I think Brave's potentially most important (and least certain) contribution to the world is its automatic micro-payments system. It's genuinely innovative and the only viable alternative that anyone has proposed to ads-based funding for smaller sites. It's also, by nature, incredibly hard to bootstrap. But I really hope it gets real traction and ends up standardized and/or copied by other browsers.
IMO it misses the point. I don't want ads. Pay me for seeing ads may be better than just see ads but what I really want is no ads. For now I block them. This way I get to see nearly no ads. I can't get my head around why I would let some ads trough to earn some bucks. It totally missing the point.
What we really need is a way to pay for content so content creators can survive without ad revenue. The internet must transit to a market where people pay for goods and services just like on literally every other market. There is money and goods/serviced and they get exchanged. That's how it should be. Now we have ads and a third-party in between which severs itself plus another party the advertisers. Brave removes the third-party (kinda) but leaves the advertiser in the game. Why? No one needs them to be part of a goods/service <> money exchange.
There is an open W3C standard that can be used for micro-payments it's called ILP. Not bound to a currency. No token. No scaling problems because it tires to run everything "on the blockchain". It's just a protocol it can be used with any token or currency.And Payment providers must compete against each-other just like it should be in a healthy economy. (At time of writing there seem to be only one payment provider (Coil.com) but that's just because someone has to start.)
> we really need is a way to pay for content so content creators can survive
So, just buy more BAT and you dont need to see ads. other people may not be able to afford paying, so they 'll prefer to see ads
> but leaves the advertiser in the game. Why?
The printing press, radio and TV always had ads, why? becuase it's the most natural fit, and it allows them to have more / better content. ad-supported content is not going away. A world with more options is always better
I don't read books with ads, I don't watch films with ads, I don't listen to music with ads. One-way broadcast technologies where one suckles at the teat of momma-Media-empire will come with ads because baby cannot help but drink what momma puts into her nutrition. The content model has changed, the internet is a two-way or multiplayer chat, not a one-way broadcast. Advertising has no place on the internet. Advertisements are not a stand-in for content. Human attention is not a commodity. These problems are solvable, but not with steam engines and model Ts. Why wedge a brand new frontier of technology between the rear view mirror of the obsolescence desert and a nearby Tuesday? Surely we can think of something more delightful than indirectly pointing to consumption via thinly veiled business-as-art. As one who adores the study of logo and design, it doesn't make sense to pay someone to make mediocre art to sell me something instead of just using that money to make good art in the first place. There.
Just so you know, there are plenty of books, films and music with ads. The harder you try to run away from ads, the more you pay to escape them, the harder they'll try to get you to see them and the more they'll pay for it.
That's why I think it's inevitable for Netflix to get ads. Even if it's not a pre-roll ad, it could be just tons of in-content advertisements. Like they do with a lot of movies. Such as Sony movies, plenty of Sony phones, laptop, TVs, speakers, etc.
The only way to get rid of ads from your life, is to become a billionaire that owns a personal city where you can outlaw them yourself. Otherwise, you're screwed.
Just so you know, there are plenty of books, films and music with ads
Yes, and also plenty without, so that doesn't prove much I'm afraid.
The harder you try to run away from ads, the more you pay to escape them, the harder they'll try to get you to see them and the more they'll pay for it.
Do you mean this literally, and if so can you give an example? Just asking because I've never experienced anything like this. Or I don't know what you mean.
people are free to create their own ad-free internet platform. that doesn't mean that they have a right to force this model on everyone. now excuse me, i have to walk my unicorn
I did not mean to be adversarial, I think you brought up some excellent points, and I thank you for the opportunity to organize thought on the matter. Your observation that radio will always have advertisements is unchallengeable, it's only inevitable that there will be a mix of approaches as we go forward.
By buying BAT I support people getting paid for watching ads.
Also and open door for ad-fraud. Bat browser doesn't know if a real user watches the ads. Do we really need more click farms and all that crap?
The solution to all this is so obvious; the third party must be removed from the equation.
Local "fee" (ad monetized) prints are horrible.
Never used Radio so I can't say anything about that. TV however has become more and more ad cluttered and low quality over the last decades to the point where I completely stopped watching any TV several years ago.
