I've been using Brave rewards, both as a user and a content maker. It's really great, and I feel this may be a reasonable alternative to the invasive trackers+ads we have today.
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 are opt-in, and user-configurable. You decide whether or not to participate, and to what degree (1 to 5 ads per hour). These ads are surfaced as OS notifications, which means they respect settings like Do Not Disturb, Focus Mode, etc. And, as always, you receive 70% of the ad revenue for your participation. Respectfully, that doesn't strike me as an "escalation of hostility" when you compare against the current option: forced participation, malicious ads, no revenue share, data leaked to a sea of third parties who use it for their purposes.
Yea, I'd be happier if there was some notion of an inherent value in my eyeballs - and then I could just put that money into the system. 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.
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.
Quantifying your attention across specific sites and then rewarding them proportionately is precisely what Brave does.
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.
It's very hard to quantify attention. And also, is that the most important? Quantifying a reward should not be given to an algorithm. That's the only reason why things like this[0] happen.
For me the best way is either a Netflix style network (like safari books), or something like [1].
Remember when the internet wasn’t a center of commerce? People posted websites and information for free because it was cool and noble. That’s the internet I love.
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.
Much of what you say rings true but ... I think without the incentive of monetization I don’t think we’d see as much good content in places like YouTube.
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 ...
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?
If I understand correctly, you don't actually use BAT, it gets consumed as you browse. You would just top it up like a pay as you go phone if you want an ad-free browsing experience, or you can generate BAT by enabling ads at a configurable level if you don't mind them.
So I don't use Brave, but it certainly sounds as though by purchasing BAT (or you can receive them through enabling ads) those are then allocated to the content creators whose stuff you're choosing to consume. Which supposedly--this is the part of the scheme I am most skeptical about, because crypto markets are mostly just hilarioujs--allows them to turn BAT into actual money.
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?
You are spending money on the creators of content you read, which theoretically you care about (not getting that vibe though.). It’s like supporting someone on Patreon but it’s a different take on direct support.
The reality is that your eyeballs are something like $200/month. You are just not likely to pay that money. When you factor in money thrown away at bot/fraud, advertisers spend a shit load of money just to reach you (and indirectly pays for a whole lot of entertainment tv-shows/web-content)
Total spending on digital ads in the United States, a reasonably proxy for the value of the ads to advertisers, has been cited at about $111B[1]. There are about 280 million Internet users in the U.S.[2] (averaging the 2018 measurement of 275M and the 2019 projection of 285M). That works out to about $33 per user per month—which is a decent chunk of change, but much less than $200/month.
I wouldn’t be so sure. I mean it’s anecdotal, but I rarely buy things. I buy all my clothes from the same internet store, and I do mean all, I have five pairs of shaping new tomorrow pants and when they get worn I replace them with the same damn pants. I heard about them from a coworker who uses them. Almost all my purchasing habits are like that, and I suspect I may not be the only one on HN.
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?
You might not buy things, but you have to do SOMETHING with your money (assuming you are an above average earner as someone in tech).
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.
That sounds crazy if true. The idea that companies are managing to change my behaviour enough with advertising to drive enough revenue and extra profit, for purchases that I wouldn’t otherwise have made, to justify $200 in advertising spend seems absurd. That would mean a significant portion of my monthly spending (much more than $200) would have to be directly driven by advertising. Is advertising really that effective?
> That would mean a significant portion of my monthly spending (much more than $200) would have to be directly driven by advertising. Is advertising really that effective?
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.
The point a lot of people miss is that advertising doesn't just convince you buy new things. Many advertisements are designed to make you feel good about the products you already buy so you won't consider trying the alternatives.
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?
I was about to disagree until I read your example. You're right - I buy a lot of stuff for reasons that aren't grounded in reason, and, although I usually relate to stuff such as "my Mom used to have this one at home when I was a kid", well, who knows if that's the actual reason or just some justification from my mind.
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.
I buy the allergy friendly one of the store brand that I’ve never seen an advertisement for. Since it’s the store brand the type variates since I don’t always shop at the same store.
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.
They have no idea whether you would have bought something or not. Look at it through the lens of how much money you spend in a month, and what the average margin is on the things you buy. When you look at it that way it's not crazy to think there would be enough positive ROI indicators to justify that much marketing spend.
Ad sales are easy: appeal to the ego of the purchaser. I’m convinced ads are all a scam and are in effect money laundering.
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.
Man that's rough. You're right, my content is way not worth that.
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)
Agreed. Which is sort of why I asked that. The reply to me said it would be closer to $200/m. However, I was wanting to pay content creators, not parasites.
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?
Yea, but in my comment I didn't care about Google. We were talking about money going directly to content providers, to compensate for the fact that they don't make ad money off of me.
Sure, and I'd love to see prices for those too. $200/m I doubt, though. Purely search though, nothing else from Google (I pay for my email/etc)
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.
Interesting link. I'm not sure how to interpret these numbers though. It says Amazon gets $752 per user per year. But this seems like it is nothing to do with how much my eyeballs are worth - people give Amazon money in return for stuff. The only other brand on that list I use is Google. I'm outside the US, so it appears my eyeballs are worth $137 per year. That is an amount I'd be prepared to pay if it made adverts go away and the money was split between the content providers I do use. But it isn't really clear (to me) how the old guy on YouTube who restores the antique furniture would collect his 75% share due to my eyeball time.
If I could choose to pay for just the content I want, it wouldn't be $200/month, because I'd carefully pick and choose what I care enough about to pay for. I spend most of my online time on a very small number of sites and same few youtube channels, many of whom I already pay on patreon, if I had to pay a little more to cover streaming/video hosting, that cuts google out of the financial picture, I would totally do that. I do not like google, but I do like the handful of content creators that I follow. Any other time I spend online is idle time that I could do without and if forced to pay for it, it would actually help me break a habit I don't particularly want in the first place.
Yes, this is a perfectly sensible stance, which of course requires you to actively pay for content instead, either through brave or some other program.
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.
I do pay several patreon, have automatic transfer set up for two projects, and a long standing subscription to a website I'm a fan of.
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'm claiming a search engine can exist without relying on advertising. There are other ways of discovering products and services than advertising. In fact, I'd argue that the amount of things I want I discovered through advertising is minuscule compared to the amount I discovered through direct recommendation, seeking it out myself and professional reviews (I seek out myself).
> 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.
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.
> I do pay several patreon, have automatic transfer set up for two projects, and a long standing subscription to a website I'm a fan of.
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.
"Content creation" is oversaturated. I'm willing to pay for the content I consume, but it is evidently true that most people are not - and I don't blame them. Would you really pay for a Logan Paul video? Without ad revenue, many lowest common denominator content creators (and other parasitic scenarios like "instagram influencers") go away. I fail to see that as a bad thing.
No. You don't understand. It's not enough for me not to see ads anymore. I want the advertising industry to die. The entire thing. Its existence is harmful to society.
If people choose to buy BAT from exchanges rather than earn it by watching ads then content will be increasingly funded directly by payments from consumers rather than through advertising. If everyone did this then there would be a closed loop of BAT exchange between viewers and content creators (mediated by exchanges) without any ads in sight. This is an effective strategy to employ against the advertising industry if that's really your goal.
