of course you own that too (cough Kindle cough). Thank God we still have options for web browsers.
But it doesn't, not in this case. Very few people want to manage a separate payment stream, and a separate login, for each content provider on the off chance that they might stumble across that provider's content. And those that do don't want to pay a flat rate for access to content that they might never stumble across in a given payment period.
My uncle used to give me a lot of grief for getting my music via bittorrent--but it was never about avoiding having to pay for content, it was about objecting to a monetization model (DRM) that was less convenient than its free alternatives. I started paying for music just as soon as Spotify made it easier to pay than it was to pirate.
Ads are the same way. I don't mind paying for my content, but blocking ads and circumventing paywalls is currently less work than the hassle of managing a fleet of flat rate subscriptions. Brave offers an alternative where you only have to move dollars once (buying BAT and funding your browser's wallet), and the money is thereafter distributed according to which content you spend more time viewing.
It solves a problem that no other "voting with your wallet" way currently does.
I'll confess that I'm not currently using brave that way, but it's only because they don't currently support a unified wallet across browsers. Once I have to manage just a single BAT balance, though, I intend to keep the shields up and the contributions flowing, and set up recurring transfers into the BAT wallet from my bank account.
As far as privacy, that's your prerogative. But I trust Brave more than I trust Chrome.
In return you get shown ads - and they get nothing unless they give in and sign up for another service that may or may not actually pay them something.
1. You are Comparing DuckDuckGo and Google suggestions (search engine), not Safari and Brave (browser). Change your Brave search engine to DDG, and results will be the same.
2. You can turn off the tab bar thing in settings. Safari offers this, just defaults to off.
3. We do have a lot of icons, you can hide the BAT icon if you don't use rewards (see settings).
4/5. Yes, those are bad bugs, we are currently rebuilding our syncing system.
I will raise this ticket and see if we can get some movement on it.
Not sure what you mean by DuckDuckGo. I don't use DDG in Safari, and changing to use DDG in Brave doesn't fix the issue.
I'm not sure if you looked carefully at my screenshots. When I type something in Safari, I get suggestions from searches, web sites, bookmarks, history, etc., all presented in neat rows. If I've visited a page with the title "Hacker News", then I can start typing "h", "ha", "hac", etc., and Safari will most likely suggest it.
With Brave, you provide those really dinky search suggestions, which are comparable to Safari's larger completions. I'm not happy about the presentation (small for thumbs, jumbled instead of neat rows), but at least they're there.
But the other suggestions generally don't come up. There seems to be some bug. I just tried it out. If I type "h", "ha", etc., I don't get anything at all. Not even "hacker news". On the other hand, if I type "kurt", I get the Kurt Vonnegut Museum page I just opened from HN. So who knows what's wrong there. It seems really flaky.
Edit: Ha, I went back and tried typing "h" again and now Hacker News does show up (which it didn't, previously; must be some async indexing going on here?). But not on "ha", "hac", etc. Just "h".
Here are some screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/qFJoo6g
However, they do nag you a bit about it. There's an icon for Brave Rewards in the address bar with a "1" badge asking if you'd like to opt-in (Toggle in Settings to hide this icon). It also asks you during setup and then if you skip (no Deny, Disagree, etc.; just skip), it shows a pop-up on the new tab page immediately after asking for the same thing.
It's the first time I read more about Brave, and despite the fact I like that they try with a new model, I think I'll keep using Firefox and the usual add-ons, as I have been doing for years.
The good news is that we are partnered with DuckDuckGo already on private tabs, and as a promoted alternative engine -- and now we are switching default search in key European countries to DDG. We feel DDG's quality has risen enough, and certain countries are privacy-focused enough, that we won't lose too many users via default search override setting back to Google.
Thanks for Firefox! It along with Google at the time (2003) inspired me to try my hand at being a maker.
I already have an uncomfortable detente with notifications on my devices. Upsetting that delicate balance is so obviously a bad idea that I don’t need to try it to tell you “no, not even a little”
Which government, the US one? Who is the customer here, the person being paid?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_your_customer#Laws_by_cou...
The publishers have voluntarily opted-in to ad exchanges because those exchanges provide value by aggregating demand in a way that would be difficult for all but the largest publishers to do themselves (and the largest publishers do, which is why FB/Google/Snap/Twitter/etc all sell their own ads).
It's not as if anyone is forcing publishers to not deal directly with buyers. The exchanges certainly don't have the market power to do so.
That's naive. Traditional media were always coopted to serve interests
Traditional media were often bankrupt , but kept alive for political influence. Subscripptions don't solve the problem, they only work for major publications , and they give them an incentive to coddle their hardcore audience , creating a bubble. If anything ad-supported media can afford to be more unbiased (but still 'safe' enough for their advertisers).
It's fine to ask a good-faith question or make a good-faith critique. It's not fine to cross-examine.
My question in this instance, although a bit antagonistic, was actually totally sincere: the fundraising fraud issue was a big legitimate criticism of Brave a while ago, and I was curious if it was still valid, having not heard anything more on the matter.
>I would personally much rather allocate actual dollars instead of CryptoBuckOfTheDay backed by ads I have no desire to ever watch. Say, $20/month that gets allocated to sites I visit. The whole "reward people for watching ads" model just seems... wrong.
Why would the price of BAT raise when uses opt out of ads?
1.) Less inventory. Advertisers bid for spots on the platform, which means that if there're fewer users accepting advertisers, the remaining spots will require more BAT, which requires purchasing more BAT on the open market. Higher demand + constant supply = higher price.
2.) Fewer user rewards. Users receive BAT when browsing, which they can either tip to creators or sell on an exchange (I'm not sure the latter option is available right now). Unless the users or creators are themselves advertisers, there's no use for BAT though, other than selling it to an advertiser. So when fewer users are receiving BAT, there's less available for purchase on exchanges. Constant demand + reduced supply = higher price.
Doesn't this assume that advertisers would be willing to pay more for fewer eyeballs? That seems like a pretty big assumption.
For example the current controversial change: Google says "slow web is bad" and deprecates an API that allowed extensions to do almost unlimited work for any web page. Oops. Adblockers depended on that and did want to do almost unlimited work for any web page, and that wasn't a bug, but the API gets dropped, AIUI because Google wants performance. The reason doesn't matter though. Google gets to set the agenda, no matter what its reasons are.
[0]https://twitter.com/flamsmark/status/1088170219695071232?s=0...
Your desire for us or anyone to die on the Gecko hill would, had we acted on it, simply have helped Google cement the Chrome (not chromium) hegemony. The crucial battle right now is a layer up, at ads/donations/subscriptions/privacy -- where Firefox has been slow and weak vs. Brave and Safari.
There will be time for better engines later, once Google loses share due to innovations that attack its deep conflicts of interest with its users, along with likely prosecution of the open antitrust case.