Ads may fit in newspapers and in TV programs. But when newspapers and TV programs are created for the sole purpose to serve ads it just results in crap. Ads don't incentive good content. They incentive click-bait titles, fake news and an anything that maximizes the time an end user waists.
> when newspapers and TV programs are created for the sole purpose to serve ads it just results in crap
Do you think that they are created to enlighten and entertain you? The model is: get your attention, and mix some ads in with the content. User gets content, advertiser gets customers, publisher makes profit.
The $3 you pay for a newspaper barely covers distribution costs. And they have to be created from scratch and actually printed every day.
High frequency publishing and advertising have always co existed. And the internet is just the latest iteration of high frequency publication.
that's because in digital, google & FB are gobbling up the bulk of advertising budgets, leaving little money in display advertising to be shared by hundreds of media sites. it's not an inherent property of ads that they create clickbait, it's the need for increasingly more ad views.
The inherent property of ads is that a third-party is involved who strives for maximal profit at the cost of the other two parties. Even the nicest possible third-party can't make the deal better for the others.
If you buy BAT you will indirectly support the system Brave has created but you will directly support each and every website you choose to donate to.
As for "ad fraud" and "click farming", I think we can leave the work of determining real users to Brave. Can you point to any sort of evidence this is already occurring? I am genuinely asking because I did not know it was a problem for a browser company.
Does it show them to have better content though? Radio sucks these days as your get long as segments every 20 minutes. TV is just poison to your brain with constant ad bombarding. Press is dying and for good reason: it's basically low quality opinion pieces. Most journalists don't link to sources and can't stop themselves from inserting opinions presented as facts. I think Internet exposed even the most well established newspapers. You can get way better information by just looking for sources.
I watch my movies on Netflix, sports on paid streaming services with little to no ads. The only quality ad supported content I am able to find is on YouTube mainly interviews, podcasts and educational videos. Even then I am supposedly able to pay to not watch the ads (YouTube red wasn't available in my country last time I've checked).
Ads poison the content. People are willing to pay 50-100$ to watch a boxing night. I don't think it's impossible to make them pay for quality content.
Only a very small percentage of users are willing to pay for an online service, that's < 2% usually. It's also very difficult and costly to accept payments for small amounts and do the accounting, sales tax / VAT properly. Ads are comparatively much easier to setup.
TV programming is the USA was pretty much created when advertisers realized the potential of the medium yet understood that no one would watch ads non-stop, which is why the had talk shows, tv series, game shows, etc made. The first TV ad - for Bulova watches - dates back to 1941, just two years after the first TV sets were sold to the public at the 1939 World's Fair.
> What we really need is a way to pay for content so content creators can survive without ad revenue.
The browser does have that feature -- you can sign up to pay content creators while not signing up for the ads.
While I do understand the problem with privacy/tracking, I don't understand the visceral dislike of ads. Ads allow for this fantastic thing that is the WWW where so many nice and useful content and services is available for free to most users who will not really shell out money for things they weren't looking for in the first place -- all financed by the companies that can afford to pay for the ads.
With Brave's ads, it sort of seems like you don't give up much in terms of privacy and tracking -- though yeah it's the start of a slippery slope, but hopefully down the road, if they sell their soul and do more tracking, there will be someone else who'll then provide a "free" service that does less tracking :-).
>all financed by the companies that can afford to pay for the ads.
Actually you pay for the ads. There are no companies who "can afford to pay for the ads". Everything they spend on ads is directly included in the price of the product. If you aren't a customer then another customer paid to show you ads. Ads are not for the user they are to maximize profit. It's a trade off for a company they can spend some of the revenue on ads to generate more revenue thus making less profit per item but more overall.
They target the optimum which means that several percent of revenue is put in ads. For everyone else this has only negative effects like less competition because the large player dominate trough ads or more resource wasting because ads make people buy stuff they don't need.
> this has only negative effects like less competition because the large player dominate trough ads
Ads can also be good for competition: if your upstart product is better or cheaper ads can help you get the word out. Here's a paper that looks at the effect of advertising bans on eyeglasses, and sees that they led to higher prices: https://www.jefftk.com/benham2013.pdf
> What we really need is a way to pay for content so content creators can survive without ad revenue.
I think there's been some confusion (partly because of Brave's confusing marketing). I didn't even realize there was the pay-the-user-for-ads thing. I was only talking about the micro-payments from users to sites.
