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Wikipedia Is Now a Brave Verified Publisher

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Re: Wikipedia Is Now a Brave Verified Publisher

#331

Post by BrendanEich »

JohnTHaller wrote: post #277
rjf72 wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free money isn't free money? Sure it's only a few bucks a month but look at that in terms of your user base. What are you going to assume your marketshare of Brave users is? For context consider the marketshare of Firefox is in the single digits. Brave is probably a fraction of that. If we assume Brave's popularity is 10% of that of Firefox, that'd give you an expected userbase of That'd be $3/month for, at most, 10k…

If our entire userbase switched to Brave and we made $300 a month from them, I'd have to shut the site down. Either way, it's really not worth the time and effort to set it up right now unless you're a huge site like wikipedia and you don't have any ad revenue to lose. I do think it will be interesting what this does to donations to wikipedia. It would make sense, I think, that Brave users may donate less per user ov…

Here's an estimate, rough and from small-N sample size:

https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1155334969583030272

Quoting:

"Looks like 26 people donated 50.35BAT in 25 days. comScore has 100 page/day browsing average. Assume 1http://aternos.com pages per day for all 26 ppl & all unblock ads there: at most .65N x PageCPM 50.35 BAT or PageCPM 77.46BAT / N =~ $20/N. I believe BAT wins."

Again, disclaimers: rough, small-N, lots of other problems. We will do proper case studies as we can. But assuming we would max out at $300 to you is unjustified.

Re: Wikipedia Is Now a Brave Verified Publisher

#332

Post by BrendanEich »

kexx wrote: post #307

Please stop promoting brave either you do it in good faith or paid or you are a shill. everything with "Acceptable ads program" is a cancer

We don't do "Acceptable ads program". Are you willing to look at what we do more closely, in order to understand it?

/be

Re: Wikipedia Is Now a Brave Verified Publisher

#333

Post by BrendanEich »

rjf72 wrote: post #273
riquito wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's completely neglect in those "facts" that Google offers the best search engine and that people want to use it

I think that ship has pretty much sailed, but in either case that has nothing to do with Firefox's decision. If they wanted to use Google, for whatever reason, they could do so while supporting user privacy by piping it through e.g. Startpage. They just want the Google $$$, privacy be damned.

I won't violate any NDA still binding me to Mozilla by agreeing that the default search deal in Mozilla is and historically has been done for funding the company. If they wanted to switch, they could -- but it would hurt financially, big time. That could imperil the project as a whole. It would definitely limit salaries at the top.

Re: Wikipedia Is Now a Brave Verified Publisher

#334

Post by [deleted] »

kerkeslager wrote: post #305
marichards wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No solution, but I think we'll never find one if debate, about problems with web privacy, suggests Mozilla is the answer - until they put into actions their words, they shouldn't be seen as the way to go. Whilst I have reservations about Brave, from a privacy standpoint they appear to be more trustworthy and some of the actions they are involved with, like complaints to regulators are far beyond anything we've seen o…

> Whilst I have reservations about Brave, from a privacy standpoint they appear to be more trustworthy and some of the actions they are involved with, like complaints to regulators are far beyond anything we've seen of Mozilla - sure they may have corporate motives, but right now they appear to align far better with consumer privacy. There's a lot for me to think about in your post, and most of it I agree with, but I…

[deleted]

Re: Wikipedia Is Now a Brave Verified Publisher

#335

Post by BrendanEich »

kerkeslager wrote: post #305
marichards wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No solution, but I think we'll never find one if debate, about problems with web privacy, suggests Mozilla is the answer - until they put into actions their words, they shouldn't be seen as the way to go. Whilst I have reservations about Brave, from a privacy standpoint they appear to be more trustworthy and some of the actions they are involved with, like complaints to regulators are far beyond anything we've seen o…

> Whilst I have reservations about Brave, from a privacy standpoint they appear to be more trustworthy and some of the actions they are involved with, like complaints to regulators are far beyond anything we've seen of Mozilla - sure they may have corporate motives, but right now they appear to align far better with consumer privacy. There's a lot for me to think about in your post, and most of it I agree with, but I…

I can't find anything from you at that link.

Would you mind inlining your biggest 3 objections? Thanks.

Re: Wikipedia Is Now a Brave Verified Publisher

#336

Post by kerkeslager »

BrendanEich wrote: post #335
kerkeslager wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Whilst I have reservations about Brave, from a privacy standpoint they appear to be more trustworthy and some of the actions they are involved with, like complaints to regulators are far beyond anything we've seen of Mozilla - sure they may have corporate motives, but right now they appear to align far better with consumer privacy. There's a lot for me to think about in your post, and most of it I agree with, but I…

I can't find anything from you at that link. Would you mind inlining your biggest 3 objections? Thanks.