No, in making provisions for the advertising industry in their business model, they are aiding its survival. I will always recommend a proper adblocker over this.
You are of course free to do as you wish, but since you're applying "guilty by association" logic to Brave—regardless of the fact that using it without enabling the ads does absolutely nothing to help the advertising industry—I really hope that you also refuse to have anything to do with any sites that receive any of their funding through advertising. Enabling an adblocker doesn't reduce that contamination in any sense: The site is still "making provisions for the advertising industry" and "aiding its survival", far more so than Brave.
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?
>but since you're applying "guilty by association" logic to Brave
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.
It seems obvious to me that this is an extreme stance and greatly oversimplifies things, but a couple things to note:
* 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.
The size of an industry and the number of people that it employs is hardly a measure of how it benefits society. People are employed in the global spam, fraud, and mafia markets, and they spend their income on such wholesome things as housing, groceries, computers, expensive wine/cars/vacations, art. Doesn't mean that the industry contributes positively to society.
This just isn't true though. Or at least I don't see where you're coming from. You might see ads as intrusive, or getting you to spend money on something you don't want to spend money on... but that's not how many advertisers see ads. Ideally, they would only be at your attention when you want them there. If I'm looking to buy a washing machine, and I don't know where to start, advertising is one of the primary ways I get introduced to the options out there.
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).
I just flat out disagree with most of the premises you have shared here. Also I don't understand how something can be wrong or right in an 'academic sense' but fine:
>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.
>resumably the companies with the bigger budgets have that money to spend because they have a better product.
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.
>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.
I made an effort to address the argumentative core of your argument. It's hard, because there is no core to the argument, just a kitchen sink of bad assumptions and weak arguments.
And let me assure you that there is nothing "faux" about my outrage.
What happens when everyone makes the same choice in this prisoner's dilemma as you? Are you ready to lose all of the content that is supported by advertising (regardless of whether you view ads or not)?
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.
If the only value of media is to make you look in its direction for long enough to show you something else that you might actually spend money on, it actually has no value at all.
And I suppose adding, "...while keeping you informed about what's happening in the world" or "...while entertaining you" wouldn't matter to you, would it?
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
> 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.
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.
That really isn't an argument worth taking seriously. Much of the web would be fine. Another chunk of it would have to shift more toward existing revenue sources. And some would have to develop new revenue sources.
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.
> That really isn't an argument worth taking seriously.
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.
>My understanding is that these services are paid for by ads but I've had an ad blocker most of that time.
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.
Either way, indirectly or not, Google makes money from people looking at ads. What would happen to "advertisers" if everyone blocked ads? Would the whole industry collapse? It's hard for me to see how that wouldn't affect Google.
I didn't say it wouldn't affect google. If everyone who uses the internet suddenly realized the joy of ad free browsing, then that would be something of a paradigm shift in my opinion.
Yes, Brave's approach is interesting. No, there's no reason to think that Google will have a problem finding other ways to fund services that people like and use. They already charge people for Docs, Gmail, and YouTube. Search is funded by non-display ads, which most ad blockers don't bother with because their relevance means people like them.
The idea that "you know" what would happen if, overnight, everyone started using ublock origin, is silly. What part of Google's revenue comes, indirectly, from "display ads"? I have no idea.
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.
Nothing happens overnight, so I'm not seeing the relevance.
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.
> 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.
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.
That's an interesting fantasy, but I see no evidence that people will go from paying happily for content to refusing to pay for anything. People have been paying for video for a hundred years, and there's no reason to think the business will die now that technology has drastically decreased distribution costs, lowered production costs, and increased quality.
>Yes and Brave's argument is that if everyone acted like you, the web as we know it would collapse.
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.
> 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
?? 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 if you feel the need to.
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.
It'd be like taking a walk in the park and paying/supporting the park utilizing a corporate currency - by having a salesperson walking beside you trying to pitch some product - if you feel the need to
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.
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.
I'd prefer if those people had some sort of income so they could do what they're doing full time. Do you have any sort of idea for how that would work or do you just dislike the current system without any prescription for a better one? (The patreon model still requires people to follow your content, and subscribers help with that)
I’m having a hard time trying to decide if people are trying to dirty capitalism with “surveillance” or surveillance with capitalism. Seems like the latter has become a dirty word over night for no apparent reason.
Surveillance capitalism simply describes the business model of spying on users to build hidden psychological / behavioural / demographic profiles which are then sold through opaque backroom market mechanisms, all with zero regard to consent.
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.
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...
Do these notifications fire only when the browser is focused, or do they fire when the browser doesn't have focus too? Either way, the full range of 1-5/hour seems way too frequent. Maybe one a day would be tolerable (though I have no motive for tolerating even that.)
And they make money by you having to buy BAT to give it. Either with the information gathered from which ads you view or by having to buy it to begin in the first place.
Actually, they don't make money on sales of BAT. Like most cryptocurrencies, its price is determined by supply and demand.
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.
GP is on track to become my highest rated comment on HN, which suggests more people agree with me about this than anything else I've said here.
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?"
That your comment was highly upvoted doesn't necessarily mean what you think it does. I often upvote items I disagree with only because they bring up something worthy of discussion. I'm curious how many other HNers do the same.
> I often upvote items I disagree with only because they bring up something worthy of discussion. I'm curious how many other HNers do the same.
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.
As far as I understand it, using the browser with the default settings is basically like using Chrome with ad blocking (and tracking protection and all of that) already built in.
The only opt in part is allowing ads, which you get paid for viewing.
You do get paid, considering you can sell the tokens. I expect the tokens I've earned across all my devices to be worth a nice few hundred USD some day.
Try it first -- it is optional. We're working on other channels than OS notifications, but so far the people who have opted in are happy enough (14% CTR).
In most regions where users would bounce off a different default and manually override it to Google (thus denying us an ethical defaulting opportunity), yes. Mozilla found out the hard way in 2014 December when they reset default from Google to Yahoo! in the USA, and most Firefox users Whisky Tango Foxtrotted back to manual Google setting. (Verizon and Mozilla bailed on that deal and Mozilla is back with Google.)
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.
There are things you don’t have to try to know you don’t want it. Like poop, for instance.
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”
That's cool -- are you willing to fund your own tokens to tip and give back regularly? Just asking, not required either. The baseline mode for Brave is shielded (so fast/private/battery-saving/dataplan-friendly) browsing.
I would not call opt-in ads that you receive money for viewing "hostile". It's not an insignificant amount of either, especially if the price of BAT appreciates.
I thought so at first, but they're so infrequent, it's really not a big deal. Mac OS bothers me about app store updates more often than I get ads. Plus, you get paid for the ads being delivered in BAT, which you can then contribute to sites (or trade on a crypto exchange).
This is a fair sentiment, but under a model where the user decides where ad revenue goes, who would want to host the ads? It has to either be the browser (like an extension that pushes toasts) or your desktop (same thing, different context).
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.
But the ecosystem around dollars is so parasite-riddled that if you tried to move cents for each ad you didn't see, you'd end up paying more in transaction fees than would make it to the content creators that you're trying to support. The dollar has a scalability problem that BAT doesn't.
Is trading dollars for BAT on an exchange and then loading those BAT into your browser's wallet such a bad alternative?