So turn off ads. The whole point of a market is that people who don't think whatever you're doing is worth the price you're getting don't have to do it, while those who think that it is worth it get the rewards. By turning off ads you're raising the market price of BAT ever so slightly so that those of us who don't mind the ads get paid more for it.
If you look at this from economic point of view, watching ads on its own does zero value creation. The People who get paid for it must (on average) spend way more than what they got on the advertise products else this is unsustainable.
That's not really true. Ads give people the opportunity to learn about products they wouldn't otherwise know about. If the new products are better, economic value is created. If they aren't, no transaction occurs and nobody is worse off, except for the attention spent on ads, which is what BAT is trying to price.
> The internet must transit to a market where people pay for goods and services just like on literally every other market. There is money and goods/serviced and they get exchanged. That's how it should be.
While I don't think simple flat payments for services and goods is wrong, it's worth noting that it's more regressive than ad-based services: the value of ad impressions is proportional to discretionary income, whereas a flat $10/month is proportionally more for a poor household than a rich one.
Like, try asking poor households whether they'd rather pay $5 or $10/month for various internet services vs seeing the ads they get now, and we both know which option most would choose, for very sensible reasons.
It's not though because it blocks ads and then pays publishers creators fuck all in comparison to what they would have made with ads. If you look at Brave's RPMs you'll find they are total dogshit.
The feature where you get paid to see ads is a side feature. It wasn't in the initial release, and it is opt-in. The main purpose of the BAT token is to be like Flattr or Cointip, but for the whole internet.
I don't mind ads but I don't want the tracking. Just throw up some generic ads based on the site. Sorry I want my privacy big corps or I'll continue to block everything.
It's "missing the point" because it doesn't fit your personal preferences precisely? There are plenty of people who don't care at all about ads, and there's a full spectrum of attitudes in between them and the hard no-ads position. Brave is targeting people within that spectrum.
No it's not the first or only attempt at this. Time (or other metric) based funding of content has been tried several times. We spent 6-figures on experimenting ourselves with a autopayments browser extension.
The hard problem is getting people to actually pay in the first place, not how to divide up the money after. Since Brave is basically a higher-level ad network with a free browser, it's paying the users first and then taking it from them in a secondary loop. It's a combination of nice marketing and forceful control over typical ad experience.
Yeah, lots of other groups have developed micropayment systems, but it looks like Brave might have finally figured out how to make it work on a large enough scale that it might improve the web.
I think that is partly because Brave has tied micropayments to something else people care about by putting their system in a privacy-oriented browser.
I didn't actually know about this mechanism. I thought users had to pay a monthly amount if they wanted to support the sites they visited. Adding another layer of ads on top is... interesting. But feels like it's just kicking the can down the road.
What I'd like to see is a mechanism similar to current paywalls but broken down into effortless micro-distributions the way Brave is. So a subset of sites would say "you can only browse our site if you're using a browser that will pay us and you're paying $10/month (total) which will be distributed amongst us based on what sites you visit and how often".
This would solve the main problem with paywalls, which is that literally nobody is willing to maintain dozens of separate subscriptions (both in terms of logistics and price) across all of the websites they read one article on each month. Apple News+ is trying a similar solution to this problem, but gated into their proprietary app. This could instead be a web standard that keeps people on the real web.
It had too few conversions and many of those were too small (< $5) to make it viable.
Ads are already effortless and fair, they generate cash from your attention in real-time and on-demand. The problem is the overall experience (interruptive formats, high frequency, tracking, etc) which is what Brave is really improving on. Good luck to them.
> I thought users had to pay a monthly amount if they wanted to support the sites they visited.
Exactly, this is how it should be. Skipping ads/ad-revenue not glorify them by paying user to click it away.
Please have a look at Coil.com it's exactly what they do.
The problem with subscription models are that they are walled-gardens. You can only flattr to people who use flattr. That can not scale. An it would be terrible if it does. The web monetization can not be in the hand of a single company like flatter. Coil however is just one payment provider that use the interledger protocol. If the content creator uses another payment provider who also uses the open interledger protocol donation form someone using coil still would be delivered. Coil doesn't care what provider the other party uses. It just reads the Web Monetization Meta Tag and sends the donation to the given address. Anyone on the web who has a banking relationship with user could potentially be a web monetization payment provider. For example Netflix. As a content creator this changes nothing. You still have one Web Monetization Meta Tag in your page with the address where to send the donations you don't have to care if some donation come from Coil user and some from Netflix users.
