Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Goodbye Brave

arunmozhi.in

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 252 posts

Re: Goodbye Brave

#231

Post by drdeca »

ahelwer wrote: post #196
drdeca wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do see potential value in being informed by an ad of a type of product I didn’t know existed. The type of ads I strongly dislike for reasons beyond like, breaking pages and tracking, are ones that repeatedly show for something which I already know exists in order to promote a brand. If someone wants to put up an ad for “we make any bronze parts”, well, I looked to see if any of them were cheap enough to get as a ga…

If you didn't have a pre-existing desire for that product which led you to search out its existence then why was having the desire for it instilled in you a good thing? Why deliberately create the hole of dissatisfaction within yourself?

Dissatisfaction?

You see a potential for dissatisfaction, I see a potential for opportunity.

Also, allocating time for “searching for products that I don’t know of but which seems like they might exist, which would improve things” seems, slow an inefficient?

Like, I previously had thought “it is bad that printers basically all have drm-ish ink cartridges.” When I saw an ad for a printer which instead had refillable ink tanks, I regarded that as an improvement. (As it happened the printer had some unfortunate bugs where it semi-frequently needs to be forcibly rebooted by unplugging it, but it is otherwise seems to work nice.)

I don’t see how this is not a benefit? It isn’t like I otherwise wouldn’t be using a printer, or like it increased average rate of printer purchasing non-negligibly . It mostly just changed which printer got purchased.

Like, I suppose if every time I thought “I wish there was a product such the [x]”, I put a description of that into a web form (in terms of keywords I guess?) and then when a product was released, the company releasing the product could send info to the company running the website demonstrating the novel properties, and then the website could notify all the people whose descriptions appeared to match, and that could be an alternative to ads?

I really do not buy many things, if your concern is that ads would compel me to buy too many things, in like, a consumerist way.

(Actually, the example with the printer was when I was living with my parents, so it was actually my dad who bought the printer after I pointed out it existed, and after he evaluated the price taking the ink into account.)

Re: Goodbye Brave

#232

Post by freediver »

jonathansampson wrote: post #230
freediver wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We absolutely do think that Google itself is creepy, and that it should be avoided entirely Yet you chose to allow ads that feed majority of Google's revenue? > Blocking first-party advertisements is largely an aesthetic decision Blocking all ads is an aesthetic decision. Users would still use ad-blockers even if all the ads in the world were not mining user data.

If the user navigates to Google, the user is handing themselves to Google. If the user wishes to block first-party content on Google (which doesn't amplify their risk in any way), Brave supports that option via Aggressive Mode . Brave blocks, by default, that which is harmful. If you're willingly typing data into Google, their SERP ads aren't increasing or adding-to your risk in any way. Brave supports the option to…

> If you're willingly typing data into Google, their SERP ads aren't increasing or adding-to your risk in any way.

How are you sure? I would assume that a more likely scenario is one where clicking a first party ad on Google.com helps build a profile about the user.

> If you wish not to see the first-party SERP ads on Google, I would suggest you not use Google.

Recommending to avoid a site that has ads is not how ad-blockers are supposed to work.

Re: Goodbye Brave

#233

Post by oakfr »

jonathansampson wrote: post #177
oakfr wrote: post #146

This article seems to spawn many threads on online advertising, but the initial comment from the author seems to be more around a system/architecture issue (i.e. why should a browser require backend servers). I am writing this comment here to see what people think about this question specifically.

Brave proxies Google endpoints (see https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Deviations-from-... for a list). This is to prevent users from making unintended contact with Google. This particular error ("Access Denied") encountered by the author could be from Google, but could also be from a transient issue with the Brave proxy serving a 401 response (or similar). Sampson (Brave Team)

Thank you for your reply!

Re: Goodbye Brave

#234

Post by taneq »

whakim wrote: post #35
cmeacham98 wrote: post #6

Hi author, if you're here on HN please consider ditching sketchy extensions like Ghostery (sells your user data) and Adblock+ (participates in paid bypass of "acceptable ads" program) for the open-source and user-focused uBlock Origin ( https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock ). Also, if you haven't tried Firefox since the quantum days come back and give it another try.

