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Brave launches 1.0

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Re: Brave launches 1.0

#251
post #196
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real question is: Why should you watch them at all?

Because you're probably not paying for 99% of the contents that your web browser loads.

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.

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#252

Criticism: #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 ch…

#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 p…

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.

ad 3: https://outline.com/fJm5C3

ad 4: i explained the issue in my other response.

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#253
post #202
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 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. [1] https://predictions.global/

And if you don't sign up, does Brave just keep the money for themselves?

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I see the clear cut ethical dilemma you do. Option 1. block all ads, publishers receive no revenue. Option 2. block all ads, user opts in to unrelated ads, user can choose to give some of the proceeds of seeing those ads to publishers they utilize. How can (2) possibly be worse than (1)?

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 f…

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.

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cur…

>when you compare against the current option

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

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cur…

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?"

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#258

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 th…

SnowHaze seems to have a quick toggle available. https://snowhaze.com/en/index.html

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#260

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…

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.

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.

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