> But the ecosystem around dollars is so parasite-riddled that if you tried to move cents for each ad you didn't see, you'd end up paying more in transaction fees than would make it to the content creators that you're trying to support
This is flat out incorrect. Brave as a company can easily consolidate payments such that fees are minimal.
Brave's internal ledger for micro-payments can measure dollars to however many decimal places they wish. Sure, when you actually transfer money out of the system there will have to be some rounding, but those transfers are minimal as Brave can batch them.
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.
The point is it’s not possible to send such small quantities with fiat currencies. If something becomes popular, those small contributions add up.
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.
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:
Would you be upset if you did so in, say, June, then proceeded to lose double-digit percent of $ value placed in the wallet?
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?
Brave hasn't rounded this corner yet, but I have to imagine that a future feature addition will be trading access to content for payments in BAT. When that happens, whether I care about the volatility will depend on the implementation. If content prices are in dollars, then yes, I suppose I have to accept some of the uncertainty that goes with the fluctuating exchange rate. If it's BAT that I trade for my content, then no--I already got _n_ tokens, they're redeemable for the same amount of content, their market value is meaningless to me. But whatever the case, I'll take it or leave it as a whole, depending on whether it's worth it to me.
> 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.
Once you can have a single BAT wallet that is used by all your devices (another feature that I assume is in the works), it will make a bit more sense to buy BAT with dollars (instead of with ad views).
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.
Getting BAT on an exchange is needlessly complex and painful (and actually impossible for a lot of people without handing the exchange all their personal details up to and including passport).
I would much prefer to just give brave my CC details, regardless of what internal currency they’re using for rewarding content.
The creators end up getting a crapto token at the end of it and then have to wait a long time to accumulate enough to justify the time, hassle and transaction fees to turn it back into actual money they can spend on beer/rent/etc. All for some tiny fraction of the browser market.
Meanwhile people are living off Patreon and other services like it.
> The creators end up getting a crapto token at the end of it and then have to wait a long time to accumulate enough to justify the time, hassle and transaction fees to turn it back into actual money they can spend on beer/rent/etc. All for some tiny fraction of the browser market.
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).
I'm reasonably sure USD (or EUR) will still exist, have some reasonably similar value, and be usable in five years. There are quite a lot of crypto tokens I do not have anywhere near that level of confidence in.
I'm reasonably sure USD (or EUR) will still exist, have some reasonably similar value, and be usable in five years.
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.
As currently constructed, BAT is designed to be used quickly. Nobody should hodl BAT at this point unless we see it gain value and become fully fleshed out.
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.
> I'm reasonably sure USD (or EUR) will still exist, have some reasonably similar value, and be usable in five years. There are quite a lot of crypto tokens I do not have anywhere near that level of confidence in.
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.
A creator would be far better served with coming up with a monetisation model that means they can make USD/EUR/whatever from Patreon (or their own PayPal/Stripe subscription etc.), than hoping for tiny nano-payments of cryptodosh from a niche interest web browser.
Ok, but the difference with waiting to accumulate dollars vs waiting to accumulate crypto currency is that with crypto you are subject to massive currency fluctuations while you wait to cash out.
Just look at BAT price volatility and decline over last year.
> Ok, but the difference with waiting to accumulate dollars vs waiting to accumulate crypto currency is that with crypto you are subject to massive currency fluctuations while you wait to cash out.
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.
Nowhere near as bad as the ecosystem around crypto, which is absolutely filled with scammers and criminals.
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.
Google had something that did this, where it would show you pictures of cats instead of ads, but still allowed you to pay the website a couple pennies:
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.
Me too, and I’m sure so would Brave. But it’s not really possible with dollars.
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.
The transaction fee hits two places. Once when money goes into the system and once when money goes out. If I spend $5/month and split it 50 ways there is no reason to pay a transaction fee on each 5cent transfer because it’s within the system.
I think the point was a low participation system relative to the web as a whole has meant systems where many bloggers accumulatad less than a withdraw transaction fee each. Aside from that, they need all the bother of registration.
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.
Why not? How do the ad buyers buy the ads which Brave are selling you?
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.
You can, though requires jumping through all the usual KYC hoops for buying a cryptocurrency, since that's what they use for micropayments. All managed through Uphold.
So why are you frequenting these 'trashy' sites? If you are, it must be because they offer some value, right? If you're not... then you don't see any ads from them. Someone else will, because they find value in the site.
Not really, sometimes you search for some information (camera review, headphones review, medical information, toys, whatever) and instead of landing on some site that has good information you end up on some crap site with crap content and tons of ads.
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.
Because the trashy sites are also the best at SEO (and google isn't properly incentivized to punish them for their ads) so you end up seeing them by accident.
Maybe trashy is the wrong word, but rather "low-effort" or "repetitive".
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.
But that's exactly what the ancestor comment was suggesting
>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.
If you want to provide TV content, go for it. But if your content has ads, don't be surprised when people skip all the ads, because ads are offensive, and they're free to skip them. So that's an awkward business model to rely on. The consumers aren't the ones being unethical; you chose to put yourself in an aggressive and dubious position in the first place. I prefer public and collectively-funded broadcasting.
Ah I see what you're getting at now. Sure, ads are unethical and they shouldn't publish them, but since they will anyway, and it would be too heavyhanded to prevent them (by making it illegal, say), we should look at ways to defend ourselves against them.
They're not paying me for the compute resources their suspicious unnecessary JavaScript payload consumes. If they were good actors respecting my property, I would respect theirs.
I think it's possible to do that with the Brave Rewards program, as long as one verifies the rewards wallet with Upheld and then deposits money from a bank account to the wallet.
It's impossible to transact in actual dollars online. Dollars are made of cloth. When you use a checking account or credit card online, it's using crypto.
Can someone explain to me this, as i could not find any real answers from my few minutes of searching. Lets say i have a blog and suddenly people start sending me BAT.
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?
The tokens get set aside (tracked only in the user's browser) but nothing happens until you verify on https://creators.brave.com/
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
All first world countries and many others with developed financial systems put laws in-place on their financial institutions (like banks) and all money transmitters. They are required to get specific licenses and one of the key parts of these various licenses is "Knowing Your Customer". The intent is to prevent money laundering. Essentially, governments regulate these financial institutions and require them to know who exactly they are dealing with (sometimes there is a minimum amount that is interesting for them, other governments require it for everyone regardless of value).
According to Wikipedia: Australia, Canada, India, Italy, South Korea, Namibia, New Zealand, South Africa, United Kingdom, United States, Luxembourg, Singapore, and Japan
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.
One of my biggest gripes with modern software is using notifications for things that shouldn't actually be notifications. IMO, marketing/advertising NEVER should be a notification. Notifications are for things where you find value in being interrupted such as receiving a message from someone you know or letting you know you have an appointment upcoming so you don't miss it. They're not there to tell you about some arbitrarily made up sale or discount. Any app that abuses notifications is instantly uninstalled from my phone which is why I have so few apps.
Brave ads don't track you around the web and sell your data to other advertisers. Brave ads don't slow down the pages your browsing, or get in the way of the content you're trying to view. And, Brave ads are optional; you only view them if you want to support the pages/news sites/YouTube channels you're viewing.
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.
It is a lot more intrusive in my experience. I'd get notifications about random blockchain conferences all the time before I figured I had to disable brave rewards to get rid of them.