> More significantly, in my book: it’s difficult to use Gecko and Firefox in these ways. Even the simplest app requires substantial and arcane boilerplate. And the docs are comprehensive but outdated. The platform may be powerful, but it’s hard to use.
There's also now qbrt[1], but the readme itself recommends not using it, and it was last updated 7 months ago. If this matures to a usable state, I can see Brave developers considering it.
AFAIK the only choice nowadays is between Chromium and WebKit. I honestly would like to see more WebKit based browsers instead.
In any case, Brave's effective CPM that they pay out to publishers it complete shit even compared to bottom-of-the-barrel ad exchanges. It's objectively a bad deal for publishers.
Not if the economics don't work out. I earnestly thing the Internet would be vastly different if microtransactions were feasible 20 years ago. I was hoping Paypal would enable this because credit card companies seemed to have no interest since their per-transaction fees are so profitable.
> Brave's effective CPM
You will find that everyone except google has terrible CPMs. I like the fact that they are exploring new delivery technologies though
Huh? This is trivially easy with DFP or if you're smaller AdGlare/AdZerk/etc
> You will find that everyone except google has terrible CPMs.
This is objectively false. OpenX, Amazon, Rubicon, AppNexus, Pubmatic, etc all pay better than Google for large pockets of inventory. Google has the largest distribution, but their CPMs are awful for a very large percentage of that inventory, even in typically high-CPM markets.
Why? Because owner of that site had resources to do SEO (if one has money, one can trick Google algorithms without much trouble). How they earned that money? Through ads, obviously.
The more ads such site has, the more revenue comes in and more money can be spend on SEO to increase revenue. And so one.
Who pays for that? Those who landed on such site, they wasted time, read some potentially infomercial content.
This ads -> money -> SEO -> more ads -> money is not particularly beneficial for the economy. This looks like one more incarnation of Gresham-Copernicus law - bad content is pushing away good content. If you spend money on content, you don't spend them on SEO, so you earn less money from ads and finally you end up on 5th Google results page and that's the end.
A whole lot of news articles are just regurgitated Reuters or AP. There's nothing wrong with that and it is a valuable service. But I am completely indifferent to these sites existence.
The sites that I would really care about if they went under, like HN, Wikipedia, NYT, etc, either use subscriptions or are donation funded. HN has job ads but they are super low key.
Public ledger nicely allows anyone to see what's going on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plurality sounds fancy but you are using it wrong, on top of what it would mean if we were talking about votes being false counting tokens as votes.
It shows exactly what I said was going on.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plurality sounds fancy but you are using it wrong
The meaning of plurality of tokens as an analogue to a plurality of votes is clear, but if not, pretend that I've spelled it out for you. Do you have any objections to the substance of my argument, or did you just come to provide evidence in support?
Any fool can google `site:news.ycombinator.com brendaneich lern_to_spel` and see your posts over the years, showing ill will used to justify bogus claims. Somehow you always fade away under rational discourse. It's boring but I'm happy to have another run-around again.
Why is nobody considering the exchange rate volatility here? Endless comments about saving a few pennies, while massive depreciation from holding large quantities in volatile crypto blow away any benefit of not using dollars.
If you want to try to tell me risk and volatility don't enter into decisions on which assets the market values, then you expose yourself as being as naive as I presume many buying into this idea are.
I understand that crypto can be converted "easily". But how does that square with storing BAT in your wallet for long periods of time to frictionlessly use it to pay content-creators? Is "eaily converting" (presumably quickly with very small "hodl" periods) consistent with how the token is supposed to be used: stored on a wallet, collected by content creators periodically?
I would guess that the vast majority of people would prefer to see their BAT go up when they viewed ads, and down when they paid content creators, and have no more interaction than that. To the viewer, it would be monopoly money, but they'd be happy because advertisers would essentially be paying creators.
The idea that I'd have to actually put my credit card number in somewhere, and think of it as my donations, and advertisers paying me... that's a whole different mindset and has a lot more friction.
It sounds like you're saying that people can purchase BAT for their wallets? I was thinking along the lines of the only method of acquisition being basically "view the brave ads".
Can users purchase BAT outright for their wallets?
The ads are a completely separate feature, you enable voluntary ads to be shown to you, and in exchange you get paid a portion of what the advertisers paid to display those ads. This is in contrast to the most common model we have online today, where you view ads in exchange for using free services like gmail or youtube.
It's likely that these two features both use the same BAT wallet tied to your brave browser, but that's the only thing they have in common.
If I had stocked up my wallet with $ over the summer, those $'s I exchanged could be up to about 35% less now. We're discussing saving pennies on transaction costs while we lost massive amounts on exchange rate slippage and volatility. This is ridiculously silly, why would creators or users go for this? If you want to say creators will immediately exchange for $, then we must consider trading fees & effort/friction to doing so.
But for users, storing any significant value in a wallet for a more than a day or so is a non starter.
https://blog.coinbase.com/buy-and-sell-bat-on-coinbase-454a7...
Markets and negative feedback mechanisms are extremely powerful things. Most of the things wrong with the modern corporate economy can be traced back to markets being replaced by hierarchical organizations with positive feedback mechanisms (eg. corporations having more money with which to buy up competitors, which leads to increased pricing power, which leads to more money to buy up more competitors; or increased lobbying spending leading to favorable regulations, which keeps competitors out, which raises prices, which leads to more money for lobbyists).
a) ongoing cost of merging
b) security updates delayed because of merging.
It's possible the limit is high enough that it wont be a problem in practice though.
This is flat out incorrect. Brave as a company can easily consolidate payments such that fees are minimal.
How do you tip $.0035 for a tweet?
You only need one transfer for each user and one transfer for each content producer. You don't need and/or want the O(n^2) cross product transfers.
Saying I earned 0.00045 BAT is fun, but doesn’t actually help me with anything until I convert it to dollars anyway.
They don't currently integrate with a payment provider, and if they did they'd have to deal with that provider shutting off payments due to pressure from governments looking to censor content. They'd also have to generate income tax documents in a wide variety of jurisdictions.
Doing the kind of business worldwide where you pay people in fiat (rather than just get paid) is a tremendous undertaking. Even Google hasn't managed to pull it off worldwide just yet:
https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...
How about if you're a content creator who got paid in these ever-volatile digital currency units...instead of dollars? If those same creators instantly traded out for $, what was their trading fees? Is all of this something to consider when singing the praises of saving a few pennies on transaction costs?
> saving a few pennies on transaction costs
The transactions we're talking about (one per ad viewed) are probably in the fractions of a cent. The "few pennies" you refer to is going to be the vast majority of the overall cost of each one (supposing you use traditional payment rails). So yes, an exchange fee on the way in, and another one on the way out, would be far better.
