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Brave: Brendan Eich's clean-ads browser startup

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

#61

Post by mahouse »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #27

Its by the same guy who donated to causes doing their best to make sure two people in love can't get married due to their gender. Sociopathy has many forms and its obvious to me that Eich is just an untrustworthy guy with a lot of bad ideas. Low-rent projects like these is just further evidence that you need a founder/leader you can trust. Its clear he's exhausted his social capital and at age 54 is far away from his…

What a disgusting personal attack. I hope you are happy of having written this.

"I don't like the political views of this guy so his project must be bad."

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

#62

Post by lsc »

jacquesm wrote: post #41
strictnein wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We tried the "paid to browse" thing 15-20 years ago. Didn't go so well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pay_to_surf

Times have changed since then and it definitely would not be the first time that something that fell flat out of the gate the first time became a success the second time around. Lots of current successes are actually just warmed over past failures. That's not proof in any way that this might succeed now but there is something to be said or giving that a shot with the number of eyeballs available today (and the harder…

huh. See, I thought the reason it failed last time,besides fraud[1], was a broader reason - it's the same reason paid surveys aren't worth very much. the idea is that the people you want to advertise to are precisely the people who are willing to trade money for their time; the opposite of the people you get when you pay folks to watch advertising.

[1], in 1998, I seem to remember that one of my co-workers had installed a thing on his work computer that would move the mouse and "browse" the internet when he wasn't there, getting paid for seeing ads.

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

#63

Post by Klathmon »

lmm wrote: post #49
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the most annoying thing about ad blocking going mainstream. It was a rare site that bothered to detect us before Apple got into the game.

I found web adverts got a lot more annoying after Firefox started including a pop-up blocker by default. That was when we started seeing pop-unders, animated Flash ads and all that.

I've been saying for years that blockers just remove the good guys.

What's the point in trying to make a safe, non-tracking, curated ad network when you will just be blocked by everyone anyway?

All adblockers do its turn the game into a race to the bottom. Whoever can get the most invasive ads past the most blockers is the winner. Any company that isn't willing to play dirty will be left behind.

Content creators won't push for the good guys because they need money, ad networks are between a rock and a hard-place, and users will say they want "nice" ad networks while simultaneously blocking all ads regardless of where they come from (and will fight against things like the "allow acceptable ads" checkbox in adblock)

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

#65

Post by Touche »

frou_dh wrote: post #36
Touche wrote: post #13

The scrolling on this website is janky as hell. Looks like they are using some "Smooth scrolling" plugin that makes scrolling not smooth at all. Not sure why native browser scrolling was insufficient for them, I'm scrolling here in HN all the time and it's perfectly smooth.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9238739

I disagree, in this case. This website is from the creator of JavaScript, about a product that is meant to solve, in his words:

   But the Web today faces a primal threat.
And that threat is the web's ad-driven monetization.

This site suffers from the same fundamental problem; the owners of it don't care too much about it. It has 114 requests , 3.8MB of content and takes 4 seconds to load.

I can't imagine Eich had anything to do with this site or even approved it. I'm guessing he is focused on the company's core product and let Marketing or someone else take care of the site. They then hired the cheapest design firm they could find on Elance, who then outsourced the work to an even cheaper freelancer who took the requirements and plugged together a dozen different jQuery plugins that he/she uses on every project and shipped it as quickly as possible. Because in that business you don't make any money if you spend any more than the absolute minimum amount of time on a project.

I mean, they didn't even concat any of their javascript or css. This is web development from the mid-2000s. It truly saddens me that a company with a noble vision couldn't afford to hire a single web developer who is up on modern practices and has good judgment on quality to put this together; would have taken then a week, tops.

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

#66

Post by rockdoe »

Klathmon wrote: post #63
lmm wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found web adverts got a lot more annoying after Firefox started including a pop-up blocker by default. That was when we started seeing pop-unders, animated Flash ads and all that.

I've been saying for years that blockers just remove the good guys. What's the point in trying to make a safe, non-tracking, curated ad network when you will just be blocked by everyone anyway? All adblockers do its turn the game into a race to the bottom. Whoever can get the most invasive ads past the most blockers is the winner. Any company that isn't willing to play dirty will be left behind. Content creators won'…

I think you just described why Mozilla was pushing for Tracking Protection (blocking only "bad" ads) and didn't do Brave.

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

#67

Post by coldpie »

lsc wrote: post #51
drzaiusapelord wrote: post #27

Its by the same guy who donated to causes doing their best to make sure two people in love can't get married due to their gender. Sociopathy has many forms and its obvious to me that Eich is just an untrustworthy guy with a lot of bad ideas. Low-rent projects like these is just further evidence that you need a founder/leader you can trust. Its clear he's exhausted his social capital and at age 54 is far away from his…

Diversity, I think, is really important. Diversity of thought as well as all the other kinds of diversity. It's important to be able to work with people who come from different backgrounds, who have different beliefs. I see this on both sides (I see it more often on the left, but that's just because my filter bubble is a somewhat leftish one.. when I step out of that bubble, I see plenty examples of people on the rig…

It's perfectly consistent. Enforcing one's religious views through threats of violence[1] is not the kind of diversity that the left wants.

[1] This is what it means to pass and enforce a law.

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

#68

Post by Klathmon »

woah wrote: post #26
Nursie wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I think it's very healthy and marks the beginning of the next stage of the web - how does it work in a post-advertising world?

Randomized ad unit class names?

and/or ad-proxies that run off the same domain, more integrated and less "blockable" ads (like sponsored stories and in-content ad reads), complicated and bloated JS ad-blocker-blockers (or ad-blocker-detectors), even more complicated ad-blocking code (which can already have a pretty significant performance impact on some sites), and more.

It's a race to the bottom now boys, and the most invasive ad companies are going to win!

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

#69

Post by bobajeff »

hapless wrote: post #16

It sounds like their plan is to block all ads, then sell the new ad inventory created by all the blank space on pages. Why on earth would users want this browser?

Actually, it sounds more like it'll do what adblock plus does.

https://adblockplus.org/about#monetization

Edit: It looks like I was wrong:

https://mobile.twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/68983945486585...

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

#70

Post by jordigh »

I will repeat this one more time, because Eich seems to be missing the point.[1]

I don't adblock for privacy, security, or speed. Those are just nice-side effects. I adblock because I do not want to be manipulated into buying things I do not need.

I wonder what would happen if, as a society, we said, "enough, no more ads". Would it really be the capitalist apocalypse that the ad industry is trying to make us believe it would be?

--

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10244964

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