This seems like a great alternative funding model for the web. Modern online advertising has a lot of issues (privacy, intrusiveness) but most users don't want to directly pay for the sites they browse either (i.e. the subscription model). By displaying ads controlled by the browser rather than the website, the user gets a lot more control over the ads they see (solving the privacy and intrusiveness problem), while still supporting the websites they visit without paying for them directly.
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.
I’m fine with them. My issue with ads is the data/cpu use and the malware. I ignored ads for 15 years or so before getting my first ad blocker.
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).
Alright, so now instead of mining for bitcoin, everyone is going to be making money directly from advertisers by running virtual machines where they simulate a human interacting with the internet for BAT?
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?
I think this largely ignores "how" ads are distributed. The website you are looking at did not select _any_ of the ads you see. They chose a network who is delegating that placement to someone else. Depending on which ad network, this could delegated by several different ad networks until an advertiser is finally selected by the final intermediary.
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.
> The website you are looking at did not select _any_ of the ads you see.
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.
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> 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.
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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.
I’m not sure how you can use the internet to distribute your content and claim copyright over how the user consumes the content. You’re distributing code to a user. The user can interact with that code however they see fit via their browser. That is the nature of the internet. Anything else (I’m looking at you Washington Post Subscription Runtime) is trying to have things both ways.
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.
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.
Showing ads is something users have to opt-in to see (using Brave Rewards). Users can turn off ad-blocking globally if they missed the ads, but blocking them (ads/trackers) is one of the main draws to downloading Brave, IMO
You don't have a right to show ads to users. (The CFAA actually works in consumers' favor here: circumventing a user's adblocker is just as much of a crime as hacking into a server.) You do have a right to refuse service to users with adblockers, but to my knowledge Brave doesn't interfere with sites that do this - I still can't get past the paywalls on WSJ/NYTimes/Bloomberg.
In some ways, this looks promising: Maybe in a few years, they'll be supporting many more countries and payment providers. I'm not overly skeptical about Brave being able to become a viable alternative to my current go-to browsers either — though I hope Safari and Firefox will keep ramping up privacy-protecting features, and I think for the purpose of getting Brave Rewards to critical mass, it would be best to provide plug-ins for integrating that functionality with other browsers as well.
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.
Sorry, this must be very basic but I've never been able to make sense of one thing about Brave's model. You say that users can get paid in BAT to watch ads. But Brave is open-source. So is there anything preventing me to fork the browser to pretend to display the ads and reap the rewards without actually displaying them? Doesn't this break the whole system?
> So is there anything preventing me to fork the browser to pretend to display the ads and reap the rewards without actually displaying them? Doesn't this break the whole system?
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.
But calling BAT a "token", and running it as a blockchain, would seem to imply that it has some kind of value... If I can just receive it by running a headless patched version of Brave that pretends to show ads, then how could one expect it to have any value?
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?
I ran an information site for an Ethereum project[1] and was pleased to see that our first revenue came from visitors' BAT donations. It wasn't a lot of money. But, it was fully automatic and easy to use. Our site earned BAT before we even signed up as a publisher. I signed up to claim the money.
It's also critical that it be a currency not used for any purpose other than advertising. The point of BAT is to price attention: users have the option of opting out of ads, if they do so it means less BAT available for purchase, which raises the price of BAT, which increases the rewards for opting into ads, which means more people opt in, which leads to an equilibrium price. If they had used say Monero for this, they'd really be pricing drugs and then piggybacking on that with an ad system, which would destroy any market pricing mechanism that they get.
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.
> 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.
Doesn't this assume that advertisers would be willing to pay more for fewer eyeballs? That seems like a pretty big assumption.
If they aren't, then the price remains unchanged, advertisers drop out of the market for BAT, and fewer ads are served. Again, you reach equilibrium, except that people who do not feel the current price of BAT is worth their attention don't have to put up with ads, marginal advertisers who get little value out of the advertising don't run them, and Brave makes less money. This also creates incentives on Brave to ensure that their advertisements are targeted effectively (so advertisers are willing to pay more), that they're unobtrusive (so users are willing to put up with more), and that the market for BAT is efficient (so value isn't lost in transaction costs).
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).
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.
I spend a lot of time studying blockchain and Ethereum and wanted to clarify your remarks.
You need some sort of cryptocurrency for this as
microtransactions don't really work in the legacy
system.
Yes, you're right: Ethereum has lower transaction costs, lower non-monetary transaction costs, and ERC20 tokens are interoperable with other Ethereum-based services.
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.
This is a common sentiment that I believe is incorrect: if a project could use ETH or USDC instead of its own token, but still function correctly, then that token is malpractice. Such tokens are a blight on the blockchain industry.
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.
For MakerDAO, there is basically the "DAO shareholders" who profit from fees, but are the ones who will lose if the peg is not resolved. And for the other token, DAI, it needs a $1 peg and not pegged to etheruem.
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.
Perhaps what is meant by "don't work" relates more to the value/price/volatility vs actual transaction functionality.
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?
Stellar also supports the creation of stablecoins [1], which tend to have a consistent price relative to some other asset (Often USD).
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.
This only used to be true. The state of the art of Ethereum has very effective microtransactions. This will improve again by orders of magnitude within the next three years.
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
I'm constantly shocked by how any mention of blockchains is enough make masses of HNers look like absolute luddites. It's just another datastructure that happens to have an above-average level of hype surrounding it.
Hi, I maintained code with a Merkle tree before Satoshi picked his pen name. I’m just not impressed by the consensus algorithm. It’s not that I’m a Luddite, it’s that I understand some things about it that others don’t and will be tricked by.
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.
It’s also one of the dumbest consensus protocols in use. It’s a compromise to get what they wanted out of blockchain but nobody will admit it. Which makes me wonder about the rest of their claims. It’s intellectually dishonest and money is involved. No thank you.
people will provide all kinds of reasons but let's be real... it's so they can get rich. they own an enormous amount of BAT just like any stakeholders in a newly created cryptocurrency.
I'd assume to limit how much transaction costs for microtransactions from many users. Credit cards are awful for small transactions, so you buy a bulk of BAT every month to reduce transactional overhead and then let creators cash out when they have some threshould of BAT. They could have done it way simpler than a cryptocurrency, though, by just using a floating point number in a database somewhere, but I'm assuming they assume a distributed ledger is more secure somehow.
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.
Measures of volatility greatly impact perceived value of whatever it is you are holding/investing in. Don't try to make the claim to me that high volatility will have no effect on both sides of this market demanding BAT. That's silly talk.
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.
As I mentioned further up in the thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21532097), BAT is an ERC-20 token and can be easily converted to a stablecoin, which is pegged to $1 USD per token. So if you can avoid that if you want to.
I'm aware of so-called stable coins. The risk with them is you must trust they have the backing & will make good on your claim. Now, since Brave is a company dealing with customers and content creators who actually have to get paid by them, they already must be trusted...so I do think this would have a been a better way to go.
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?
The short answer: for many Brave and BAT users are just going to do the standard thing of using the BAT they earn to support content creators. These folks aren’t concerned with volatility.
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/
Brave "rewards" started appearing in my Android's notification center without my consent. Seems pretty intrusive to me, and I defiitely did not opt in...
doesn't Brave have to track your browsing history in order to accurately award sites "you visit the most"? Isn't that exactly the issue a lot of people have with ads in the first place?