As far as how the content creators feel about bearing the brunt of the volatility... I hate to sound callous, but as a consumer it's not my problem to consider such things. Either the industry finds a way to provide a product that's worth it to me, or it doesn't. I don't buy any other product based on how difficult it was to manufacture, I buy it based on how much it's worth to me. Why should content be any different?
The hassle of keeping track of whether I'm logged into my Washington Post account, my New York times account, etc... and on which device... will never be worth more to me than the content that those sites provide, so the only pay-for-content model I'll patronize is one that distributes my money based on how my attention is allocated without requiring me to guess today where my attention will be tomorrow--and Brave is shaping up to be exactly that.
This is just pushing the problem one step removed.
Is it not only relevant what you trade for your groceries?
If you can find someone to take BAT for that, in stable exchange rates, then your point stands.
If you have to acquire $ then what the exchange rate is for $ to BAT comes back into relevance.
Again, perpetually trading BAT back and forth for showing ads/watching ads is restating my premise about holding BAT.
Whether people will be willing to do so greatly depends on exchange rates and volatility.
I would much prefer to just give brave my CC details, regardless of what internal currency they’re using for rewarding content.
Meanwhile people are living off Patreon and other services like it.
The same would be true for actual dollars... you would have to wait for it to get high enough to justify the transaction fees but also the service time. Most service won't let you take it out until your cash reach an high limit. With a concurrency, at worse you can keep using it in other alternative ways (at a bare minimum, on your web browsing in this case).
Just look at BAT price volatility and decline over last year.
Give me real money every day, I'm happy to pay a small fee in order to not have to deal with the hive of scum and villainy that is the cryptocurrency market.
Option 0. block no ads, publishers receive all of the applicable revenue from their preferred network
It isn't clear to me from the website what happens if the publisher is unaware or unable or unwilling to claim revenue generated through this fringe browser's alternative revenue mechanism. Who ends up with that money? Is advertising even shown? Is the user aware of whether or not the publisher is in a position to claim revenues of the ads they're seeing?
Depending on the answers to those questions, the addition of (2) could be worse for these publishers if it makes some users who otherwise would've (begrudgingly or otherwise) chosen option (0) feel morally justified in switching over to (2), converting their real (0)-derived revenues into unrealised (2)-derived theoretical revenues.
Unfortunately, that is likely not an optimally ethical reference state for the browser. Navigating with no ad blocker leaves the user open to all kinds of nasty tracking, auto-loading, and general trickery. When taken together that shady behavior can be seen by a reasonable person to outweigh the benefits of maximizing revenue for the user's favorite sites.
Case in point: if I want to open a pdf music score from IMSLP, IMSLP displays an ad with the prominent text "Download PDF" in it. If I follow the ad it eventually prompts me to install a Chrome extension. Do you think it's wise to install that extension?
In general I trust that IMSLP is an ethical site-- after all, they've spent a lot of effort to ensure that nobody downloads a score that is still under copyright in the country where the user is located. Did they forget to check a box to disallow misleading ads for their site? If there's no such checkbox "preferred network" is quite a euphemism and the correct/ethical reference state for browsers is with ublock origin installed.
Edit: just to be clear-- 2 could still be worse than 1 depending on how Brave browser behaves. But for most practical uses of the web by non-technical users, your 0 is almost always a worse ethical choice than 1.
Consider that I could pirate a movie, or I could pirate it and pay the creators directly, leaving out the distributors the creators contracted with. I fully agree that the second is slightly more ethical than the first, even though the creator agreed to neither. The problem occurs when some Tube site distributes the videos without the creators' consent, collects money from the viewers, takes a cut, and passes the rest to the creator. The Tube site is ethically wrong.
I think that's why they went with a cryptocurrency for payment. Brave isn't a middleman, or at least there's no technical reason why they have to be. Users pay publishers directly, using tokens that they earn from Brave in exchange for viewing ads.
wikipedia.org, slashdot.org, and other sites that show a purple checkmark in the URL bar have gone through that verification process
If I deposit my dollars in the bank, are they no longer mine? The last time we had this discussion, I erroneously claimed you controlled a majority of the tokens, and you corrected me that it was only a plurality. Has anything actually changed since then, or are you still just quibbling over insubstantial details?
> Any fool can google `site:news.ycombinator.com brendaneich lern_to_spel` and see your posts over the years
And any person with half a brain can remove the "brendaneich" from the query and see that I often call out companies and people with dubious ethics. You happen to have shown poor ethical judgment on more than one occasion, as any fool who Googles "Brendan Eich" can see, but those past lapses are different from this one, so let's try to stay on topic.
So the rest of us HN users are fools?
Anyway... why I am writing this comment: I was just going through some of my old comments and noticed you replied to one of them 5 days after I posted. That was two months ago, so it won't let me reply now, so here I am.
Comments in question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20830172
I claimed that Brave removes a website's ads and replaces it with Brave's ads. You called me "misinformed". Is the Flying Spaghetti Monster placing those ads there, is it malware placing those ads there (well, technically yes, but I digress)? I'm not impressed with your attitude/ethics. If I needed another reason not to use Brave, there it is.
Edit only six minutes after posting: Interesing.
Users who are interested in building a business in the BAT ecosystem requires a different use case.
Now, if the BAT ecosystem takes off and it becomes possible to build a business using BAT, there will be all kinds of services to help content creators deal with the gobs of BAT they may collect.
Uphold, who is Brave’s partner that provides wallet services already has a bunch of useful services if someone has a non-trivial amount of BAT: https://uphold.com/
There is so much wrong with advertising in an academic sense.
- They distort the product market as they favour those players with the highest marketing budget, rather than with the best product.
- They distort the media market as getting people to look in your direction is the only thing that has value. Clickbait and fake-news are a direct result of advertising, and wouldn't exist without it.
- They are an attempt at manipulation. People have to constantly expend the energy to counteract that manipulation. I also believe this to be a big factor in the decrease in trust in media. Since the stuff that is meant to inform you is always surrounded by stuff trying to manipulate you, how could you ever build trust to it?
> They distort the product market as they favour those players with the highest marketing budget, rather than with the best product.
I don't see any alternative to letting people make claims and making laws to stop them blatantly lying. What is the "best" product in any category? How does the best product surface in front of me without advertising in any context?
> Clickbait and fake-news are a direct result of advertising
Advertising is a part of it, sure, but it's not the whole picture.
> They are an attempt at manipulation. People have to constantly expend the energy to counteract that manipulation
100% agree, which is why I promote adblockers. But I don't think this is a problem with the principle of advertising, it's an execution problem. Like many others mention if a website had a small sidebar with static graphic ads that weren't invasive I wouldn't block them as they wouldn't be requiring me to expend energy to counteract them and I would still think it would be ethical to block them if someone wished to. It's never unethical to choose what code runs on my machine after being sent to me, if you don't want me to have free content then don't send me content for free.
I think we're mostly on the same page, I just don't have a problem with ads at the bottom end of the manipulation and annoyance scale.