>Also, what mechanism does coil have to prevent a “content creator” from bombarding the end user with ads?
Nothing. Coil is a payment provider for web monetization. It's up to the content creator to provide content in way people want to consume it. A content creator can of course still show ads to user who donate and piss off the user.
And the user can of course still block ads or turn off donation for that site (or both). Donation hardly depend on the time you spend on a site. So if you go to a site and its overloaded with ads you simply leave. (The fact that people know that sites get donations if they stay on the site probably has a very positive effect on people behavior)
- View ads on site and generate cash for site via attention in real-time.
- View ads from Brave and earn BAT, pay BAT to site as user.
It's a mix between the two models. You're still working via your attention to generate value and trade it for content from the site, it's just inserting 1 more step from the usual ads but with more control over the experience since it's handled by Brave.
What examples do you have? So far I can think of Steem coin and Dogecoin. The former has the vendor lock-in issue, and the latter has no standardized automation of tipping.
Flattr was probably the most famous. It's still running, last I checked anyway. Readability.com tried something like that as well - remove ads from a site and pay the site owner directly instead. Site owners got very angry about this and it stopped that pretty quickly.
I admit that I would hate to see Flattr become a monopolistic payment platform that knows everything abou the websites you visit... but which also seemed inevitable as they have to determine how much to pay to whom ?
The biggest thing is you don't have to contribute actual money. Instead of watching the website's intrusive, tracker-ridden ads, you're receiving custom ones from Brave tailored to you based on a local machine learning profile. You're watching ads on your own, separate from the ad networks used by the websites, and so you get a virtual token that can be sent to creators you like. They can convert it to actual cash (you can too if you want).
The whole point is no money is invoked for the browser user unless they want to go to the frog me of withdrawing the bat they earned. Instead they can just assign it to someone they support
That's what's superior. Real money services require someone to pay real money.
This system could be done without the coin but I bet it would be more difficult to arrange transfer to each browser user.
As with all of these systems, where it's likely to fall down is that the monetary amount you receive for viewing ads will be so miniscule as to be inconsequential.
if this kind of model works, the biggest contribution will be security. potentially , cross-site scripting could be disabled altogether if it is no longer needed to fund the web
Pro-tip: Brave has built in torrent support. You can visit any .torrent or magnet link and it will load up directly in the browser, no external program needed!
One of the serious criticisms against Brave was that they were collecting payments for sites and creators that had not signed up and who did not want to sign up. That is they were charging for other people’s content, that they don’t own, under the guise that the money went to those creators when it didn’t and wouldn’t. Seemed a pretty serious criticism to me. Has this changed?
"Publishers must verify ownership of their properties with Brave in order to receive contributions from Brave users. If a publisher has not verified ownership, then a user’s contributions will be held in reserve inside the browser for 90 days. The browser routinely updates an internal list of all verified publishers to determine whether a property can receive contributions. At the end of the 90 day period, any contributions marked for unverified publishers will be released back to the wallet. No funds leave the browser except to go to verified creators."
Seems more than fair to me if I understand correctly.
If you're not accepting money, you don't get to keep it but they give you a buffer of 90 days (which they didn't have to) and if the buffer is exceeded it goes back to the user wallet.
It's changed, but apparently no one was punished for it, or even for the false claim that the funds were held "in escrow" when Brave was holding funds itself and eventually claiming them.
When someone commits fraud, gets caught, shows no contrition, and then takes a little step back so it's no longer obviously fraud, I think the emphasis in that sentence needs to be on "obviously", not "no longer". I wish they'd quit spoofing their User-Agent so it'd be possible to opt out of the new version of this scheme, but they'll only send an accurate header to sites that sign partnership agreements.
To claim it demonstrated intentional fraud rather than poor UX and rewards architecture in an early beta (which was immediately fixed) is simply not credible.
The only funds flowing through the system at that stage were from Brave's own marketing budget through the form of user grants.
The concerns were about theoretical, future issues if Brave ever broke out as a mainstream browser and rewards / payment solution.
Even now, a year after the issue was fixed, it remains to be seen whether Brave's payment system draws in anything more than Brave's own distribution of tokens (through grants and ad rewards to users).
