Brave: Brendan Eich's clean-ads browser startup • Hacker News Board

Re: Brave: Brendan Eich's clean-ads browser startup

#271

Post by VLM » Wed, Jan 20, 2016, 5:59 PM UTC

coldpie wrote: post #116

err4nt wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes him a homophobe? All I knew about was a political donation. Homophobe implies a fear or hatred of homosexuals, I haven't seen evidence for that yet. Does this word apply here?

Why else would one oppose marriage equality?

For better or worse (mostly the latter) we pretend to have separation of church and state, but certainly do not.

Being reminded of this, manages to deeply offend many people on both sides. If we don't talk about it, its not a problem, right? (LOL)

So, like it or not, government marriage = Christian marriage and Christians are going to be really offended at the government redefinition of their religious institution. Just like Jews would be annoyed if the IRS enforced changes in the Bar Mitzvah or the FAA decided to enforce changes in the Mormon baptism for the dead ritual.

The gay marriage people really screwed up there, intentionally or not. Should have done it in two far less controversial steps, one step to get the government once and for all out of the church, and then once church and state are separated, there would be no religious component to changing the state definition of marriage, much as there's very little religious animosity on the topic of obscure trust inheritance law or modifications to building codes.

Gay people seem to have little empathy for religious people. I'm not religious and even I have more empathy for them than the gay people do. I can assure you Christians believe in their religion just as strongly as progressives believe in their religion of progressivism.

Re: Brave: Brendan Eich's clean-ads browser startup

#272

Post by reubenmorais » Wed, Jan 20, 2016, 6:00 PM UTC

GFK_of_xmaspast wrote: post #252

reubenmorais wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're supposed to remove the branding from the binary — as in user visible logos and names —, not the source code. You can't reasonably expect forks to remove all the thousands of references to "Firefox" from the source code, like in comments, component names, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sed

Yeah, but it'd be a silly requirement, and would make syncing upstream changes to your fork needlessly difficult. My point is the Firefox branding stuff does not apply to the source code of forks.

Re: Brave: Brendan Eich's clean-ads browser startup

#273

Post by javaun » Wed, Jan 20, 2016, 6:00 PM UTC

VLM wrote: post #159

smacktoward wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Paywall every newspaper website. Nearly every newspaper website is already paywalled, and every time someone posts a story from those sites to HN all the comments are people complaining about the paywalls. HN even added a special little link to let people skip around them, because why would we want to encourage people to pay for quality work they appreciate?

newspapers are un-needed intermediaries. For whatever weird reasons AP and Reuters and the like don't want the hassle of 6 billion individual subscribers, so they contract out to an intermediary who pays them a vaguely fixed amount per month based on viewer numbers and then the intermediary stuffs the pages with ads and clickbait headlines to profit more than their 1000 competitors trying to do the same thing, which…

AP is a member-owned organization (owned by national/regional papers), that's why they can't really go direct to consumers. NPR is the same way. NPR's board is owned by member stations, which is why you only hear Morning Addition and All Things Considered either on terrestrial radio or co-branded with the stations on NPR One. You won't see NPR distributing a full podcast of either shows. The governance model is tied to the old method of local distribution and at odds with the way the Web works.

Re: Brave: Brendan Eich's clean-ads browser startup

#274

Post by dota_fanatic » Wed, Jan 20, 2016, 6:03 PM UTC

philh wrote: post #204

jordigh wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've yet to encounter an ad that has a hope in hell of manipulating me at all. If you know what "just do it", "the happiest place on Earth", "think different", or "the world's most advanced operating system" refer to, you've already been manipulated. A lot of ads are just about making sure you have a particular brand in mind and you're keenly aware of that brand's existence. Then, when time comes around to actually…

When I want to buy a card, I go to a shop named Cards Galore. I go there because the name makes me think that they sell cards. I know it exists because I pass it every day, and they have their name in big letters on the outside of their shop. Do you consider that I've been manipulated? More to the point, do you find anything unethical in this?

Manipulation, yes. Unethical, maybe? (when you look at its effect in aggregate)

Honestly I just want all the advertising (be it physical (signage, billboards, smells, etc) or digital) to get out of my environment. It's almost always noise and it's ugly. There's no reason we couldn't build a hyper-connected system where if I'm looking for something, I can find it.

I want socks? Ok, how many sock stores are local? Ok, what are these made of and who is their supplier, and how does their supplier get their product? (I don't want to support sweat-shop labor or non-sustainability, especially if I'm buying socks.) How have other people found these socks to work?

I should be able to find what I need, which includes being able to understand how that product came to be (transparency). Products shouldn't find me. Ads are noise and we've got enough of that as it is. Would Nike, selling socks, be as successful when all is considered? I'd like to think humans care more for their home and, taking away all the psychological manipulation of ads, could begin to choose how to spend their money more intelligently. A man can dream...