Are you aware of the concept of independent product reviews that you can build trust to and seek out on your own if you are interested in them?
>Advertising is a part of it, sure, but it's not the whole picture.
There is no direct financial incentive for them without advertising.
A political actor might sponsor fake news, so it wouldn't disappear, but most of it gets made because it's a cheap way to generate highly engaging content that gets shared a lot.
You 're only talking about news sites. While they are the loudest to complain, most of the web traffic is not news sites, but sites with immense amounts of valuable information, most of which is not compensated well. The only one who gets compensated well is Google, and we should change that.
Businesses are constantly willing to give money for advertising, and they will do that even if 100% of users use adblocking. That is a 0.5 trillion industry which is a great fit for attention-grabbing media, from printed press to the internet. It's not going away. It's just broken, largely because of centralized tracking, and we have to fix that.
There is a lot of sites out there with very valuable information, I'm not convinced that they inherently need compensating though? but I might be mis-interpreting what you mean. More specifically I don't think encouraging these valuable sites to survive on new ad driven or donation modals is pragmatic, especially one backed by a crypto like BAT.
If I create high value content and put it online for free I don't think it's fair I then complain that it doesn't generate enough revenue through ads. I would rather the content not be given to me for free in the first place.
I am. I find some excellent Youtube channels, and i m sure google is not compensating them enough. I find interesting comments here or on reddit which are never compensated. For small audiences, there is just no way to be compensated. IF people take the time to provide value to me, simple logic says there should be a way to compensate them (but there isn't). It seems like we have the technology to transform the way we live and we don't use it.
> create high value content and put it online for free
Most people do that with the expectation that once they hit a popularity threshold, they 'll be able to monetize it. At least that's what Google promises them (thats how blogs and youtube took off), and after they bait they switch and start starving creators of income. We can do better than that, imho
You need some sort of cryptocurrency for this as
microtransactions don't really work in the legacy
system.
Also by using their own token they can boot strap
the ecosystem cheaply as they can mint the tokens
themselves with the value accruing later after
network participants are onboarded and transacting.
Projects like Augur and MakerDAO must have their own token or they wouldn't work at all. Augur and MakerDAO have healthy token economics.
I'm not an expert on BAT token economics, but I believe Brave would have been much better off using ETH itself or a stablecoin. afaik Brave's microtransactions don't require BAT to work and that makes BAT a bad token.
Why?
My personal favorite example is:
https://www.stellar.org/papers/stellar-consensus-protocol.pd...
Transactions take a few seconds, 10000 transactions per $.01 as well as no mining for coins so it is not a bad coin for climate change compared to say Bitcoin and the mining farms.
Just my $0.02
What you describe above has to be weighed against loss of value for holding until accumulating enough to trade for $ no, as well as general fees associated with trading for $ generally?
Else what really is the point, if maintaining the value transferred isn't possible?
For example, see https://comingsoon.idex.io/ which is state of the art.
The Lightning Network allows microtransactions on the bitcoin blockchain quickly and cheaply; since it went into production last year, over 10,000 nodes have joined and there's over $7 million in network liquidity: https://1ml.com
but you repeat yourself?
BAT can also be used for paywalls, VPN payments, pay-per-view streaming and other smallish transactions. As the BAT ecosystem grows, there will be more incentive to transact in BAT, so there’s not so much of a need to convert to fiat.
BTW, BAT is up nearly 8% as I write this, presumably on the news of the Brave 1.0 release. There’s a decent chance that BAT is worth significantly more 2 or 3 years now; we’re still in the early days.
Finally, because BAT uses the Ethereum ERC-20 token standard, it automatically interoperates with the Ethereum ecosystem, including being able to be converted to other ERC-20 tokens, including stablecoins like PAX and GUSD, which are designed to always be valued at $1 per share, kinda like a money market fund.
Most exchange won't let you cash out over small amounts, but you can still exchange it. You aren't subject to fluctuation if it's already exchanged.
It's so weird the amount of misinformation here... I know that people here may hate cryptocurrencies, but it's the same thing as having it stored somewhere in a DB. The only difference is that you can actually do something with it.
If you're making that purchase, you might as well time it with a down-swing in the price (or away from an up-swing). Some users will spend more cycles on timing their buys than others, and those users will have a stabilizing effect on the price.
Also, the price of BAT in USD over the last 60 days has stayed between 0.12 and 0.24... it's not exactly as crazy as you're making it out to be.
You said OP used the word wrong but he didn't. He was wrong about his statement but not about his word use. If you're going to correct people you should probably be correct yourself.
The way stellar works is pretty smart, if I have some currency on the stellar network and you only accept some other currency, it automatically looks for people willing to exchange them to find you a good rate. So even if few people use your favorite stablecoin you can still accept payments in it.
[1]: https://cointelegraph.com/news/ibm-backs-new-us-dollar-pegge...
Ad-blocking in Brave (as it already exists in every other browser via plugins) is optional.
Brave ads (a paradigm which doesn't exist in any other browser) are optional.
You can disable both, enable both, or disable one and not the other. The choice is absolutely on the user and Brave isn't holding anything hostage.
You're still confusing who is at fault here.
>If you don't want to provide free content then stop publishing on the web, a free medium.
How would that not also apply to television?
Are you saying that site owners should feel violated by folks installing ad-blockers (or using host files)?
Brave, however, positions itself as being good for creators with its rewards program. A user may be forgiven for thinking that this is actually better for creators: "Earn rewards and give back to your favorite Creators. Support your favorite sites with micropayments."
If Brave takes away revenue from the creators, and offers them a fraction of that revenue back, that's one thing. BUT you can't turn around and say that a creator accepting that fraction is "consent" to the whole program.
That's what I was saying.
Normally, to accept digital donations, I'd need to have something like a Paypal account, and follow their terms of service (or that of another company like Patreon). If I do anything that company doesn't like, like produce and sell fireworks or draw porn, they will forbid me from using their service and users will be unable to donate to me. Or if I'm in Venezuela and the US embargo the country, the company might block donations to me because they have to by US law.
Cryptocurrencies try to solve this problem by being "neutral" in a way, nobody central truly owns it, and nobody can based on preference, policy or political reasons forbid users from using the system.
The second case arguably devolves, game-theory wise to the market never valuing subsequent new currencies with much significance compared to Bitcoin. It's the same argument I made above, just replace Bitcoin for $. Why hold BAT if some new crypto might come along and be better. Opening oneself up to appeals to new, "better" currencies based on features means there's never any trust, incentive to, or faith in holding current ones. Those that take this to logical conclusion will only/mostly value Bitcoin.
There will always be some floor on many of these currencies based on censorship resistance, but again that's niche relative to addressable market... and those who in their own minds won't get kicked off payment processors won't have use for a less censorable one. Of course, BAT is less decentralized than Bitcoin so not sure it's immune to political influence (we know who runs Brave).