(employee here) We do take security very seriously and have been able to deliver a 24 hour turn-around when there are Chromium updates (like the recent zero-day bugs which were patched in C78). We also have a bounty program open via hackerone that we take seriously which has helped us improve: https://hackerone.com/brave
Can't you make the exact same argument for people using Firefox or Chrome? That malware on your computer might be able to get at your browsing history is a risk with all browsers, not just Brave.
I sort of like this concept and was playing with Brave but I still can't explain to you how it works. I wish there were a page where I could see an ad, or something, a page that fully demos what is going on. The wallet page is a little confusing (I need to verify a wallet or something, which seems like it is a laborious process, etc). Seems very cool, but I hope they can keep simplifying it.
if you care about privacy you’d be better off with Mozilla Firefox. Brave is just a Trojan horse for Eich’s ambition to replace google as an ad broker. With a meaningless market share it’s not likely but still, it’s important to know what Brave is about, and it’s not about the users.
Whether they're struggling or not under their current revenue system (advertising) is irrelevant when you're talking about destroying their current revenue system (blocking ads) and replacing it with a new one (Brave rewards).
You aren't really meant to have a "system" of earning and spending BAT that balances each month.
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.
> 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.
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?
BAT is a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin, so yeah, you spend dollars to buy BAT, and put it your brave browser wallet, and decide your monthly donation budget. This is so that you can choose to support web and content creators online without the needs of ads. Think of it as automatic micro-donations based on your browsing.
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.
Why would either end users want to put $ into BAT, or content creators accept BAT in lieu of dollar given the massive volatility of BAT relative to $?
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.
These are common criticisms against cryptocurrency in general, and the answer is pretty much this:
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.
Absolutely, and so we're back to (in my opinion) the main valid arguments for cryptocurrency: censorship resistant transactions, and store of value through absolute scarcity immune to political desire to debauch fiat money.
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.
Important to note that the Brave browser + BAT are also achieving a more private browsing experience compared to a corporate browser and 3rd party ads allowing the tech to be abused to gather as much data on you as possible.
my issue with brave is the false pretense of caring about our privacy and being better than what's out there they started with then at some point they did a u-turn and went on selling ads... i just can't shake the feeling of that nothing good is coming out of this.
Ah there you go. That's exactly why I deleted brave. Make it more annoying, splendid! And in the process demonetise websites and claim it's all for the greater good.
so instead of spying on the level of websites, it is moving to the level of a browser? And not only aggregated clicks, but detailed statistics of browsing time per user?
I preferred the Flattr model, of just paying the content creators directly without the ad middle ground. I don't really see why I should use Brave over something like Firefox with uBlock Origin.
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.
many do, but uBlock Origin does not. Ad Block, Ad Block Plus and uBlock all allow advertisers who pay them. uBlock Origin so far has not sold out, and should be the only one people suggest.
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.
If people like Brave's ad model, all the power to them. I would personally never touch it. I'm not philosophically on board with the idea that paying people to look at ads is a pragmatic way forward. It doesn't matter if it's opt-in, free-to-play games with loot crates are opt-in, but the decision to go down that road will effect their decision making process when designing new features and I don't want to be part of it even indirectly.
The Brave approach seems to be the same as the infamous Adblock Plus, i.e. insert themselves as a middle-man between websites & ad networks on the one side and the user on the other and under the guise of "ethical ad blocking" extract a ransom.
That doesn't make it more ethical. Presumably if the sites wanted to operate under that model they would be already.
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.
> Presumably if the sites wanted to operate under that model they would be already.
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.
>There is no easy way to set up an own advertising network for every website
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.
It might be trivially easy for you, as you seem to have experience, but I don’t think it’s easy for your average joe who wants to set up a blog, local news site, forum, etc.
I don’t think either Brave or a custom advertising solution are unethical. It just seems like the barrier to entry to getting your own advertising solution up is a lot higher than setting up a site on squarespace, and that most small site owners can’t roll their own advertising solution.
setup DFP and find advertisers where? The ad networks you mention either exclude 95% of websites or pay worse than adsense for long-tail websites. You can find testimonials about them in tons of sites
You're absolutely right that they aren't a feasible option for long-tail sites (as you mention, most of the time you won't even get approved). However, long-tail sites don't monetize poorly because Google is screwing them. Long-tail sites monetize poorly because because the value of the content on long-tail sites isn't worth the Trust & Safety overhead for anyone except for Google.
Brave is unethical. The key problem is they insert themselves into the revenue stream without the consent of the web publishers. It's fine to block ads entirely, but substituting your own ads and collecting money from that is wrong.
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.
> Option 0. block no ads, publishers receive all of the applicable revenue from their preferred network
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.
Option 0 is no longer an option because ads are no longer just ads. They are malicious trackers that collect as much data about you as possible and sell it all over the place. It's unethical for a site to even host such "ads" as a method of monetization.
Because it inserts a middleman who takes a cut that the publisher did not enter into an agreement with. If it was just users giving to publishers, that would be fine. Having a middleman hold the publisher's monetization hostage is ethically dubious for the middleman.
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.
But nobody is holding anything hostage. When you use Brave, you can opt-in to display ads on your Browser, and while doing so still get ads from Brave. So the choice to cut-off ads from the content publisher is yours. If you think it's unethical - just do not block the ads.
Using a piracy tube is also optional. That doesn't make the people running the privacy tube any more ethical. Brave is replacing a monetization scheme that the publisher willingly entered into with one where Brave inserts itself into the existing monetization flow and stops the monetization completely unless the publisher deals with Brave. Similarly, the tube sites stop monetization for its users unless the creators deal with them.
> Having a middleman hold the publisher's monetization hostage is ethically dubious for the middleman.
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.
Tokens only go to verified publishers. Signing up to receive them is basically that consent. Otherwise (site or channel not verified), the transaction never leaves the user's browser
wikipedia.org, slashdot.org, and other sites that show a purple checkmark in the URL bar have gone through that verification process
"I blocked your source of revenue, now I'm holding some money which you can either sign up to receive a fraction of, or don't and you won't get any" doesn't sound like "consent" to me.
Setting aside the rewards program, people can and will use ad-blockers. Even if those were illegal for some reason, there are lists available (such as hosts, https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts) where you can make known tracking/advertising/etc hostnames non-routable
Are you saying that site owners should feel violated by folks installing ad-blockers (or using host files)?
No one believes that ad blockers are good for content creators.
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.
I think you have a point, but the Brave Rewards program can also be seen as a redistribution system. For the sites that one wishes to support, one can choose to disable the ad-blocking system in Brave and see the standard ads. For the sites that are distributing bad advertisements, the ad-blocking system is useful and might be wise to enable. The in-browser ads then give a small funding to the user who sends it back to the sites that were unblocked, further increasing their revenue.
The idea is to nudge advertisers and publishers towards a more transparent model without middlemen. Unethical is what's happening today, with middlemen making obscene profits. It's more like civil disobedience than unethical.
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.
e.g. when facebook took the page followers that people worked to acquire, and made them pay for users who intently subscribed to them, that was undestandable from a revenue-generating side, but unethical. Also when google forces people to pay the google tax.