It looks like my post fell off the front page, so the hashtag link doesn't work. :/ Copy-pasting my comment here:

Looking into this only briefly, it didn't take long to find a lot of very questionable decisions made by Brave:

1. They're positioning themselves as both an advertiser and a privacy advocate[1], which strikes me as more of a strategy for bootstrapping revenue than a trustworthy moral position. The entire point of crypto micropayments is to pay for content with crypto rather than attention/privacy. Why should I view Brave's ads rather than the other ads on the internet from advertisers who also claim their ads respect privacy? The fact that Brave has decided to get into bed with advertisers at all shows they're committed to profit, not to users: micropayments are just a way to diversify for Brave, which will quickly fall to the wayside if it fails to provide the revenue they want.

2. The entire concept of a Brave Verified Publisher stinks. It positions Brave as a censor. If this system takes off, then suddenly Brave has control over who gets paid for content on the internet, and can censor content they don't like. And this isn't hypothetical, they plan to do this: their TOS[2] explicitly contains a code of conduct which contains a long list of things they will terminate your account for: they promise to use their power as censors to enforce of US copyright/patent law and also a wide variety of subjective social norms. This also shows their commitment to being an advertiser rather than an application that serves users: if you're serving users then you let them pay for the content they want to pay for, but if you're serving advertisers, then you can't let advertisers brands be seen as supporting questionable content.

3. BAT based in Ethereum seems to be basically a way to ride the wave of cryptocurrency hype while still positioning themselves as a central authority/middleman. If they weren't trying to position themselves as a middleman, they would just make the micropayments in Ether directly, or better yet, in a cryptocurrency that doesn't have a history of forking the blockchain to fix an bug in a major users' contract[3]. If they weren't trying to ride cryptocurrency hype, they'd just allow micropayments via a much-simpler-and-more-reliable REST API or similar since they're already the central authority anyway.

I don't think we can trust Brave with our privacy or attention. I don't think we can trust Brave with the decision of who gets paid for content. I don't think we need Brave as a middleman to pay content publishers. I don't like the state of how content is paid for on the internet, but I don't think Brave is the solution.

It's disappointing to me that Wikipedia has decided to associate their name with Brave's. A big part of why I respect Wikipedia is their long-standing policy of keeping independent from advertisers, and it seems naive of them to have not realized that Brave is an advertiser. I can understand why Wikipedia has made this decision, but I still think it is a compromise of Wikipedia's values, and I hope they'll reverse their decision in the future.

[1] https://brave.com/brave-ads-waitlist/

[2] https://brave.com/terms-of-use/

[3] https://www.coindesk.com/ethereum-executes-blockchain-hard-f...

Re: Wikipedia Is Now a Brave Verified Publisher

#337

Post by BrendanEich »

onyva wrote: post #279
marichards wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whatever Mozilla's focus is when you load Firefox you experience the following: 1. On ESR first time it loads two pages load including https://www.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/60.8.0/firstrun/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/ You then find first party cookies are set by Google Analytics _ga GA1.2.1671101194.1567114471 _gat_UA-36116321-1 1 _gid GA1.2.377831647.1567114471 In the EU this would breach the ePri…

Talking about the cesspool of Brave employee lurking here, this discussion might be interesting when you guys start identifying as such. It didn’t go unnoticed that you guys are all over the place attacking Firefox and Mozilla !!! on privacy. Really? Clearly you think this is your entry point for some reason. Brave is a corporation. For profit. It can’t and shouldn’t be trusted. Especially not a company run by a disg…

You've been downvoted, but your words deserve a reply. Profit motive does not go away in a "non-profit" (Mozilla Corp is the for-profit subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation; top salary last seen [2017] was $2.3M+). It takes innumeracy or worse to miss that Mozilla depends for its profits (to pay such salaries and bonuses) mainly on the Google search deal.

In my opinion, this conflict of interest between users and Mozilla's search revenue share held back tracking protection in Firefox over the years.

Meanwhile Brave has a transparent rate card, where we pay the user 70% of the gross revenue for user-private ads, and 15% for publisher ads (not yet deployed; the publisher makes 70% and we take same as the user). So we get Good luck pressuring Mozilla to cut its top exec's pay from seven figures. Your words are empty.