Donations generally can be achieved with Bitcoin of course. Micro-payment currencies being stable relative to alternatives is the point of contention here. I don't see stability coming anytime soon, therefore I don't see large adoption either. I'll happy to be surprised though.
How did these original purchasers find out about these products in order to buy and review them? How do I know they aren't receiving products for free or more subtly being specific in what products they will or won't review in order to spin a narrative. I'm a big fan of good product reviews but this doesn't solve advertisings problems it just introduces new ones.
I'm not really sure how businesses survive in a world where they are not allowed to advertise their products or where they are located? It feels very artificially prescribed in how you think people should discover something.
Like you I don't even like ads, and I would rather not see them but I don't advocate for them not to be able to exist, just for my right to block them or in the real world for them to no intrude unnecessarily.
What solution do you envisage to the problem of ads as you see it? to ban them entirely?
Professional reviewers already find out directly fron the product creators. They want to be contacted by them and even seek out contact. This problem is already solved. In general, they certainly don't learn about products from advertising.
>How do I know they aren't receiving products for free or more subtly being specific in what products they will or won't review in order to spin a narrative. I'm a big fan of good product reviews but this doesn't solve advertisings problems it just introduces new ones.
I generally don't have a problem with professional reviewers recieving products for free to review them. If they get paid to push a certain product, while pretending they are a neutral source of information, I would consider this fraud.
>What solution do you envisage to the problem of ads as you see it? to ban them entirely?
Yes, I advocate banning advertising and I hope to contribute to support to put that measure into place.
In short, I see you all as a little nefarious, with a heap of woo to rival some other boondoggles we’ve recently gotten over.
When NoSQL was big a decade ago nobody thought it would upend society or make everyone millionaires.
Sure, but even with an inflation rate of 2%, if you hold USD for 10 years, its purchasing power is cut in half.
Every BAT token that’s ever going to exist has already been minted, so it can’t be inflated by creating more of it. There will be no quantitive easing, “too big to fail” or bailouts in the BAT ecosystem.
That almost certainly will not be the case for either the dollar or the Euro.
So what will be the purchasing power of BAT in 10 years?
Given that there’s no doubt there will be at least one financial crash with the dollar and other fiat currencies, there’s a more than decent chance BAT will outperform the dollar in the next 10 years, which frankly, wouldn't be too difficult.
Nothing stop you from exchanging it as soon as you can.
If the website would be offering USD instead of BAT, you would still not be able to retrieve it until it reach a amount big enough to take out (Google Ads is at 100$, 25$ for international user on Patreon). Until it's actual USD in your bank account, it's not better than BAT and depends on the existence of the service. The difference is that BAT, you can still use it if you decide to, right now.
Depending upon youtube ads for your revenue is not a good model anyway. Many channel owners have their own monetization through sponsors ("this video was sponsored by..."), patreon, affiliate links, merchandise, etc.
For others, they may either produce the content for pleasure (i.e. without intent to monetize) or as a way of driving attention toward their real business (e.g. if they are a consultant or book author).
> I find interesting comments here or on reddit which are never compensated. For small audiences, there is just no way to be compensated. IF people take the time to provide value to me, simple logic says there should be a way to compensate them (but there isn't).
There are incentives that motivate people aside from money, such as reputation. That aside, I think the reason many participate in sites like this is that ultimately they intend to gain knowledge as well. There's not an explicit exchange, but by all of us willing to share our knowledge and experience, we all end up more educated than we started out.
> Most people do that with the expectation that once they hit a popularity threshold, they 'll be able to monetize it. At least that's what Google promises them (thats how blogs and youtube took off), and after they bait they switch and start starving creators of income. We can do better than that, imho
Again, depending upon a platform provider (and one that is often secretive and unaccountable with it's decisions) for your main source of income is a bad bet. For content creators, the hard truth is that you have to put a lot of work into connecting directly with your customers and finding ways to disintermediate the publishing platforms and diversify your revenue streams.
obviously people do, but considering that the tech exists, why not have an option? Also, consider that many blog posts are essentially blogvertisements anyway, and there is apparenty a market for buying upvotes here.
> you have to put a lot of work into connecting directly
That is a lot harder because people's attention is limited and the big tech cos have a stronghold on it. E.g. it's very hard to pull people away from youtube.
What is "enough" if not determined by the market?
Presumably these channel creators could leave YouTube and create their own websites and sell their own ads. If they're being grossly underpaid vs. the value that YouTube provides (largely in distribution and monetization) presumably they'd be doing that, but they're not. Why not?
Exactly that, the market is skewed by monopolies. You can easily setup an ad server, but good luck getting the attention of an advertiser. Google has a stronghold on display ads, almost a monopoly.
If anything Google provides more opportunity because the alternative to AdSense existing would probably be no revenue at all for small web properties.
I'm a firm believer that FOSS and (Internet) Content needs funding. Yet, I loathe ads. They promote (but are not solely to blame for) behavior that is a brain drain on society. Ads always seem to boil down to 90s style child cereal commercials. Loud noises and flashy attention grabbing tactics to pull you towards it within a tiny, limited window of bought attention.
I'm not convinced society is better because of ads. The dystopian movies with neons signs everywhere seem shockingly accurate (and I believe are already like that in many eastern cities).
I like some of Brave's attempt. At least their doing something. But Ads still seem wrong to me.
The reward distributed to them is paid by you. Your balance accumulates either through opting into ads (advertisers pay you to intrude), or you can buy Basic Attention Token yourself (like via Coinbase) and top up your wallet.
Brave is doing exactly what it sounds like you want.
The audacity of so many people who feel entitled to get paid makes me so sad. I adblock, strip affiliate links, etc.
Ad revenue drives censorship. Dumbs people down, etc. The whole biz should burn down to the ground.
Your eyeballs only have value if they’re willing to look at things that other people are willing to pay to have you see. Thus ads.
I'm sure you're not just expecting content creators to make stuff for you full-time entirely for free.
Ads should die, but it requires consumers to realize that they need to pay for content one way or another.
But people don't need to realize anything for ads to die. All they need to realize is that they should all be using ad blockers and never ever turning it off again.
Being able to make people look in your direction long enough to show them something else they might spend money on is not valuable. It doesn't need to exist.
I’d rather they work with the likes of DuckDuckGo and share context based ads. Context does NOT include my personal details :)
It's fine if only some of us do it (and I do as well) but it just leads to the death of free internet, and subscription models for all news sites.
That might be fine for you, but don't think for a second that's not a privileged position, and if the internet moves behind a paywall that is a significant detriment to a massive class of people.
Sure, your system works for you, but don't pretend like your solution scales.
And even if you decide to never see an ad, you’ll still receive grants in BAT from time to time, which you can use to tip content creators.
