Wikipedia Is Now a Brave Verified Publisher • Hacker News Board

Re: Wikipedia Is Now a Brave Verified Publisher

#101

Post by BrendanEich » Thu, Aug 29, 2019, 5:23 PM UTC

dymk wrote: post #69

jonathansampson wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I'm not sure what you're referring to. Brave has 2 ad-models (one still in the works). First, the User Model. In this model, user's must first opt-in to participate. If/when they do, advertisements are shown (at a user-controllable rate) as OS notifications. When a notification is shown, 70% of the revenue is deposited into the user's wallet. The second model is the Publisher Model; this is in the works now. U…

We'll see how long that lasts once the VC money runs out. Blocking ads and displaying your own certainly is an "ad replacement" model though, and websites that don't want to participate have no choice.

We're not doing ad replacement. We will not without publisher as partner. Anyone saying otherwise is repeating a falsehood.

Re: Wikipedia Is Now a Brave Verified Publisher

#102

Post by BrendanEich » Thu, Aug 29, 2019, 5:24 PM UTC

dymk wrote: post #94

lukemulks wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Brave employee here) We block 3rd party ads and tracking, that collect user data, often without their knowledge or consent. Brave Ads are disabled by default, to ensure that no one sees ads that is not interested in viewing ads. This provides a benefit to advertisers as well, as they currently dump a lot of money into a dumpster fire, and are basically tasked with measuring how many of the pixels appeared on the scr…

You don’t block third party ads; you block first party ads that the website depends on for revenue

We don't block 1st party ads. We block tracking tags including GPT/GTM, which will block some direct sold ads. We can with the publisher as partner fix this, but not by whitelisting tracking.

Re: Wikipedia Is Now a Brave Verified Publisher

#103

Post by steveharman » Thu, Aug 29, 2019, 5:27 PM UTC

bsclifton wrote: post #28

zargon wrote: post #12

I really like what Brave is doing. I wish it was built on Firefox instead of Chromium. I just don't see myself leaving Firefox without major upheaval in the browser space.

(Brave employee here) Curious: what are some of the shortfalls you see in Chromium? Before I joined Brave, the desktop browser was originally using Gecko (from Firefox). Ultimately, there were some problems and the decision was made to move to Chromium. On iOS, Brave is forked from Firefox though You can check out more detail on Reddit where folks asked why FF was not used (which has links to more detailed info): htt…

Any idea when Brave will support password sync across machines / devices? It's a bit of a limitation right now.

Re: Wikipedia Is Now a Brave Verified Publisher

#104

Post by Ididntdothis » Thu, Aug 29, 2019, 5:27 PM UTC

zargon wrote: post #12

I really like what Brave is doing. I wish it was built on Firefox instead of Chromium. I just don't see myself leaving Firefox without major upheaval in the browser space.

“ I wish it was built on Firefox instead of Chromium. “

I commented in another thread. This is one area where Mozilla has failed. It should have been the goto engine for projects like Electron or Brave or even MS Edge instead of Chromium. But the last time I looked Mozilla was not very friendly towards developers who want to use their engine.

Re: Wikipedia Is Now a Brave Verified Publisher

#105

Post by basch » Thu, Aug 29, 2019, 5:27 PM UTC

dymk wrote: post #94

lukemulks wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Brave employee here) We block 3rd party ads and tracking, that collect user data, often without their knowledge or consent. Brave Ads are disabled by default, to ensure that no one sees ads that is not interested in viewing ads. This provides a benefit to advertisers as well, as they currently dump a lot of money into a dumpster fire, and are basically tasked with measuring how many of the pixels appeared on the scr…

You don’t block third party ads; you block first party ads that the website depends on for revenue

I just visited https://techmeme.com/river in Brave and on the right you will their first party sponsored posts, alive and well.

Re: Wikipedia Is Now a Brave Verified Publisher

#106

Post by jonathansampson » Thu, Aug 29, 2019, 5:28 PM UTC

jammygit wrote: post #83

lukemulks wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The catalog contains edge-cached URLs and metadata for the ads. The size remains small, as we're not compressing down images, rich media, video or other assets in the catalog. (I work at Brave, and am on the team bringing the ad platform to market)

Could you clarify a tiny bit? I’m not sure I follow. If you are not including images or video in the ads, does that mean that you are downloading them at view time from somewhere, or that the ads have no images or video? Also, what are edge cached urls?