Re: Wikipedia Is Now a Brave Verified Publisher

#338

Post by kerkeslager »

BrendanEich wrote: post #330
kerkeslager wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would never opt-in to ads even if there was some upside. That's like asking if I'd like to see billboards on a beautiful drive through Colorado and in return you'll throw some change in my center console. I'll just take the beautiful drive and you can keep the cash. This, and the fact that Brave has decided to get in bed with advertisers at all seriously undermines their credibility.

Only if you assume we enable tracking for Brave Ads. But we do not. Please look deeper, otherwise you're just writing false stuff based on assumptions.

No, nothing in my post is false. I knew how your ad model works when I wrote that post. You're in bed with advertisers because you're taking money from them and providing them a service.

Look, I don't have anything against you personally. I'm sure you're a good, kind person with pure intentions. But tracking or not, advertising is not the way to fund a browser that serves users. You'll always be beholden to advertisers for your cash flow, and you're always going to be making choices between prioritizing users or prioritizing your income. Sometimes the choices will seem minor and it won't be clear which direction to go, and you'll compromise and the focus on users will be eroded. And at some point the choice might be between screwing over users and shutting the doors of your company due to lack of funding or something else. Historically, some people have chosen users[1] but most have chosen to stay open.

I hope you prove me wrong, I really do. But you'll excuse my skepticism at this point.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit

Re: Wikipedia Is Now a Brave Verified Publisher

#339

Post by BrendanEich »

kerkeslager wrote: post #336
BrendanEich wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't find anything from you at that link. Would you mind inlining your biggest 3 objections? Thanks.

It looks like my post fell off the front page, so the hashtag link doesn't work. :/ Copy-pasting my comment here: Looking into this only briefly, it didn't take long to find a lot of very questionable decisions made by Brave: 1. They're positioning themselves as both an advertiser and a privacy advocate[1], which strikes me as more of a strategy for bootstrapping revenue than a trustworthy moral position. The entire…

Too many words, I'll use fewer.

1. Ad spend last year was over $100M in the US alone, ~$300M globally. Heading toward $1T globally. Users subscribing or paying out of goodwill won't cover this if we block it all and corner the market. We are doing anonymous and private ads (also donations and subscriptions, note well), no conflict with user in data or revenue share. Read my comments here, e.g., https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20841558. For you to claim a conflict, you have to show we make more than the user, cheat the user, or somehow steal or leak data to our advantage.

2. We are in the middle phase of a multiyear roadmap, where the last phase will distribute domain verification to many oracles, if we can't bake it into validators on-chain. If you know of an existing blockchain solution, please lay it on us. Also for handling OFAC and other KYC regulations (where we use Uphold today). We cannot intermediate ad revshares, and no blockchain today can either. We do not censor, our test for domain ownership or channel control is objective. If you think we won't get on to phase 3 of our roadmap, fine -- but don't use your speculations as if they were facts.

3. Here is a chart from end of 2017 showing relative volatility. BAT was 2nd least volatile above USDT, we beat Bitcoin and Ether. But we also have other advantages via BAT, including our user growth pool. If you discount that then you are arguing we should find a billionaire to replace it with Ether out of the grace of his or her charity. Who might that person be? Your argument here is cheap unless it's you.

https://twitter.com/woonomic/status/942921951252709376

I don't find these to be objections based on reason so much as misunderstandings or hostile speculations that we will fail. You aren't required to agree with us, we're not imposing any system on you. If you don't like BAT, just use Brave with its default settings. If you don't like Brave, there are lots of other browsers. If you have rational arguments against any bug or design flaw in our intentional work to replace surveillance with privacy tech for donating and advertising, I'm all ears.

Re: Wikipedia Is Now a Brave Verified Publisher

#340

Post by JohnTHaller »

BrendanEich wrote: post #331
JohnTHaller wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If our entire userbase switched to Brave and we made $300 a month from them, I'd have to shut the site down. Either way, it's really not worth the time and effort to set it up right now unless you're a huge site like wikipedia and you don't have any ad revenue to lose. I do think it will be interesting what this does to donations to wikipedia. It would make sense, I think, that Brave users may donate less per user ov…

Here's an estimate, rough and from small-N sample size: https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1155334969583030272 Quoting: "Looks like 26 people donated 50.35BAT in 25 days. comScore has 100 page/day browsing average. Assume 1 http://aternos.com pages per day for all 26 ppl & all unblock ads there: at most .65N x PageCPM 50.35 BAT or PageCPM 77.46BAT / N =~ $20/N. I believe BAT wins." Again, disclaimers: rough, smal…

Thanks for that, Brendan. More data is always helpful, even when small-N like this. We're going to continue participating and monitoring it for PortableApps.com and see how things shake out. Also, the login page caching and editor issues seem resolved over the last few months so I updated my post in our forums.
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