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Brave launches 1.0

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Re: Brave launches 1.0

#331

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…

Do these notifications fire only when the browser is focused, or do they fire when the browser doesn't have focus too? Either way, the full range of 1-5/hour seems way too frequent. Maybe one a day would be tolerable (though I have no motive for tolerating even that.)

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can someone explain to me this, as i could not find any real answers from my few minutes of searching. Lets say i have a blog and suddenly people start sending me BAT. 1. How does this impact my taxes? Wouldn't this be considered an income? 2. If i don't collect it where does it go? 3. If my content is being hosted on something like youtube or github do i get it or does the site hosting it get it? 4. How do i go abou…

The tokens get set aside (tracked only in the user's browser) but nothing happens until you verify on https://creators.brave.com/ Once you verify, the tokens will leave the user's wallet and are put into a wallet (called a card) with Brave partner Uphold. If you want to convert the tokens to your local currency and put into your account, there's a "Know Your Customer" process that the government makes sure is enforce…

> there's a "Know Your Customer" process that the government makes sure is enforced

Which government, the US one? Who is the customer here, the person being paid?

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#333
post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or course you do, but you also seem to think no one should be using the web if they want to make ad revenue. >If you don't want to provide free content then stop publishing on the web, a free medium. How would that not also apply to television?

If you want to provide TV content, go for it. But if your content has ads, don't be surprised when people skip all the ads, because ads are offensive, and they're free to skip them. So that's an awkward business model to rely on. The consumers aren't the ones being unethical; you chose to put yourself in an aggressive and dubious position in the first place. I prefer public and collectively-funded broadcasting.

I was only commenting on the "...then don't publish on the web" bit, which you seem to be back peddling on.

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#334

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.

Yes, this is a perfectly sensible stance, which of course requires you to actively pay for content instead, either through brave or some other program.

I'm sure you're not just expecting content creators to make stuff for you full-time entirely for free.

Ads should die, but it requires consumers to realize that they need to pay for content one way or another.

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#335
The other day I tried to look up a recipe for beef stew on my phone. Normally my web reading experience tends to be limited to big news sites and tech on a Desktop or Tablet - the ads there are bad, but not terrible. But recipe sites are a whole different category of horrible. I was shocked.

They are all absolutely PACKED with ads. Try it yourself. It's ridiculous. Every other paragraph is separated by ads, overlays, click-spam news, auto-playing videos, etc. I tried easily 7 or 8 different sites before giving up and installing Brave.

This is just anecdotal, but I think the categories that are targeted at the broadest category of users, probably scewing towards older and female, are just being straight up abusive. And mobile seems to be particularly bad.

This situation is untenable. I guess sites and advertisers are just relying on a continuing influx of newbies to line their pockets, but really it's a scorched Earth policy that can't possibly continue as is.

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The idea is to nudge advertisers and publishers towards a more transparent model without middlemen. Unethical is what's happening today, with middlemen making obscene profits. It's more like civil disobedience than unethical.

Middlemen are not ipso facto unethical.

The publishers have voluntarily opted-in to ad exchanges because those exchanges provide value by aggregating demand in a way that would be difficult for all but the largest publishers to do themselves (and the largest publishers do, which is why FB/Google/Snap/Twitter/etc all sell their own ads).

It's not as if anyone is forcing publishers to not deal directly with buyers. The exchanges certainly don't have the market power to do so.

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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

> 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. Yes and Brave's argument is that if everyone acted like you, the web as we know it would collapse. Perhaps it's an argument worth taking seriously. And I say that as someone who acts like you.

> "if everyone acted like you, the web as we know it would collapse. "

So blocking ads is an effective way to enact social change? Great!

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#338
post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me too, and I’m sure so would Brave. But it’s not really possible with dollars. Flattr tried it a while back where you could set aside 5 euro per month, or whatever, and they would distribute it to the stuff you liked the most. But the transaction fees were high for them and it was hard to do super small payouts. This is a crypto case that makes sense. I’m not quite sure how they will keep an exchange rate with the d…

The transaction fee hits two places. Once when money goes into the system and once when money goes out. If I spend $5/month and split it 50 ways there is no reason to pay a transaction fee on each 5cent transfer because it’s within the system. Twitch’s bits are a great example of this system.

I think the point was a low participation system relative to the web as a whole has meant systems where many bloggers accumulatad less than a withdraw transaction fee each. Aside from that, they need all the bother of registration.

I'm not really sure how I feel about the idea that everyone should be accumulating money on all these things. It kind of devalues things to have people trying to make a lot from micropayments mixed with a more hobby web. I think I've eventually turned away from everything that had some get rich quick schemers show up.

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#339

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…

>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

Like it or not, revenue is required to keep sites online.

Hosting costs money. Design costs money. Maintenance costs money.

If the internet is to stay as alive and as open/accessible as it currently is for the public at large (despite increases in censorship), there needs to be more effort put into high availability and accessibility by more people than the enthusiasts who run revenue free sites/businesses that have other revenue streams.

People have been trained not to accept paywalls. But they do tip, as we see with patreon, superchats, etc, and and they do accept some modicum of ads and freemium services.

Brave provides options for all of those things; what I like most about brave is not its ad model, but its site donation model. It’s a very direct form of person to site donations that is built to be extremely convenient. I don’t know how it’s implemented, but if it's sufficiently decentralized (which I think it is, unless the BAT crypto currency is just a distraction from some centralized mechanism required for donations), that’s a potentially very valuable/difficult to censor/easy means of direct value exchange. Plus you don’t have the privacy concerns you do with ads.

My hope is that it becomes so convenient and popular to send money to sites via Brave and potential future competitors that the ad revenue model can be mostly replaced. That might be pie in the sky, but it seems plausible to me.

I also think it’s great that users get a big chunk of ad revenue. That percentage may change in the future, but for low income people who can get a few extra bucks by browsing normally/might be less likely to use ad blockers, something like Brave seems way better than seeing ads and not getting any revenue.

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#340
Brave is awesome and I'm happy to see them reaching this point. I've been using this as my primary browser for the past 2 years and my absolute favorite thing about it is the simple profiles switching. HOWEVER that's also the thing that's irritated me the most as this software has changed: it started with person-specific tabs (awesome!) then moved to person-specific windows (okay ...), and now for the third time they've changed the icons available without letting me specify custom pictures (ugh!). Where is my ability to sync these PROFILES AS A GROUP? Setting up half a dozen "people" on each new computer becomes a tiresome exercise.

I tried the rewards/BAT thing for a while but after a few computer changes and losing my wallet through the process, I gave up and just block everything and contribute nothing. I'd like to get back into it but all of those transitions just killed it for me.

All that said, there's a lot of good stuff in here and I'm happy to be using it as my primary browser. Now that they're hitting 1.0 I may actually be able to recommend it to non-tech people.

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