As an early adopter I'm aware of honest, thoughtful criticisms (browser monoculture with Chromium) and... this is not one of them.
I didn't just follow it closely, I directly discussed it with Brave developers here and on Twitter at the time and I've continued to have to deal with their fraud for the last year. In their issue tracker an employee specifically called out me blocking them over this[0] to justify continuing to spoof their User-Agent. I am unfortunately still involved by having to burn more volunteer developer time and effort to block them.
You claim I didn't make an honest or thoughtful criticism, but you didn't support that by disputing any of my facts or reasoning, and your only defense of Brave is that they were caught too early to successfully defraud anyone. Whether the money was taken directly from end users or indirectly from speculators in their ICO is irrelevant. They falsely represented themselves to users as site owners and they continue to evade responsibility by falsely representing themselves to site owners as different users. It is tediously prudent to want nothing at all to do with a company that does business through misrepresentation as a standard practice.
Your first criticism demands people ignore Hanlon's Razor ("never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity") and buy in to a most bizarre business model: that the Brave team had a plan to defraud users of donations to unverified creators.
It's hard to overstate how absurd this is as you work through the implications: it means this business model is in conflict with the obvious goal of growing the ecosystem of verified creators as quickly as possible, and assumes incredible ignorance from the Brave team about likely revenue from users unwittingly donating to unverified creators.
The reality is without creators actively pushing their supporters to donate to them via Brave's rewards system the funding flow would largely be Brave 'promoters' pushing creators to use that funding channel.
Instead of this nonsensical explanation it's easy to understand the simple and correct one: Brave had an aggressive growth marketing strategy where they imagined being able to email unverified creators with emails about how much $$$ they could collect from users who had started donating to them, and in doing so accelerate verification of creators.
The stupidity here is that they didn't properly consider that some creators would rightly object to an implication Brave Rewards was an approved donation channel for that creator, which could theoretically risk cannibalising donations that would otherwise go through other channels (that it would likely be a negligible amount doesn't make it any less unethical). Brave did the right thing in fixing it in an early public beta, which is the point of public betas.
Your second criticism about user agent spoofing depends on a fundamental lack of awareness about the whole history of user agent strings, which is basically a story of challenger browsers spoofing the user agent string of the dominant browser within an ecosystem for compatibility reasons [0].
That you attempt to assert that UA spoofing is a nefarious practice (but presumably only for Brave, not for every other browser that does this, such as Chrome for Android which presents as Safari[1]) is yet more evidence of the low credibility of these criticisms.
I don't quite follow #2. BAT is an ERC20 token like any other and can be quite easily transacted outisde of the browser and outside of Brave's control.
That doesn't equate to having full control over the monetary flow. They can mint new tokens, but since the contract doesn't have a self destruct function, it's out there on the blockchain forevermore, even if Brave were to disappear tomorrow.
I think the answer is "not anymore" based on what's in their FAQ.
> Publishers must verify ownership of their properties with Brave in order to receive contributions from Brave users. If a publisher has not verified ownership, then a user’s contributions will be held in reserve inside the browser for 90 days. The browser routinely updates an internal list of all verified publishers to determine whether a property can receive contributions. At the end of the 90 day period, any contributions marked for unverified publishers will be released back to the wallet. No funds leave the browser except to go to verified creators.
> Previous versions of the Brave desktop browser worked differently. Until version 0.58.21, released on January 11, 2019, browsers with Brave Rewards enabled would contribute BAT to content creators whether or not they had verified. Brave would then hold contributed funds for those publishers in escrow until they’d verified.
BAT was also known for becoming the primary funding mechanism for an infamous website dedicated to stalking and harassing autistic people.
This led to a lot of complaints sent to Brendan Eich and his employees, which they were understandably extremely upset about, but they did eventually drop support for said website.
It does raise an interesting point, though: at what point does BAT funding cross an ethical line? One can imagine even worse things than stalking being funded if there are no checks. But then defunding anything can be seen as a violation of free speech.
Is this any different from ad-funding, and the processes they have in place for approving/rejecting pubs? There's a spectrum between privacy and control over consensual (legal) transactions, but it has nothing to do with Brave.
