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Brave launches 1.0

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Re: Brave launches 1.0

#381

Post by denismi »

fastball wrote: post #218
NelsonMinar wrote: post #200

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.

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)?

There's also:

Option 0. block no ads, publishers receive all of the applicable revenue from their preferred network

It isn't clear to me from the website what happens if the publisher is unaware or unable or unwilling to claim revenue generated through this fringe browser's alternative revenue mechanism. Who ends up with that money? Is advertising even shown? Is the user aware of whether or not the publisher is in a position to claim revenues of the ads they're seeing?

Depending on the answers to those questions, the addition of (2) could be worse for these publishers if it makes some users who otherwise would've (begrudgingly or otherwise) chosen option (0) feel morally justified in switching over to (2), converting their real (0)-derived revenues into unrealised (2)-derived theoretical revenues.

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#382

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

PKop wrote: post #322
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the ecosystem around dollars is so parasite-riddled that if you tried to move cents for each ad you didn't see, you'd end up paying more in transaction fees than would make it to the content creators that you're trying to support. The dollar has a scalability problem that BAT doesn't. Is trading dollars for BAT on an exchange and then loading those BAT into your browser's wallet such a bad alternative?

Would you be upset if you did so in, say, June, then proceeded to lose double-digit percent of $ value placed in the wallet? How about if you're a content creator who got paid in these ever-volatile digital currency units...instead of dollars? If those same creators instantly traded out for $, what was their trading fees? Is all of this something to consider when singing the praises of saving a few pennies on transac…

Brave hasn't rounded this corner yet, but I have to imagine that a future feature addition will be trading access to content for payments in BAT. When that happens, whether I care about the volatility will depend on the implementation. If content prices are in dollars, then yes, I suppose I have to accept some of the uncertainty that goes with the fluctuating exchange rate. If it's BAT that I trade for my content, then no--I already got _n_ tokens, they're redeemable for the same amount of content, their market value is meaningless to me. But whatever the case, I'll take it or leave it as a whole, depending on whether it's worth it to me.

> saving a few pennies on transaction costs

The transactions we're talking about (one per ad viewed) are probably in the fractions of a cent. The "few pennies" you refer to is going to be the vast majority of the overall cost of each one (supposing you use traditional payment rails). So yes, an exchange fee on the way in, and another one on the way out, would be far better.

As far as how the content creators feel about bearing the brunt of the volatility... I hate to sound callous, but as a consumer it's not my problem to consider such things. Either the industry finds a way to provide a product that's worth it to me, or it doesn't. I don't buy any other product based on how difficult it was to manufacture, I buy it based on how much it's worth to me. Why should content be any different?

The hassle of keeping track of whether I'm logged into my Washington Post account, my New York times account, etc... and on which device... will never be worth more to me than the content that those sites provide, so the only pay-for-content model I'll patronize is one that distributes my money based on how my attention is allocated without requiring me to guess today where my attention will be tomorrow--and Brave is shaping up to be exactly that.

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#383

Post by notadoc »

judah wrote: 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…

> Brave ads show up as a notification in your operating system outside of the page

LOL WTF, no!

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#384

Post by xkde »

justsee wrote: post #328
TremendousJudge wrote: post #256

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

Recent cross-platform options with surveillance capitalism: * Google Chrome: mandatory * Firefox: opt-out [1] * Brave: blocked That's the primary issue. It's great that Brave is pioneering a new opt-in, privacy-respecting funding model for the web - we need innovation here - but it's a secondary issue. [1] Thanks to Google $, slowly changing presumably thanks to forcing effects of Apple's increasing privacy defaults…

I’m having a hard time trying to decide if people are trying to dirty capitalism with “surveillance” or surveillance with capitalism. Seems like the latter has become a dirty word over night for no apparent reason.

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#385

Post by maelito »

AgentME wrote: post #347
maelito wrote: post #296

What if I really don't want to see ads at all ? Can I pay Brave in € and let it distribute this money to the content creators ?

Yes-ish. You can put your own BAT (or Bitcoin or ETH) into your Brave wallet. You can buy BAT from Coinbase/Uphold/other exchanges.

That's cool. I'd use it if I can : - charge my account by credit card in 1 click - get the same ad blocking level as mublock

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#386

Post by notadoc »

hinkley wrote: post #160
judah wrote: 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.

I'd happily take plain old web banner ads over push notification spam. Are people nuts?

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#387

Post by emptysongglass »

sneak wrote: post #372
emptysongglass wrote: post #272

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 utilit…

There is no meaningful technical criticism of Chromium that I have seen. All of the anti-engine folks’ main argument seems to be “it has the Google stink on it”, but I can’t see how that is relevant in an application explicitly designed to avoid their ad/tracking/cloud services. It’s just a renderer.

What it is, is a backsliding into the days of IE where only one implementation was correct. Competition, yes, even at the engine level, is critical to a healthy web.

Google is the steward of Chromium and Manifest v3 is just the beginning. When a single corporation has Total Control over what goes in to their codebase, we're going to see more and more abuses making it increasingly difficult to maintain healthy forks. Given the tipping point of users, certain websites now simply refuse to work with any browser but Chrome.

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#388

Post by buboard »

Barrin92 wrote: post #330
buboard wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> funded by communities who have authentic interest in keeping them alive That's naive. Traditional media were always coopted to serve interests

yes, traditional media is for the most part ad-funded and that's why it suffers from the same problem. There is plenty of non-traditional or local media that functions perfectly fine based on subscriptions. Diminishing or better destroying the ad model will be good for them.

> traditional media is for the most part ad-funded

Traditional media were often bankrupt , but kept alive for political influence. Subscripptions don't solve the problem, they only work for major publications , and they give them an incentive to coddle their hardcore audience , creating a bubble. If anything ad-supported media can afford to be more unbiased (but still 'safe' enough for their advertisers).

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#389

Post by 1_player »

emptysongglass wrote: post #371
eigenvalue wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would you have the Brave team do? Create a new html rendering engine from scratch? That is an incredibly challenging engineering project that would probably require years and many tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars to do well, and what would be the benefit to Brave's users and investors? It would just lead to loads of performance and compatibility issues, and it is fundamentally irrelevant to the core v…

No, of course not. I would have had them base on Gecko.

Don't quote me on that, but Gecko must not be the easiest engine to build upon. How many browsers out there are based on Gecko, apart from Firefox?

AFAIK the only choice nowadays is between Chromium and WebKit. I honestly would like to see more WebKit based browsers instead.

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#390

Post by deanCommie »

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.

That is just peeing in the pool.

It's fine if only some of us do it (and I do as well) but it just leads to the death of free internet, and subscription models for all news sites.

That might be fine for you, but don't think for a second that's not a privileged position, and if the internet moves behind a paywall that is a significant detriment to a massive class of people.

Sure, your system works for you, but don't pretend like your solution scales.

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