I think it's at least worth having the discussion about "acceptable ads". While reasonable people can disagree, I personally think that unobtrusive advertising that doesn't harvest your data should be a valid business model.

As long as that discussion begins by defining "acceptable ads" as "ads that I accept", not "ads which the advertiser doesn't think are quite that bad."

And by "ads that I accept" I mean "ads that I can turn off".

Re: Goodbye Brave

#235

Post by therios »

This is a use case on how social media was a mistake. A random guy has issues installing some extension, doesn't know how browsers work and somehow, due to algorithms, got his inane opinion amplified and here we are debating Brave. All because of yet another ignorant opinion that somehow is considered authoritative...

Re: Goodbye Brave

#236

Post by throwawaybutwhy »

Yeah, let's hop on the cancel train with knee jerk accusations amplified by trigger happy crowds. Especially when Manifest V3 is around the corner. I hope Brave folks will be brave enough to keep Manifest V2 / uBO running.

Re: Goodbye Brave

#237

Post by roenxi »

ahelwer wrote: post #195
roenxi wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I can't. There are many things that influence my behaviour and that is low down on the list of influences that worry me. Even Hacker News is probably a worse influence than the average ad. What do you think is the problem here? And it isn't billions, you need to normalise by audience size. Any company spending billions to influence my behaviour is bankrupt, I don't have enough money for them to make that back.

Okay, so you actually can pick out the issue. You just don't mind being manipulated by corporations. Fine, but strange that the angle you took was "aw shucks geez guys I'm so confused about all this".

If a dog gives someone puppy eyes, the common response is to play with the dog. If a corporation waves something that people want at them, the response is to buy it.

But one of those things would get a broadly supported "aw, how wholesome!" from the crowd. The other appears to get actual, honest, anger. It is unclear to me why the difference in responses is so large.

Everything a person encounters influences them, and generally people are comfortable with good and bad influences in their lives. The fact that corporations are motivated to sell things doesn't even mean their influence is bad. The fact that I bought a rice cooker because it was being advertised to me doesn't change the fact that I am better off owning the rice cooker. I bought it because it improves my life. So why the hate on ads?

Re: Goodbye Brave

#238

Post by ntp85 »

pmlnr wrote: post #45
paulcarroty wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this person doesn’t even consider Firefox * Firefox main income is the competitor, Google * Firefox sent telemetry to Google servers after first start So am I, it doesn't feet in my degoogled life.

Setting can be disabled, and for example the debian build comes without telemetry.

Is this also true for Debian-based distributions? Anyways, users on Mac and Windows usually download Firefox directly from Mozilla and are therefore affected by the aforementioned telemetry.

Seeing the market share of Desktop Linux I'd hazard a guess that those users are in the majority.

Re: Goodbye Brave

#239

Post by jonathansampson »

The author was able to confirm (see https://arunmozhi.in/2021/12/06/goodbye-brave/comment-page-1...) that they had been using version 1.18.77 of Brave (released nearly one year ago in December of 2020). This version of Brave did not contain service-keys for authentication with the proxy-server which shields users from unintended contact with Google. As a result, when Brave began to enforce key-requirements for requests (a recent change), this out-of-date build of Brave could no longer install extensions (since it could not utilize the proxy service).

Many thanks to the author for diligently assisting with this investigation.

Sampson (Brave Team)

Re: Goodbye Brave

#240

Post by jonathansampson »

jonathansampson wrote: post #172
schleck8 wrote: post #5

I think this is due to Brave proxying some Google requests through their own servers, because otherwise the same people would complain that a Google server is being contacted. > I am thinking of going back to [Chromium] with the usual extensions like Ghostery, AdBlock+ > [Brave's] amazing ad-blocking and tracker protection If you just need an adblocker, sure. At this point everone should have heard of uBlock Origin.

This may indeed have been an issue with Brave's proxying layer (Hello, I'm Sampson from the Brave team). I was able to reproduce the user's screenshot by setting up an AutoResponder in Fiddler to serve a 401 Unauthorized response from go-updater.brave.com, which yielded the "Access Denied" message in the Chrome Web Store. I'm not aware of any issue where this endpoint authentically served a 401 response, but it's ent…

Resolved: User had a very out-of-date build of Brave. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29471236 for more details.
Post reply on HN