Ads first appear as OS notifications on your desktop. This notification displays plain-text content from the regional ad catalog. You get 70% of the ad revenue at this point.

If you click the notification, Brave opens a tab in the Brave browser and navigates to the advertisement location. At this point, the ad can load images, video, etc.

Important to note, however, that ad pages are not given any special treatment in the Brave browser. They are subject to the same privacy/security restrictions on all other pages. Third parties are severely limited, if not entirely prevented from engaging in the session.

Re: Wikipedia Is Now a Brave Verified Publisher

#107

Post by Ididntdothis » Thu, Aug 29, 2019, 5:28 PM UTC

jonathansampson wrote: post #54

jchw wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC it was actually originally Firefox. I wonder what exactly made them switch?

This is correct. Note that both of our founders are from the Firefox team originally. Our CTO, Brian Bondy, originally built the first Brave prototype on the Gecko engine. Unfortunately, after much testing, it was clear that a modified Chromium would be the better route forward. You can imagine this was not a decision taken lightly, as both of these individuals have lived and breathed Gecko/Mozilla for years prior.

It doesn’t speak for Mozilla that even with these people Chromium turned out to be the better option.

Re: Wikipedia Is Now a Brave Verified Publisher

#108

Post by NoodleIncident » Thu, Aug 29, 2019, 5:30 PM UTC

jonathansampson wrote: post #79

admax88q wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're saying that the quality of the ads shown are terrible.

The types of ads shown by early participants is skewed toward blockchain and security topics. For many users, this is not very interesting. But the inventory changes and diversifies with time. We're seeing this happen today, already. The machine-learning model within the browser will also adapt over time, getting smarter and more attuned to your interests and habits. Quality will increase with Time and Inventory. We'…

> some scammy crypto-of-the-day which even FB and Google ban

The comment you first replied to said that the ads were so bad and scammy that they shouldn't be shown to anyone, not that they were poorly targeted.

You're free to disagree with what they said, but it's weird to respond as if they'd said something else entirely that you already agree with.

Re: Wikipedia Is Now a Brave Verified Publisher

#109

Post by basch » Thu, Aug 29, 2019, 5:30 PM UTC

jonathansampson wrote: post #97

basch wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

thats a bit of semantics. if they block someone elses ads, and display their own ads they are still replacing what a persons attention is drawn to, even if it is an overlay instead of injected into the page. (its literally called an attention token, diverting attention to a new target.) should they be allowed to create an ad driven piece of software? absolutely? but if that software is an ad blocking browser, its cre…

The problem is more nuanced than "they block someone elses ads, and display their own," though. Modern digital ads (since their start in the early-mid 90s, have been about data collection. In 2009, online advertising was further adapted to include a process known as Real-Time Bidding, where users are auctioned off (usually in less than 100ms) for each ad-slot on each page they visit. The ad industry has been transfor…

I'm not defending the ad industry, the worst players have ruined it for everyone. It is 100% a safety hazard to surf the web without ad and javascript blocking. I absolutely support users having the choice of what programs to render on their devices, and being allowed to control what javascript executes when a page loads. If it breaks the site while your mucking with its local execution, thats on the user (although ideally all sites should have accessibility compatibility, and work as just plain text. 1st party ads would still work fine.) And although I find them annoying, paywalls and ad blocking detection are choices that publishers can choose to make.

Re: Wikipedia Is Now a Brave Verified Publisher

#110

Post by dmix » Thu, Aug 29, 2019, 5:33 PM UTC

Ididntdothis wrote: post #104

zargon wrote: post #12

I really like what Brave is doing. I wish it was built on Firefox instead of Chromium. I just don't see myself leaving Firefox without major upheaval in the browser space.

“ I wish it was built on Firefox instead of Chromium. “ I commented in another thread. This is one area where Mozilla has failed. It should have been the goto engine for projects like Electron or Brave or even MS Edge instead of Chromium. But the last time I looked Mozilla was not very friendly towards developers who want to use their engine.

Everyone is also switching to headless chrome for automated testing since it's faster than Gecko.

I don’t know if FF has changed in this regard but it takes a long time to get rid of a perception of poor performance and this should have been their first priority long ago (which seems to be the case with their Rust work and GeckoView/mobile preview browser). In addition to how far they were behind Chrome security wise for so long, such as isolated tabs.

But I agree, this should have been Mozilla's niche that they owned. Owning the early adopters is critical to mainstream success IMO. We're the ones that regular people listen to when making tech choices.