I also wonder about its legal consequences; If some creators decide to sue them for this issue then what would be the outcome? I don't think I am allowed to freely use some random contents without creator's explicit consent then give back some arbitrary amount of money in the current IP framework.
I've heard that as well, but haven't heard Brave's side of it.
Not defending it in anyway. but strategically I feel like Brave should take the money, and just email the creator every 3 months saying you have X amount of money you can claim. Of course, if Brave is just profiting this money that's pretty shitty.
Even if they do that, it isn't right. They are removing ads and thus revenue from content creators. They have no right to do that and then skim some profit before paying out. And even if they did, they have no way of knowing if what they are paying is more or less than what the creator would have gotten had their content not been modified.
Wait, why should brave get to throw its own ads on example.com? If the little fish and big fish were swapped, would you say the same if Chrome had an [opt-in] box for replacing all non-google ads with doubleclick ones?
I have been using Brave on macOS for more than 3 years now. I used Brave on Android for a while and I am currently using Brave on iOS as my daily driver. I don't use their BAT system or anything associated with that. I like their default vanilla experience and the fact that I can install Chrome plugins on Brave. I still use uBlock origin on top of their default blockers. I use the built-in Tor experience time-to-time as well.
To me, Brave is what Firefox should have been. Good UI, good defaults, fast enough, support for Chrome plugins, etc. I am slightly concerned about their future direction though (if they enforce the BAT system down users' throats).
Given there's very clear monetary incentive for the company to hype their own product, and that these stats can't be externally verified [1], this is essentially just snake oil. Personally, if anything, I find the constant forced hype across media and social media to be a red flag. If your product was really both good and honest, you wouldn't need to try to force it down people's throats.
This is the most unintentionally hilarious comment ever posted on HN. “Any good product would never need to post about themselves.” Welcome to tech startups? I guess?
I've been using it for a bit and really enjoying it. Mobile version anyways. Only downside is it doesn't seem to be able to autofill all my information for forms, so I switch back to chrome when I'm making a purchase on my phone or something like that.
Any details from verified creators or Brave directly regarding revenue? Even if it's tiny right now, it would be great to hear some data from anyone giving it a real go.
As one datapoint over last ~3 weeks or so I've accumulated 20ish BAT (~$5) from a combination of 1) ads shown to me, 2) tips from people to my twitter, 3) automatic monthly contributions from other users, presumably based on them spending time on the pages I've registered for rewards. In turn my auto-contribute settings (left at defaults) are to distribute up to 20BAT/month on sites I visit the most (e.g. DDG, HN, Github, Twitter, ...), which will happen automatically on Dec 15.
Agree with some of the other users that the tooling around the rewards is still a bit hard to navigate. There's the separate Uphold account, from which I seem to have to manually move BATs around to my browser wallet (?), I'm getting BATs from sources I don't fully understand, I don't think there is a page that just shows the timestamped deltas (debit/credit) etc.
I find the simple idea appealing that I don't have to spend too much energy on who to reward or not reward. I reward anything that I find valuable enough to spend my finite attention on. If companies started to receive sufficient profits from this stream they would feel less incentive to implement the other (often dirtier along multiple axes) monetization strategies. But I would be very curious to hear other people's "policies" on how they tune these allocations.
They did an AMA recently on Reddit where they go into the payment positives in detail, of course they skipped the negatives like they are playing ads on your desktop outside of the page.
Yeah, last time I tried to switch to Brave the desktop ads really skeeved me out. It's a shame. They should know that their target segment of users would be particularly offended by those.
I've started accepting BAT since January, and so far has received about ~35 BAT ($9.00) on my ~1 million pageview website. I have not done anything to promote Brave on the site (basically verify the website with Brave and that's it) so actually getting paid is quite surprising.
From my previous: "We've still got BAT enabled on PortableApps.com with the standard custom Brave browser header and donation ask you setup via their program. We got 31.35 BAT (about $8.08) for around 2.7 million page views in the last month. We also got a single 0.95 BAT (about 24 cent) donation."
just a couple of bucks. you can earn from both visitors and from referral link downloads. system is kind of fun and it incentivizes you to promote browser downloads
I have it set up on Tildes (https://tildes.net) so that I can receive BAT from Brave users, but haven't really put any particular emphasis on it.