I've been using Brave for a few months and I've never seen it substitute it's own ads within any applications or websites.
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.
In all honesty, I'm not sure how I feel about this model? I'm one of those people who has been out saying that the web needs a new business model. Well, here one is, and yet I find myself a bit hesitant to embrace it? It's probably just a matter of needing more information to fill in the blanks and explain the contradictions.
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.
> my mind tends to automatically start strategizing the long game
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.
Another perspective is that people don't want to pay for content, because we've been brainwashed to get content for free.
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.
If people aren't willing to look at ads, what will news articles become? ads. What will HN comments become? Ads (many blog posts already are). Advertising covers a need
I know advertising covers a need, there's nothing inherently wrong with advertising in an academic sense.
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.
>there's nothing inherently wrong with advertising in an academic sense.
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?
I'm talking about the basic principles of advertising. A simple sign in the street is advertising, as is a static graphic on a niche hobby website advertising products from a company people within that community respect. There's nothing wrong with letting people know your products exist. The problem is always in the execution.
> 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.
>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?
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.
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?
>How did these original purchasers find out about these products in order to buy and review them?
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.
> quality that people are willing to pay for though
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.
I didn't just mean news sites, they are a good example though.
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'm not convinced that they inherently need compensating though?
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
> I am. I find some excellent Youtube channels, and i m sure google is not compensating them enough.
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.
> I find some excellent Youtube channels, and i m sure google is not compensating them enough.
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.
That's a demand problem not a monopoly problem. You can't get advertiser attention because advertisers have limited interest in advertising on small scale properties because it's not a scalable way to do business.
If anything Google provides more opportunity because the alternative to AdSense existing would probably be no revenue at all for small web properties.
There are a decent number of us that don't object to ads, we object to tracking and surveillance.
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.
yes, traditional media is for the most part ad-funded and that's why it suffers from the same problem. There is plenty of non-traditional or local media that functions perfectly fine based on subscriptions. Diminishing or better destroying the ad model will be good for them.
> traditional media is for the most part ad-funded
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).
Two big issues for me that have kept me on Firefox despite being a huge cryptocurrency nerd:
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.
What would you have the Brave team do? Create a new html rendering engine from scratch? That is an incredibly challenging engineering project that would probably require years and many tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars to do well, and what would be the benefit to Brave's users and investors? It would just lead to loads of performance and compatibility issues, and it is fundamentally irrelevant to the core value proposition of Brave, which is to monetize ads on behalf of users and content creators.
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.
As I understand it, Gecko is much harder to work with, so it would take a lot of time to make something like brave compatible with both Chromium and Gecko/Firefox's APIs (or to even only move to Gecko/FF). See the following comment from [0]:
> 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.
I wonder if Webkit still have any resources behind using it on Windows since the documentation for building it[0] still says "Windows 8.1" (and I can't find links to the documentation or website SVN repo).
I used brave for about a year but stopped. There were issues with the Linux version - eg, it wouldn’t start after a system boot without using the terminal for the first time
There is no meaningful technical criticism of Chromium that I have seen. All of the anti-engine folks’ main argument seems to be “it has the Google stink on it”, but I can’t see how that is relevant in an application explicitly designed to avoid their ad/tracking/cloud services. It’s just a renderer.
What it is, is a backsliding into the days of IE where only one implementation was correct. Competition, yes, even at the engine level, is critical to a healthy web.
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].
When the Brave folks make their speed claim, it makes me curious if they genuinely don't understand the difference between above-the-fold page render time vs how long it takes for the spinner to stop spinning. Maybe they understand the difference but prefer to point people at the spinner because it's easier for them to make changes to stop the spinner sooner.
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 tried out Brave ~3 years ago when it was still Electron-based, and it was unfortunately too laggy to be a daily driver. Then I tried it out again ~6 months ago after they'd switched it to being a Chromium fork. The speed was much-improved, but it suddenly started spamming me with push notifications about various features, Brave rewards, etc. I felt like I was blocking web ads just to get native ads instead. You can turn them off deep in the settings, but I got sketched out and stopped using it.
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.
You turned on Brave Rewards at some point, it seems. If you want to tip and contribute anonymously but not get ads, just turn off ads (upper left of rewards settings).
Did you fix that issue yet where you were fraudulently claiming that you could receive tips for any content creator on the web but those sent to creators that hadn’t signed up went to Brave instead?
Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. If people show up here to discuss their work and get harangued, what incentive do they have to show up at all? If we allow commenters to disincentivize that, HN will be less interesting and worse.
It's fine to ask a good-faith question or make a good-faith critique. It's not fine to cross-examine.
I understand and I will endeavor to avoid any comments that may be mistaken as such in the future.
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've used Brave since March, and I'm really not impressed. For a browser that tries to be different, it's incredible how little consideration has been given to things that annoy users and that could probably be trivial to remove.
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.
It's perfect for my use case: Chrome but with all the google bits removed and built-in ad-blocking. Can't say any of those things you listed have bothered me. I don't use BAT.
Edit: Why do so many new accounts (green text) post to any thread about Brave?
Google basically decides what to implement, what not to implement, what to deprecate.
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.
I'm not sure if that's what the person I was asking meant by "general agenda", considering the change you're talking about (Manifest v3) doesn't even affect Brave[0], or any other Chromium based browser that simply doesn't wish to implement that specific change. Chromium based browsers change their code all the time, and decide whether or not incoming changes will be fully adopted by their browser themselves.
I was thinking the same. I considered Vivaldi for some time but it was just buggy. That's a shame because now that Chrome is going to release manifest v3, many users will look for alternatives. Vivaldi has had years to polish their UI but they have missed the train. Eventually I'll settle with Brave, I think.
I used Vivaldi for a long time and never encountered many UI bugs. About a year ago I switched to Firefox mainly because I don't want Chromium to take over the world.
What I miss most using Firefox is the ability to customize almost everything.
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.
This comment breaks the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Would you please review them and stick to the rules when posting here? Gratuitous insinuation about astroturfing is probably the most toxic of the common internet poisons, and it's important not to spread that unless you have some specific evidence for thinking so—and in that case you should email hn@ycombinator.com so we can look into it.
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.
I had the opposite take on the same product decisions.
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.
I've also been using it since about March, and been generally happy with it. It's faster than Chrome, and the built-in adblock is great, and the easy incognito/TOR modes are handy. That's basically all I want out of it - it's got all the other nifty Chrome goodies that I use (devtools etc.), the only Chrome extension I used regularly was Adblock, I don't use a whole lot of other power-user features. I've had some stability issues (it crashes about once every 2-3 days), but that could be because I'm running several versions behind. Looking forwards to trying 1.0.
Sooooo, basically all of your issues are related to extensions.
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.
> I always saw Brave as "not chrome, and not as much of a change as Firefox"
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.
Have you had the same experience with their mobile browser? I found the desktop experience lackluster but the only browser that's run faster on my phone is Firefox Focus.
Been running it on mobile for years. Built in adblock was all that I was looking for. Without the adblock all the video ads were draining my battery 1% per minute. Decent UI, good for people with basic needs.
I guess that a big amount of time and energy is used to bicker about money and legalities, instead of improving the GUI and UX. However, this may simply be the price for something new.. the net had twenty years to decide on micropayments, and now its ad-infestation and surveillance capitalism instead. So, the GUI whining is not convincing here...
