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Brave launches 1.0

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Re: Brave launches 1.0

#271

Post by cyborgx7 »

have_faith wrote: post #71
buboard wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I know advertising covers a need, there's nothing inherently wrong with advertising in an academic sense. News organisations do not offer anything of consistent high quality that people are willing to pay for though. I have no faith that quality will improve if only we all switched off our adblockers and clicked some ads. People's propensity to read clickbait will not decline as a result of higher revenue from advert…

>there's nothing inherently wrong with advertising in an academic sense.

There is so much wrong with advertising in an academic sense.

- They distort the product market as they favour those players with the highest marketing budget, rather than with the best product.

- They distort the media market as getting people to look in your direction is the only thing that has value. Clickbait and fake-news are a direct result of advertising, and wouldn't exist without it.

- They are an attempt at manipulation. People have to constantly expend the energy to counteract that manipulation. I also believe this to be a big factor in the decrease in trust in media. Since the stuff that is meant to inform you is always surrounded by stuff trying to manipulate you, how could you ever build trust to it?

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#272

Post by emptysongglass »

Two big issues for me that have kept me on Firefox despite being a huge cryptocurrency nerd:

1. The decision to base on Chromium is a bigger negative for me than any feature. We're all going to regret contributing to the One True Engine someday and it's going to be so painful to fix.

2. BAT is a pure money play. There's no inherent utility outside buying and spending. And Ethereum is nothing if not the biggest utility crypto out there. This is always one of those things in the Ethereum ecosystem where I point out that you didn't have to make yet another ERC-20 if your only play is money.

It's too late now, of course. But man, it would have been terrific to recommend a browser that blocked ads out of the box and wasn't part of the engine hegemony.

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#273

Post by PKop »

dwild wrote: post #268
lawtalkinghuman wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The creators end up getting a crapto token at the end of it and then have to wait a long time to accumulate enough to justify the time, hassle and transaction fees to turn it back into actual money they can spend on beer/rent/etc. All for some tiny fraction of the browser market. Meanwhile people are living off Patreon and other services like it.

> The creators end up getting a crapto token at the end of it and then have to wait a long time to accumulate enough to justify the time, hassle and transaction fees to turn it back into actual money they can spend on beer/rent/etc. All for some tiny fraction of the browser market. The same would be true for actual dollars... you would have to wait for it to get high enough to justify the transaction fees but also th…

Ok, but the difference with waiting to accumulate dollars vs waiting to accumulate crypto currency is that with crypto you are subject to massive currency fluctuations while you wait to cash out.

Just look at BAT price volatility and decline over last year.

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#274

Post by chabes »

hinkley wrote: post #257
jonathansampson wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

As far as I understand it, using the browser with the default settings is basically like using Chrome with ad blocking (and tracking protection and all of that) already built in.

The only opt in part is allowing ads, which you get paid for viewing.

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#275

Post by bsclifton »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #234
fastball wrote: post #218

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…

Tokens only go to verified publishers. Signing up to receive them is basically that consent. Otherwise (site or channel not verified), the transaction never leaves the user's browser

wikipedia.org, slashdot.org, and other sites that show a purple checkmark in the URL bar have gone through that verification process

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#276

Post by pergadad »

I used brace for a while on mobile but stopped once brave started to out ads in the notification bar. I don't remember exactly what they were for - probably BAT and the browser itself - but I definitely don't need another pathway to get slammed. Back to Firefox and happy as can be.

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#277

Post by nybble41 »

cyborgx7 wrote: post #267
jonathansampson wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I already decided my Ad participation. I block ads, and want the advertising industry to die. This does not seem like a value add to me.

So don't opt-in. There are other ways to acquire BAT and support the sites you visit in Brave besides watching ads.

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#278

Post by lawtalkinghuman »

dwild wrote: post #268
lawtalkinghuman wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The creators end up getting a crapto token at the end of it and then have to wait a long time to accumulate enough to justify the time, hassle and transaction fees to turn it back into actual money they can spend on beer/rent/etc. All for some tiny fraction of the browser market. Meanwhile people are living off Patreon and other services like it.

> The creators end up getting a crapto token at the end of it and then have to wait a long time to accumulate enough to justify the time, hassle and transaction fees to turn it back into actual money they can spend on beer/rent/etc. All for some tiny fraction of the browser market. The same would be true for actual dollars... you would have to wait for it to get high enough to justify the transaction fees but also th…

I'm reasonably sure USD (or EUR) will still exist, have some reasonably similar value, and be usable in five years. There are quite a lot of crypto tokens I do not have anywhere near that level of confidence in.

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#279

Post by nfoz »

jamiequint wrote: post #245
nfoz wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't want to provide free content then stop publishing on the web, a free medium.

You're confusing what is technically possible with what is ethical.

Advertising isn't ethical. It is lies and manipulation.

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#280

Post by degenerate »

annoyingnoob wrote: post #249

Fuck ads. Fuck tracking. Fuck making me part of your 'audience'. There has to be a better way. I'm going with blocking until there is a better answer. Brave may be a step in the right direction but its not the solution.

The main reason I block ads is because ad networks make so many requests (and the ads load so slow) that it always affects my browsing. I am either waiting for the page to load because of poorly engineered synchronous ad network code, or I'm having my content fumbled around at the tail end of pageload. Both situations are obtrusive, aggravating, and slow me down.

In the early 2000s ads were simple images that loaded just as fast as everything else, and I didn't mind them much, even the cheesy animated ones. It's the delivery, not the content, that I abhor.

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