EDIT: To me your question raises the problem we should solve, which advertising kinda solves damn poorly. Get people who need something in touch with the people who can provide that something, and make it transparent for both parties as much as possible.

Re: Brave: Brendan Eich's clean-ads browser startup

#275

Post by nitrogen » Wed, Jan 20, 2016, 6:04 PM UTC

mille562 wrote: post #152

RodericDay wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't emphasize this enough. Every time someone rattles out a list of "annoyances" regarding ads, I wish that I could plead with them to consider that there's even bigger reasons. Plenty of people try to sell the idea that ads let us have content "for free", and that all we have to tolerate is "a little annoyance". It's insane. If companies are buying ad-space, it's because they expect to get more business in retur…

There are people with needs and people with solutions. I understand where you are coming from, but advertising a solution to people that may have that need is not always evil. There are many times where I am glad I saw advertising: my favorite band is coming to town, a new product that will save me hours a day just got released, the shoes I have been looking for are being sold at 30% off. I don't want to give up all…

Information like "products X, Y, and Z from these manufacturers now solve these problems" or "band Q is visiting your city soon" can be presented in a non-manipulative manner, but current ads go beyond information into manipulation using emotion, repetition, ear worms, and social pressure.

Re: Brave: Brendan Eich's clean-ads browser startup

#276

Post by rorykoehler » Wed, Jan 20, 2016, 6:04 PM UTC

munificent wrote: post #267

rorykoehler wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fall into the camp of blocking all ads because frankly I don't like them. They are visual pollution. I also doubt I would pay for written content (maybe on a very rare occasion I might) if given a micro-payments solution because it doesn't seem worth paying for. I write blog posts from time to time and I do it for pleasure because I enjoy writing about things that interest me and sharing it with others. Honestly I…

> I write blog posts from time to time and I do it for pleasure because I enjoy writing about things that interest me and sharing it with others. I do the same thing, but I realized a while back there is a flaw in this model. It means the available creative works—which in turn effectively means the engine of culture—is determined almost entirely by people who are well-off enough to have the free time to do that. I do…

You make a very valid point. I think there are other solutions to this problem.... strangely I had already just decided to make it the topic of my next post before reading your comment.

Also imho micro-payments won't solve that problem. It is a much deeper structural problem.

Re: Brave: Brendan Eich's clean-ads browser startup

#277

Post by chris_wot » Wed, Jan 20, 2016, 6:08 PM UTC

coldpie wrote: post #75

rockdoe wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

However, this conversation is about a new company he created, where employees are free to make decisions about whether to join it fully cognizant of any personal issues Eich has with them, unlike the Mozilla position where a homophobe was placed in a position of power above existing employees. Eich was a co-founder of Mozilla, as mentioned in most articles about Brave. So he had a leadership position all along and di…

Perhaps the homophobic donation stuff only gained focus because of the media attention around the CEO position, but then I think it's a case of "better late than never."

So you just negated your entire point.

Re: Brave: Brendan Eich's clean-ads browser startup

#278

Post by philh » Wed, Jan 20, 2016, 6:08 PM UTC

quadrangle wrote: post #260

philh wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the data I have, is consistent with people having different levels of susceptibility to ads. It wouldn't surprise me if there are in fact people who aren't influenced by them. Do you have data which is inconsistent with this?

If lots of people are susceptible, I have to live in the world with the economy that this situation creates whether or not I'm personally as susceptible as someone else.

Yes, of course. But I think there's a difference between (say) "I play WoW (as opposed to some other MMO) to play with my friends who play WoW because of advertising" and "I play WoW because of advertising".

And I think logingone or joosters were talking about the second, not the first.

Re: Brave: Brendan Eich's clean-ads browser startup

#279

Post by chris_wot » Wed, Jan 20, 2016, 6:09 PM UTC

GFK_of_xmaspast wrote: post #252

reubenmorais wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're supposed to remove the branding from the binary — as in user visible logos and names —, not the source code. You can't reasonably expect forks to remove all the thousands of references to "Firefox" from the source code, like in comments, component names, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sed

Oh yeah, that would be really easy.

Re: Brave: Brendan Eich's clean-ads browser startup

#280

Post by cpeterso » Wed, Jan 20, 2016, 6:12 PM UTC

akkartik wrote: post #212

rockdoe wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it the browsers that are getting slower, or the websites that you visit?

Both, I think. The rash of huge background videos is a prime culprit. Here's a bug I filed, for example: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1197460

The Firefox Media Playback team will be tackling issues around multiple videos and background videos in Q1. For example, pausing videos until the user has viewed the tab (bug 1187778). Infinite-scrolling of Facebook's timeline page with multiple videos is another problem.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1187778

I hope we can push the Graphics team to enable hardware acceleration on Linux eventually, too. :)