Here's an idea. Go help them make it better. Fixing our broken ass network and the (bad) incentives that keep is afloat is one tough job. We need all the help we can get!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I use Brave on iOS with javascript blocked as it is the only* iOS browser which gives me the ability to easily use the Web without JS while giving me the ability to quickly enable it for the site where it makes sense, and still retain the ad blocking feature.
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.
Yes, there are multiple solutions available for Chrome/Firefox on other platforms, but on iOS there is only native/apple content blockers and browsers with built in ad blocking.
I've been using Brave for a few months, and I'm basically using it as an un-Googled Chrome. Not using the ad rewards system.
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.
What do you like about Safari that iOS Brave is missing? We are quite a bit faster than Safari, and our private mode is more aggressive against things like cookies and writing data to disk.
* 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.
Thanks for the verbose feedback. We seriously appreciate it. Wanted to respond to your items:
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.
Thanks, didn't realize there were settings for those things.
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".
Brave is awesome and I'm happy to see them reaching this point. I've been using this as my primary browser for the past 2 years and my absolute favorite thing about it is the simple profiles switching. HOWEVER that's also the thing that's irritated me the most as this software has changed: it started with person-specific tabs (awesome!) then moved to person-specific windows (okay ...), and now for the third time they've changed the icons available without letting me specify custom pictures (ugh!). Where is my ability to sync these PROFILES AS A GROUP? Setting up half a dozen "people" on each new computer becomes a tiresome exercise.
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.
> 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.
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.
Yeah, having seen all the useless previous attempts at paying users to watch/click ads, I'm not particularly hopeful for the long-term prospects of that system.
Seems like it might be better to just force the user to disburse those funds to the sites they visit.
Ha , it seems i ve made a few bucks (rather, bats) and didn't even know. I didn't know you can monetize twitter and reddit, but it makes a lot of sense! I kinda like the idea of users controlling sites indirectly by rewarding and punishing them for ads, kind of a direct-to-webmaster upvote button. Not sure about the way they implement their ad replacement, but if the basic model works there will probably be more companies that will enter the BAT ecosystem.
>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
I guess just blocking ads and trackers gives a significant performance boost they leverage in their marketing. I bet benchmark against any of the other browsers with ad-blockers installed would give a different result.
Ads aren't inherently bad, but modern digital advertising has been co-opted by bad actors. Brave offers an ad-free experience by default; this is necessary for your privacy and safety online.
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.
Did Brave ever claim to reduce the use of ads? As I understand, they want to shift the revenue model and put control back in hands of users. You can use their browser and ignore ads (also not receive Bats) or you can see ads and receive compensation for it.
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.
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.
Brave's business reminds me of Adblock+. They started all "we are cool, we make the web a better place" (which they did by the way), then they didn't know how to monetize, so they introduced "non invasive ads". Which is still ads, except this time, it's up to them to choose how ads should look like.
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.
I think they want users to be able to control the web through their attention. It's a great idea that acts as indirect pressure on websites to behave. As things are now, users have no way to slap a site on the wrist for being horribly slow and invasive. Brave seems to want to change that.
#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.
#1 Their ad-blocker is also a tracking blocker and a pretty strict one at that. They also spend a lot of time optimizing the performance[0] of this ad-blocking. This improves the browsing experience.
#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.
ad 2: Brave takes a 30% cut of the add income. The adds you block are targeted adds, thus they yield a higher income. Besides that there are usually service fees for converting your BAT to other currencies.
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.
The current case is content creators not receiving any reward because people are using ad-blockers. I don't see how that can possible be "best case" a "notably worse outcome". Worse case, content creators get some pittance where before they were getting nothing. Best case content creators can be entirely directly funded by the people actually consuming their content.
Re: criticism 1, this is mostly true. However the fact that it's "not google" adds some privacy, or at least diffuses vulnerabilities.
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.
Paypal is the most popular billing service that is present everywhere. By not using Paypal you essentially create extra steps for the end user. This goes 2 ways, you need to purchase BAT if you want to use their reward system.
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.
Source on tech savvy streamers being unable to deal with BAT? The process is pretty straightforward. If you're fine with centralized services you can:
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.
I've been using Brave on android for a while now and it has been really good - it is basically the same as chrome, except with a built-in ad blocker. Highly recommend it as your daily driver.
I use firefox on desktop, but found firefox on android to be a bit clunky the last time I tried it (years ago)
Firefox on Android is a bit clunky, but Mozilla is currently working on a new version that will (hopefully) be much cleaner and faster. You can try it now as "Firefox Preview" on the Google Play Store.
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.
Here are two problems I have noticed with brave-browser : The layout is great on widescreen monitors but breaks on my 15'' laptop. Sites like YouTube render as a garish mess of incongruously placed whitespace. This is a major issue.
Also, the brave icons for receiving 'rewards', when activated, are too large obstrusive when displayed on websites. I had to turn them off in settings.
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.
Is Brave making any amount of money from their advertising system? I can't find any public communications about it, and I would expect them to be touting if the numbers are good.
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.
https://brave.com/transparency shows revenue share BAT buys to pay users their 70% from invoices paid in fiat. Some ad buyers use BAT, and we do some barters.
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. :-)
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:
I'm going to give this a try again. I REALLY want the model of micropayments vs ads to work. I realize content creators need to get paid, I just refuse to be subtly influenced by ads in my day to day life. I currently use an ad blocker in Chrome to get around that but I'm perfectly fine paying $5 a month to creators I use.
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.
There are a lot of negative comments here about Brave. They fall into two classes. One group thinks the present state of affairs with the web is ok, so there is no need for Brave. That view is so cracked that I am not going to bother responding to it.
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.
This is a pretty cool idea - I'm not sure how intrusive the OS notification are going to be but I'm willing to give it a shot as long as they don't collect any personal info on me.
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?
In my experience (2017 MBP running Mojave), it is much, much faster than Firefox. I have lots of tabs open, and my fan almost never kicks on anymore. With FF, even using ublock and even a pihole, the fan was constantly at full throttle. Maybe I was doing other things wrong, but switching to Brave has made a huge difference for me. I say this as someone who stood by FF for a decade and a half.
The other day I tried to look up a recipe for beef stew on my phone. Normally my web reading experience tends to be limited to big news sites and tech on a Desktop or Tablet - the ads there are bad, but not terrible. But recipe sites are a whole different category of horrible. I was shocked.
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.
Having switched recently from Firefox to Brave, I must say it's a pretty nice browser but with some unwanted quirks.
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
Sorry I've tried to give Brave a shot for a couple of months and the 3-6x faster browsing is nonsense. It's really slow compared to Chrome or Firefox. Just do a quick comparison yourself, you can probably count seconds on a couple of sites you visit regularly whereas Chrome loads instantly.
I run a high spec machine with 3 browsers(Brave and Google Chrome, Firefox) 8-10 hours a day every work day. I respectfully completely disagree. I do not find it slow in comparison to the others, I do find it much much quicker on 90%+ sites.
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.
I would be more inclined to try BAT if it were just an extension that I could add to any browser of my choice. Also, having tried Brave it doesn't seem like you actually have the private keys to your own wallet since I wasn't able to withdraw any funds without an Uphold account.
