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Brave launches 1.0

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Re: Brave launches 1.0

#171
post #13

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…

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.

> The whole "reward people for watching ads" model just seems... wrong.

And it's not new either. Tried many times in the past, and ends up not being enough for 'real' users to care, but people will try to exploit it.

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#172

As a Firefox user, is there a reason to convert? Seems like a step backwards to me, even though I applaud what they're doing.

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.

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#173
post #13

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…

> 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. But does YouTube get anything? To support their business

Yeah YouTube is really struggling to make ends meet, we need to remember the little guy here.

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#174
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.

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#177
post #13

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…

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?

don't worry, something something blockchain

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#178
post #44

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…

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

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.

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#179
post #13

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 had me... > Brave ads show up as a notification in your operating system outside of the page. and then you lost me. Hitting people with notifications is an escalation of ad hostility, not a reduction.

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.

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#180
post #13

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…

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.

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