To me the current option is no participation because I see no explicit ads. The web is pull and not push, and my browser renders whatever I want it to. As for the revenue, they can keep it for all I care, why would I want to make money browsing the web? It'd be like making money for talking a walk in the park
So if I have a couple of PCs idling, do they show ads? If ads are shown then there is a waste that someone is paying, and publishers will complain.
Can I set 10 raspberry pi to start farming BAT?
At this point Brave should start tracking what the user is doing to see if it is convenient to show an ad and that's is where all the problems start again... user/behavior monitoring.
Is just a bad but noble idea followed by a terrible implementation. Just let it pass by...
Sure, they’ll benefit if BAT goes to the moon because part of the team’s compensation is in BAT, but that’s no different than a startup and their stock.
There are some of us that think the distraction economy is making the world a worse place.
OS notifications have a higher participation rate than side-bar ads because 1) nobody has learned to tune them out, and 2) theoretically speaking, these are the things we opted not to filter out, so we are more inclined to peek.
I know people who will stop mid sentence of an interesting conversation with you to figure out why their phone is chirping at them. I'm sure you do, too. It's painful to watch even when it's not you.
My reaction to "it's opt-in" is a little bit like my reaction to "tobacco is opt-in". It's not reassuring, maybe even a little troubling. The best reaction you can expect is, "And?"
I do, though it's rare. I've done it for comments a few times, but mostly just for low-karma threads that don't have any comments yet, where I want to see what other people have to say.
Still getting quite a few me too responses.
The only opt in part is allowing ads, which you get paid for viewing.
Yes and Brave's argument is that if everyone acted like you, the web as we know it would collapse. Perhaps it's an argument worth taking seriously. And I say that as someone who acts like you.
The only thing that would be particularly at risk is stuff funded exclusively with display ads, but where users don't care enough about it to support it. Or, put differently, we'd lose sites that people don't like much, but that survive through manipulating people into buying things. Doesn't sound like much of a loss to me.
When the Tivo was new, it was argued that it would destroy television, because people could now skip ads. 20 years later, TV is doing better than ever as a medium. Why? Because a lot of us are now paying directly for the things we like. I think the same thing would happen with the web.
So blocking ads is an effective way to enact social change? Great!
Maybe the people that rely on the ad supported, user data selling model that primarily destroys the privacy of technologically less advanced users should have thought about that before they started the invasive ad arms race?
So fewer people will make money unethically on the web. If we adopted Brave's point of view then making money from cryptolocker ransomware would be okay because only ignorant users would not have anti-virus and backups in place, so it's really the users fault.
?? I don't understand this logic or analogy even remotely. I would love to make money by doing things I already do for free
It'd be like taking a walk in the park and paying/supporting the park - by having a salesperson walking beside you trying to pitch some product - if you feel the need to.
Hosting costs money. Design costs money. Maintenance costs money.
If the internet is to stay as alive and as open/accessible as it currently is for the public at large (despite increases in censorship), there needs to be more effort put into high availability and accessibility by more people than the enthusiasts who run revenue free sites/businesses that have other revenue streams.
People have been trained not to accept paywalls. But they do tip, as we see with patreon, superchats, etc, and and they do accept some modicum of ads and freemium services.
Brave provides options for all of those things; what I like most about brave is not its ad model, but its site donation model. It’s a very direct form of person to site donations that is built to be extremely convenient. I don’t know how it’s implemented, but if it's sufficiently decentralized (which I think it is, unless the BAT crypto currency is just a distraction from some centralized mechanism required for donations), that’s a potentially very valuable/difficult to censor/easy means of direct value exchange. Plus you don’t have the privacy concerns you do with ads.
My hope is that it becomes so convenient and popular to send money to sites via Brave and potential future competitors that the ad revenue model can be mostly replaced. That might be pie in the sky, but it seems plausible to me.
I also think it’s great that users get a big chunk of ad revenue. That percentage may change in the future, but for low income people who can get a few extra bucks by browsing normally/might be less likely to use ad blockers, something like Brave seems way better than seeing ads and not getting any revenue.
> Hosting costs money. Design costs money. Maintenance costs money.
Then maybe we'll get less blogspam and have a higher signal-to-noise ratio of sites run by people who are passionate about things and know what they're doing, instead of crap trying just get clicks to get paid.
Maybe videos would be 1 minute of quality content rather than 10 minutes of "be sure to click subscribe". Etc.
* Google Chrome: mandatory
* Firefox: opt-out [1]
* Brave: blocked
That's the primary issue.
It's great that Brave is pioneering a new opt-in, privacy-respecting funding model for the web - we need innovation here - but it's a secondary issue.
[1] Thanks to Google $, slowly changing presumably thanks to forcing effects of Apple's increasing privacy defaults in Safari
For me the best way is either a Netflix style network (like safari books), or something like [1].
[0]: https://unhashed.com/cryptocurrency-news/are-fake-websites-a...
On the other hand that same carrot brings a lot of baggage like: ads, and lots of crap (content farms and idiotic buzzfeed listicles and cat videos) some idiocy is okay, but we get flooded ...
When I updated to the latest iOS version, I got 20 BAT, for supporting content creators.
If you’re a content creator and you register your site or YouTube channel, you can be tipped in BAT.
Brave also allows you to tip folks on Twitter and GitHub.
And of course, you can buy BAT on various exchanges like Coinbase, etc.
In the case, it's a bit tricky, but "surveillance" is acting as an adjective, more specifically a noun adjunct
You can have a positive view of each separate word (depending on context) and the term still works perfectly in describing the business model society is beginning to reject, through mechanisms like the GDPR and CCPA.
The only way you would find new products or services is by 20th century word of mouth or search. And search is built on a mountain of ad dollars.
Are you claiming that you don't need Google?
That isn't true at all. What about when I play a youtube video on my chromecast and it shows an ad on my TV? What happens when websites draw all their content using the canvas instead of the DOM, and adblockers don't work anymore, or websites like Hulu which already make it difficult to enjoy the content while avoiding the ads.
Are these websites the only websites you visit? Otherwise, you're very short on paying for the content you consume.
Without ads, you have to pay the creator of every YouTube video you watch, the journalist behind every news article you read, etc. Unless the content creator is actively choosing to give it to you for free (i.e. never had any ads in the first place), then you need to pay them somehow for every bit of content you consume.
With how we consume content, this will have to be pay-per-view as a day of browsing would otherwise need possibly hundreds of subscriptions.
A mediator in form of Brave's "BAT" or similar is a good way to do fair pay-per-view.
> But people don't need to realize anything for ads to die. All they need to realize is that they should all be using ad blockers and never ever turning it off again.
No, everyone should not use ad blockers, there should be no ads. Ad blockers are a defective symptom of the decease that is ads, not a solution to the problem.
> Being able to make people look in your direction long enough to show them something else they might spend money on is not valuable. It doesn't need to exist.