Please return "Brave" to your User-Agent[0] so we can return to opting out of your cryptocurrency.[1] (Yes, I'm aware of the changes since the scandal broke[2].)
I don't understand why they didn't use a stable coin/transition BAT to a stable coin, the volatility of BAT probably keeps creators uneasy. Why sign up for a service where contributions can lose half their value overnight.
When did you see that type of volatility? Advertiser dollars go into the system through purchases of BAT by the team. This helps to maintain steady value. You can see previous transactions (and more) at brave.com/transparency.
Almost every post that links to brave.com makes it to the frontpage withing minutes. And all criticism is buried with lots of shilling. This company has been compromising HN for years now, as well as other influential online communites like Reddit and 4chan.
A privacy-focused browser that took money from the Palantir guy. Hard pass. That's before considering the CEO's past, unexplained donation to a hate campaign spearheaded by the Mormon church.
I keep trying to use Brave but I feel that it drops the ball. I think Hamcha encapsulates most of my grievances.
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.
We've still got BAT enabled on PortableApps.com with the standard custom Brave browser header and donation ask you setup via their program. We got 31.35 BAT (about $8.08) for around 2.7 million page views in the last month. We also got a single 0.95 BAT (about 24 cent) donation. It seems that - right now at least - the only way a site will make enough money to be worth it is via Brave referrals (advertising Brave to your users to get them to switch).
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.
Can you login to the StackDriver metrics console with Brave yet? I had to disable everything, literally all protections, to get this to non-endless redirect, its difficult to whitelist as there is dozens of domains from (gcloud to accounts.google.com, to some sd/stackdrivers one) at this point it I gave up
I had this issue, but on Firefox and with Privacy Badger and uBlock Origin enabled. Some cookie seems to get blocked, leading to the infinite redirect loop. At least in this case I could just disable two addons temporarily and was good to go.
> “Either we all accept the $330 billion ad-tech industry treating us as their products, exploiting our data, piling on more data breaches and privacy scandals, and starving publishers of revenue; or ...
Give Brave a piece of that moist and delicious $330B cake, because...
> 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
I used brace for a while on mobile but stopped once brave started to out ads in the notification bar. I don't remember exactly what they were for - probably BAT and the browser itself - but I definitely don't need another pathway to get slammed. Back to Firefox and happy as can be.
Weird to watch how long it takes to load a single site using their demo video. Makes me think that they are using some type of preloading, which would mean that your web requests are actually being sent to Brave. It appears after some brief research that they are infact precaching, and the other browsers they are testing against we don't have any details on their configuration but can clearly see that they do not have uBlock Origin enabled. I wouldn't consider this a fair test.
We don't collect your browsing data, and it isn't proxied through Brave. I am unsure what preloading information you found. All of our configurations are open source, so if there is something particular you are looking for, it is visible. We are also comparing browser defaults here. However, our adblocking approach is built directly into the browser using a Rust library and can function faster than a Chrome extension.
I put Brave on the backburner a while ago because of some random display glitches, mostly on YouTube, and the built-in adblocker not really being up to par with something like uBO. but this sounds like a good an excuse as any to try it again.
Is this the browser that blocks ads unless the website allows brave ads and get brave crypto. Essentially the same model the mafia uses. I'm sure this will go great.
It's so weird, I had this exact idea when bitcoin came out. But it seemed like you'd need a money transmitter license to be able to do it? So I gave up.
General reminder that Brave is a scam; they forcefully converted user funds that were held in BTC to their own competitive token, BAT, which seeks to monetize your attention.
Not to mention the massive privacy leak that is a public network of transactions, revealing browsing habits by way of advertising payments.
Initially I liked the concept of brave, but they destroyed themselves by bloating it with this coin/payment stuff that is not possible to remove 100%. Back to Firefox now.
Fuck ads. Fuck tracking. Fuck making me part of your 'audience'. There has to be a better way. I'm going with blocking until there is a better answer. Brave may be a step in the right direction but its not the solution.
The main reason I block ads is because ad networks make so many requests (and the ads load so slow) that it always affects my browsing. I am either waiting for the page to load because of poorly engineered synchronous ad network code, or I'm having my content fumbled around at the tail end of pageload. Both situations are obtrusive, aggravating, and slow me down.
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.
Brave is a scam just like most "privacy centered" parasite products like DDG and VPN providers. All these companies are run by shameless and aggressive useless parasites who actually offer nothing but a rebranded product made by others. It's sad that a community supposedly filled by software engineers fall for and promote such scams
Yeah, seems weird that Hacker News is censoring this. I guess they don't want people to know that. Maybe Brave gave them some money to push this announcement.
Several posts in this subthread were flagged by users, probably because they were off topic and broke the site guideline against flamewar. The Eich/Prop 8 flamewar has been repeated dozens if not hundreds of times on HN over 10 years now. Nothing new will come of it, and nothing that predictable can be on topic here, because the defining feature of ontopicness is gratifying intellectual curiosity: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
(Nobody pays us anything, let alone to "push announcements"—of all the things we could do to ruin this community, that would be the stupidest. We don't accept gifts either FWIW.)
I mean, that was a pretty terrible thing to do and learning it does color my perception of Brave. I just wish the OP had provided that context (and they probably wouldn't have gotten so downvoted by others if they had).
How is donating money to a campaign that passed with 7 million votes a "terrible thing to do"? Are we not allowed to have an opinion that is different from the intelligentsia?
This sort of thing does color my perception of Brave in the other direction. The fact that Eich refused to "confess and recant" in the face of internet lynch mobs and getting fired as CEO of Mozilla makes him rather brave in my estimation.
I am all for fighting capitalism, but I wont tolerate any form of ads. Ads are a threat for free thinking. They are pollution, poison, for the mind. I dont want to face any form of manipulation.
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.
> I wont tolerate any form of ads. Ads are a threat for free thinking.
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.
Your first comment doesn’t make sense or maybe I am misreading. Do you mean you are fighting for capitalism or fighting against it? You are implying you are against capitalism by banning advertising which is a very capitalist thing. I’m confused
Whoever uses Brave for "privacy" reasons should understand that Chrome offers more privacy due to fingerprintability.
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.
If you're talking about the canvas id fingerprint which is identical across all instances of the browser, that lets Brave users hide in the crowd, so it's literally more private.
Panopticlick needs to update their docs to make that clearer.
There are billion of vectors that are still fingerprintable. Best examples are fonts and window decorations. And these cannot be fixed by Brave without increasing entropy. And brave should know this.
Hmm, I get identical results from Chrome and Brave on my Ubuntu desktop in Panopticlick, which doesn't disprove your argument, but it looks like Chrome is fingerprintable-enough that the difference may not matter.
https://brave.com/malvertising-homeland-security/
"Brave warns US Senate & Congress: foreign state actors can use targeted ads to run code on US government computers, exploiting conventional browsers"
Oh, my. I am so scared. And Brave is of course a knight in shining armor ready to protect our shaken foundations.
I am not arguing about possibility of getting virus through ad on browser. My point is that they are using scaremongering in a hope to advance their product. They have no real proof that it is more secure.
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.
Brave Rewards is off-by-default. It's up to you to opt-in. And, once you do, you can set the number of ads to be shown each hour (upper-limit). The user is always in control.
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.