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Brave launches 1.0

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Re: Brave launches 1.0

#591

Post by fastball »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #429
KKPMW wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But nobody is holding anything hostage. When you use Brave, you can opt-in to display ads on your Browser, and while doing so still get ads from Brave. So the choice to cut-off ads from the content publisher is yours. If you think it's unethical - just do not block the ads.

Brave is holding the publisher's monetization hostage. Again, my issue is not with the user but with Brave.

But... they're not though.

Ad-blocking in Brave (as it already exists in every other browser via plugins) is optional.

Brave ads (a paradigm which doesn't exist in any other browser) are optional.

You can disable both, enable both, or disable one and not the other. The choice is absolutely on the user and Brave isn't holding anything hostage.

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#592

Post by cyborgx7 »

dimino wrote: post #522
cyborgx7 wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 you also want the media industry to die as well? Too bad, but most of us don't.

If the only value of media is to make you look in its direction for long enough to show you something else that you might actually spend money on, it actually has no value at all.

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#593

Post by piokoch »

EpicEng wrote: post #233
mantap wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience the most valuable websites have few ads and the most trashy websites have the most.

So why are you frequenting these 'trashy' sites? If you are, it must be because they offer some value, right? If you're not... then you don't see any ads from them. Someone else will, because they find value in the site.

Not really, sometimes you search for some information (camera review, headphones review, medical information, toys, whatever) and instead of landing on some site that has good information you end up on some crap site with crap content and tons of ads.

Why? Because owner of that site had resources to do SEO (if one has money, one can trick Google algorithms without much trouble). How they earned that money? Through ads, obviously.

The more ads such site has, the more revenue comes in and more money can be spend on SEO to increase revenue. And so one.

Who pays for that? Those who landed on such site, they wasted time, read some potentially infomercial content.

This ads -> money -> SEO -> more ads -> money is not particularly beneficial for the economy. This looks like one more incarnation of Gresham-Copernicus law - bad content is pushing away good content. If you spend money on content, you don't spend them on SEO, so you earn less money from ads and finally you end up on 5th Google results page and that's the end.

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#594

Post by have_faith »

cyborgx7 wrote: post #271
have_faith wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 resul…

I'm talking about the basic principles of advertising. A simple sign in the street is advertising, as is a static graphic on a niche hobby website advertising products from a company people within that community respect. There's nothing wrong with letting people know your products exist. The problem is always in the execution.

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

I don't see any alternative to letting people make claims and making laws to stop them blatantly lying. What is the "best" product in any category? How does the best product surface in front of me without advertising in any context?

> Clickbait and fake-news are a direct result of advertising

Advertising is a part of it, sure, but it's not the whole picture.

> They are an attempt at manipulation. People have to constantly expend the energy to counteract that manipulation

100% agree, which is why I promote adblockers. But I don't think this is a problem with the principle of advertising, it's an execution problem. Like many others mention if a website had a small sidebar with static graphic ads that weren't invasive I wouldn't block them as they wouldn't be requiring me to expend energy to counteract them and I would still think it would be ethical to block them if someone wished to. It's never unethical to choose what code runs on my machine after being sent to me, if you don't want me to have free content then don't send me content for free.

I think we're mostly on the same page, I just don't have a problem with ads at the bottom end of the manipulation and annoyance scale.

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#595

Post by cyborgx7 »

have_faith wrote: post #594
cyborgx7 wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 resul…

I'm talking about the basic principles of advertising. A simple sign in the street is advertising, as is a static graphic on a niche hobby website advertising products from a company people within that community respect. There's nothing wrong with letting people know your products exist. The problem is always in the execution. > They distort the product market as they favour those players with the highest marketing b…

>I don't see any alternative to letting people make claims and making laws to stop them blatantly lying. What is the "best" product in any category? How does the best product surface in front of me without advertising in any context?

Are you aware of the concept of independent product reviews that you can build trust to and seek out on your own if you are interested in them?

>Advertising is a part of it, sure, but it's not the whole picture.

There is no direct financial incentive for them without advertising.

A political actor might sponsor fake news, so it wouldn't disappear, but most of it gets made because it's a cheap way to generate highly engaging content that gets shared a lot.

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#596

Post by DagAgren »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #201
mdorazio wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

Nowhere near as bad as the ecosystem around crypto, which is absolutely filled with scammers and criminals.

Give me real money every day, I'm happy to pay a small fee in order to not have to deal with the hive of scum and villainy that is the cryptocurrency market.

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#597

Post by throwaway-hn123 »

t34543 wrote: post #534
asdkhadsj wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, I'd be happier if there was some notion of an inherent value in my eyeballs - and then I could just put that money into the system. Eg, I pay $5/m or $15/m, whatever, and that gets split up by the number of pages I view and content I consume. I'm a firm believer that FOSS and (Internet) Content needs funding. Yet, I loathe ads. They promote (but are not solely to blame for) behavior that is a brain drain on soci…

Remember when the internet wasn’t a center of commerce? People posted websites and information for free because it was cool and noble. That’s the internet I love. The audacity of so many people who feel entitled to get paid makes me so sad. I adblock, strip affiliate links, etc. Ad revenue drives censorship. Dumbs people down, etc. The whole biz should burn down to the ground.

Imagine being a dumb teen with the audacity to think people shouldn't earn money.

People like you are vermin.

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#598

Post by gwd »

a3_nm wrote: post #424
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…

Sorry, this must be very basic but I've never been able to make sense of one thing about Brave's model. You say that users can get paid in BAT to watch ads. But Brave is open-source. So is there anything preventing me to fork the browser to pretend to display the ads and reap the rewards without actually displaying them? Doesn't this break the whole system?

> So is there anything preventing me to fork the browser to pretend to display the ads and reap the rewards without actually displaying them? Doesn't this break the whole system?

Even if it were closed-source, technically there's nothing stopping you from binary patching your browser to do the same thing. But then again, there's nothing stopping you from putting an ad-blocker in your normal browser; and faking clicks on your own website to "milk" advertisers is already a thing that has to be dealt with.

I don't think either Brave's model, or its being open-source fundamentally changes the issues facing ad-supported systems.

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#599

Post by iseeyou »

pcnix wrote: post #584
iseeyou wrote: post #216

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…

You might also like umatrix for this, it gives unmatched control over blocking resources.

Yes, there are multiple solutions available for Chrome/Firefox on other platforms, but on iOS there is only native/apple content blockers and browsers with built in ad blocking.

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#600

Post by iseeyou »

DHPersonal wrote: post #258
iseeyou wrote: post #216

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

It does, thanks for the tip. It does seem to allow even finer grained configuration of what to block or allow so I will definitely take a look.
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