It's important to remember that we're only fighting random ads plastered everywhere as brute-force marketing.
Other forms of marketing will always exist. Having a big logo on your physical store is marketing, done to attract attention of possible customers. Showcasing their products within the store is marketing to try to make you buy them. Nothing wrong with that.
Do you wish the "free" content was of higher quality?
Do you think a insightful blog post, youtube video, or similar content is worth rewarding the person who made said content?
Seems like the main evil of advertising is that it doesn't directly reward the maker of the content. Most of it is sucked up by the middle men who siphon off most of the money and force the content providers to work ever harder for their ever smaller fraction of the proceeds.
Using brave seems much like using Patreon to sponsor your favorite content providers. But instead of trying to manually set a $ per month per provider you can just use your eyeball time to control each content providers share.
Seems like the internet where brave (or similar) was popular would be a much nicer place than the current advertising.
Wouldn't you be willing to pay $20 or similar a month if that meant zero ads for you and your favorite sites got more money than they get through advertising today?
> Eg, I pay $5/m or $15/m, whatever, and that gets split up by the number of pages I view and content I consume.
That's 100% possible to do with Brave's system.
Can you explain what exactly in this conversation you don't care about? Follow-up question, can you explain why you felt the need to air that don't-care-about-it without moving the conversation anywhere?
I think it is. I've used Google search, gmail, youtube, and Google docs since they've existed. I've paid $0 for them. My understanding is that these services are paid for by ads but I've had an ad blocker most of that time. If everyone started using an ad blocker, what would happen to Google/those services? I don't know, but I feel uneasy about the fact that services that I use depend on people not doing certain things that A. seem rational and B. I have been doing for years.
> When the Tivo was new, it was argued that it would destroy television, because people could now skip ads. 20 years later, TV is doing better than ever as a medium. Why? Because a lot of us are now paying directly for the things we like. I think the same thing would happen with the web.
It seems to me that Brave is attempting to make it so that people "pay directly for things they like" and they're attempting to solve that problem generically, in the browser. Maybe it would be better if this problem wasn't solved in the browser. Maybe all the companies providing free services funded by ads should solve this problem individually, by charging a monthly fee. But that solution:
1. Leaves out individuals who make a living providing "free" entertainment who are funded by ads (so-called content creators)
2. Requires people to juggle many monthly subscriptions
3. Will cut out people who cannot afford subscriptions
4. Will never happen unless something forces these companies to change (maybe something like a browser with a built-in ad-blocker gaining market share...)
Brave's approach is interesting. I have no idea if it will pan out but I think they've identified a real problem.
Google makes money by collecting behavioral data generated by its users, which it then uses in the form of raw materials to create products for its actual paying customers: advertisers.
Whether you're using an ad-blocker or not, you're still contributing to the advertising machine by using its products, you can't stop Google from crunching your personal behavioral data on their platform.
I have no interest in Brave and I still use Google products (for now), I just wanted to point out that what's really happening is a bit more sophisticated than you may think.
I think it's safe to say that there would be repercussions if everyone started blocking ads. Maybe Google isn't the best example but there are websites that block my access because I have an ad blocker. They aren't doing that for no reason.
What are you on about, TV is essentially dead as an over-the-air/cable-bundle medium.
The only reason "TV" survived, is because it was reimagined by streaming services who charge a monthly fee. That model has certainly been going through a golden age, but the story is far from finished there and things are about to get very very bad with dozens of streaming services on the horizon, all wanting 5-10$/month.
We have yet to see what's going to happen when consumers rebel against their content needing 100s of $/month to access. The Tivo of the 2020s will involve VPN, or Piracy with a new face, or some form of account sharing, and will be resisted just the same.
What I am sure of is that the economy generally as well as most companies specifically display a long history of being able to adapt to changing business conditions. If you want to claim they will suddenly lose that resilience in the face of continued rise of ad blocking, you have to prove it.
Yes, some places are currently dependent on ads. If ads continue to decline as a revenue source (something they've been doing for years even without ad blocking) then those companies will either find new revenue sources or go out of business.
Since companies do both those things all the time without disaster, and since ad-only companies are a small portion of the total web, I maintain that the notion that "the web as we know it would collapse" is absurd drama. It is not an actual risk.
Funding the site with Brave and BAT would at least offer a practical alternative to reliance on advertising. Unless, perhaps, your goal is not to destroy advertising, but rather to destroy all sites which depend on external funding and yet aren't a big enough draw to justify a dedicated subscription?
* the global advertising industry is upwards of a $500 billion market [1]
* that industry employs close to 200k people in the U.S. alone [2]
I think it is safe to say that people who earn their living via the advertising industry and thus positively contribute to the economy would be a benefit to society. Of course one could still make the argument that the net impact is harmful, but I don’t think it is controversial to say that is a bold claim with many complicating factors.
1. https://www.statista.com/topics/990/global-advertising-marke...
2. https://www.statista.com/statistics/186066/employment-in-us-...
Furthermore, ads have driven most major media from newspapers to radio to tv... and what has made them so financially accessible to most people. Maybe you can afford to pay money to every single patreon out there, but not everyone can. And imagining a world where everyone uses an ad-blocker and advertising dies means that every content creator is just going to put up a paywall, which means information will be exclusively restricted to people with money. That sounds like a fantastic future.
Frankly the notion that advertising is objectively bad, or good, for that matter is reductive. You might say certain practices are good or bad, and certainly the ones we are seeing online right now are not good, but that seems to me the problem Brave is trying to solve - building an ad model for the web that actually works.
I've heard advertisers try and justify their work and it doesn't sound very convincing. The simple fact is they are paying to make you do something you wouldn't have ordinarily done.
As we have become more resistant to their activities they have become more underhand. Adverts will try and convince you that you can't be a good father unless you own an SUV, that your partner will become slim and attractive if you buy a specific perfume for her, that you will have a happy family Christmas if you just bought this oak table. This sort of manipulation is a scourge on society.
If I'm looking to buy a washing machine I either go to the electrical store or by a copy of Which (I guess consumer reports would be the same thing in the US).
>They distort the product market as they favour those players with the highest marketing budget, rather than with the best product. Presumably the companies with the bigger budgets have that money to spend because they have a better product. When people buy your product, you have money to spend, and then you go and spend it on marketing and advertising (which are two separate disciplines, I won't get hung up on that but just know that using those two interchangeably betrays a lack of critical understanding). I can think of very few companies that became market leaders solely because of advertising while selling an inferior product. Beer/alcohol springs to mind, but even there I could argue that taste is subjective and that image is a huge part of what people are drinking regardless so much like fashion, customers are buying the label as much as the utility.
> They distort the media market as getting people to look in your direction is the only thing that has value. Clickbait and fake-news are a direct result of advertising, and wouldn't exist without it. This is also wrong-ish. People didn't tune into a TV show because of the advertisements that aired between commercials, they tuned in because of good TV. The better the TV show, the more money they could command from advertisers because of the audience size. They wouldn't invest that money into more advertisements, they would invest it into making better TV. Now, with clickbait you have a bit of a point - but that's more of a systemic issue. When people started giving content away for free, newspapers crashed as content moved online. Desperate for an audience, advertisers used yesterday's model (look for the place with the most eyeballs) and started migrating over there. There was a period of time where buzzfeed and clickbait reigned supreme for that reason, but that's starting to change as advertisers get wiser about where they are positioning their company. Respectable products tend to dominate respectable sites and clickbaity sites get filled with less respectable companies. It's far from perfect, but again - this is about the method, not really advertising as a practice. I don't see the connection with fake-news at all. Fake news happened because people were glued to their newsfeeds. If anything advertisers are terrified of fake news because it hurts their credibility to show up next to it.
> They are an attempt at manipulation. People have to constantly expend the energy to counteract that manipulation. I also believe this to be a big factor in the decrease in trust in media. Since the stuff that is meant to inform you is always surrounded by stuff trying to manipulate you, how could you ever build trust to it? Are reviews an attempt at manipulation? Maybe you think they are better because they are a third party... but at the end of the day they are just trying to tell you one product is better than another. If "attempts at manipulation" are bad, then we should get rid of all review sites. If your issue is that the company is saying their thing is best, when maybe it isn't, what company in their right mind would say "hey, our product sucks". Do you have an issue with sales or selling in general? Is the very act of getting someone to try and buy your thing a cause for societal ill? As for people constantly expending energy to counteract this manipulation, this is my least favorite line of argument around advertising. It disrespects people and treats them as weak minded simpletons who have no thoughts other than what they are told to think. At a certain point you have to respect people and their ability to make decisions for themselves.
That's a misunderstanding. It's not a guilty by association thing. It's that there is already a thing more in line with accomplishing my goals, since uBlock Origin has no provisions for ad companies to still make money.
[1] https://mondaynote.com/the-arpus-of-the-big-four-dwarf-every...
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/325645/usa-number-of-int...
I do click on the occasional Kickstarter boardgame advertisements, but I never end up backing because we always end up playing bloodbowl anyway.
On the other hand I do subscribe to the internet part of a Danish news paper that along giving you access to articles also removes all adds for paying users. I guess that’s sort of what brave wants to do, but who wants the hassle of buying alt-coins and reporting the taxes on it?
That's why I believe a lot of value all these trackers provide to various companies is not so much the typical 'buy this product now' pop-up that you're thinking, but instead more nefarious value-adds.
Maybe that mortgage or car loan rate you applied for came back a little higher than others would have received on the same day. Perhaps that collection agency decided they wouldn't discount the medical bills because they know 'you can afford it'. I've seen several sites give me one price when I was logged in without an ad blocker, and then a lower price after clearing my cookies.
There is no way insurance companies aren't paying huge amounts of data to calculate rates offered to individuals based on thousands of data points. I imagine the government itself would be able to take advantage of user data in all sorts of clever ways - everything from solving crimes to catching tax cheats to provide better and cheaper background investigations for the millions who require it.
Companies interviewing candidates could save thousands on each potential hire if they could quickly have an algorithm avoid the 75% of candidates they wouldn't consider hiring anyway.
There are just so many ways companies can statistically make a few extra percent here or avoid an expensive loss there, it will be used until the government disallows it, which apparently isn't going to happen anytime soon in most countries.
When you grab a bottle of dish soap off the shelf, do you select the same one each time because you prefer it for reasons you can't quite articulate or do you grab whatever's cheapest because they're basically all the same?
But you’re right, I probably buy Coca Cola (and like it better) instead of Pepsi because of life long branding. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen an online advertisement for Coca Cola though.
The numbers coupled with lack of factual evidence of effect is staggering. I have a lot of distrust in the business. It’s about as accurate as Nielsen.
It's odd to me though. I could pay for content I care about at an amount far smaller than $200/m, and the content creators would make more from me I imagine.
Why the extreme overhead? There's no way some blogger is making $200/m off of a handful of clicks from me. I'd be shocked if they made $5/m directly from me.
So where is the disconnect?
(sidenote, i understand the $200/m figure was not for a single blogger. But, lets pretend that blogger was all of my traffic for the month. I still can't imagine it's even remotely close to $200/m)
So my comment was talking about paying content creators. I can't imagine they come anywhere close to $200/m from me, as you put it it's all the middlemen. So why would I be concerned about $200/m?
Google's revenue from ads could be useful, though.
For anyone who is a user of multiple brands, you need to add these numbers.
If you save your money, then financial companies are going to want to advertise to you to use their services. If you invest, investment opportunities will want to advertise to you. If you travel, vacation destination will want you.
Assuming you don't just put your money in a box, SOMEONE is going to want you to use your money in a way that gives some of it to them.
Their purpose isn't to randomly convince someone to spend $20-30k on a brand new vehicle.
The purpose is to convince people who've already bought the car that they made the right decision and to feel good about it - and to rave about their new exciting, big purchase to their friends/family.
Laughably wrong. Like, parallel universe wrong. Don't even know where to start on that one.
With response number two, there is so much wrong, I don't even know which part to quote:
-Who said people turned in because of advertising? I have literally no idea where you got that from?
-Fake news is a cheap way to produce content that gets a lot of attention. You make something up that riles people up, and then people share it. Without advertising, there would be no direct financial advertising to do so.
-Who cares that advertising companies would prefer not appear next to fake news. Their actions still directly encourage fake news.
And so much more. A real Gish-Gallop you got there.
> Are reviews an attempt at manipulation?
This is the mark of the ultimate dishonest argument or lazy thinking. Do you honestly not see the inherent difference (of kind, not degree) between a review you seek out from a trusted independent source, and an ad that someone paid for to put in front of you against your will, and who's only incentive is to get you to buy the product it is about? If you don't, I genuinely can't help you.
>It disrespects people and treats them as weak minded simpletons who have no thoughts other than what they are told to think. At a certain point you have to respect people and their ability to make decisions for themselves.
I don't like having to constantly spend that energy. I don't like constantly having to be on alert and defend myself from the manipulation attempts.
And this is such a bad argument in general. You could use the same argument against anything designed to make people's life easier and less stressful. Why does advertising get a past.
In conclusion, your entire comment is a collection of the very worst, lazy and dishonest arguments and excuses for advertising.
And yet you couldn't address any of them without dodging the material part of the argument in favor of faux outrage, generalities, and personal preference topped off with a belittling logically unsound conclusion.
Cool.
And let me assure you that there is nothing "faux" about my outrage.
To say though that Google has to get a piece of the $200/m that some blogger makes assumes of course that Google is the ad provider. Not sure, but it seems like a weak argument.
I wish I could start seeing the real no-ads costs here.