So far the site's account has a balance of 258 BAT, which should be worth about $50 USD right now. The "Brave Creators" interface is so bare-bones that I can't figure out what kind of rate that's come in at though. It says that 60.50 of it is from the "Current Period", but I don't know what that means.
Trying to set up the process to actually be able to withdraw the BAT has been annoying and has gotten hung up at multiple points with no indication of how long it'll take until it moves forward. At this point I don't even really think of it as money that I have, because I have no idea how many more steps I need to go through to be able to convert it to actual money, what that process will involve, or how many more fees will be taken on the way.
Did you set up an Uphold account and link your Brave wallet to it? That should pretty much be the end of it; should be straightforward from there to send/exchange the BAT elsewhere.
As your browser receives BAT on the 5th of every month, I think that's also when your Creator account receive tips, but I haven't confirmed that. The UI really is bare-bones and my site doesn't receive enough traffic to speculate further.
Yeah, setting up the Uphold wallet was the main annoying part. For example, I tried to set it up on my PC but couldn't, because it required me to "take a selfie" and my PC doesn't have a camera.
It should all be set up now, and the Brave Creators site says that my payout is in the "Reviewing" stage, so we'll see how it goes from this point.
Been using it for a month. Have made a little over $2. Loving the BAT stuff.
Also loving profile switching which for some reason I never used in Chrome but now use in brave like mad because I have several clients with separate gsuite / google cloud platform environments.
I don't think they can be compared. Brave profiles (well, Chrome profiles) are basically different browsers. They share nothing. They can have different settings, they can run a different set of addons, etc.
Yeah you can create as many profiles as you want with firefox and run independent processes with the correct command line args but most users aren't advanced or tenacious enough to set it up. It would be nice if they had a slicker implementation like chrome.
I installed it on my personal laptop due to constant crashes with chrome that debug logging didn't help to solve. Brave suffered similarly so I stuck with Chrome. I do extension development so when I saw that they used the same store I was pleasantly surprised. I couldn't test my extension behaviour though, because the app it enhances was having issues.
I'll give it a go on the PC I'm using for work(family) until I upgrade. Free BAT!
I recently wanted to play an online game, but hardware acceleration on Firefox on Linux doesn't work very well (Firefox on Windows is fine though - I've used the exact same hardware to play on Windows and it was butter-smooth), so I wanted to get a Chromium-based browser for that usecase. Ended up picking Brave, and it's worked well for that.
I might have been interested, but Chrome-based is out of the question, and I'd prefer to avoid any ties to advertising too - and it's not like other options aren't available...
I've looked at verify a site that I control through Brave to start earning some BAT tokens but I'm really not to keen to have to also give PII (government photo and a selfie) to their only payment processor Upstart.
I'm not familiar at all with this company and I'd really rather not go giving them data just to earn revenue on my site that Brave has taken away by blocking ads.
Could someone who's more familiar with Upstart assuage my concerns? Are they legit, have they got a good track record?
all crypto exchanges require such documentation, or worse. you can keep the BAT there or perhaps transfer it to another exchange to exchange for another crypto. but always, regulatiosn and stuff
They require PII because they can, not because they are legally required. To accept cryptocurrencies and allow people to withdraw them into a wallet, you do not need to verify their identity, unless the tokens are exchanged to fiat on the platform.
There are companies that are more established and popular than Brave which do not ask you to hold your ID next to your face and take a selfie in order to withdraw donations to a cryptocurrency wallet.
oh ok i see. i should be able to withdraw to any BAT wallet, that's weird. but knowing how much legal scrutiny there is around crypto-enabled companies, i m not surprised to see restrictions
> As part of the Brave 1.0 launch, Brave Rewards is now available on Brave for iOS, which contributed to the app’s 27% growth in the past month.
I'm a happy Brave user but the "Rewards" are a gimmick. I've made a dollar a month at best for clicking their amazon/intel/VPN ads. But the actual browser serves its purpose well as a well supported and actively developed de-Google'd chrome with pretty good ad blocker baked in.
I've been using Brave for a while, maybe a couple of years. Its default ad blocking doesn't work 100% of the time, so I've installed uBlock Origin. I don't use the BAT functionality at all, but I think one of the main advantages to Brave (and likely any Chromium-based browser) is that you get all of the same fast, consistent rendering, plus all of the same Chrome extensions will work without any extra effort.
I recently switched to an iPhone from android. Brave seems like the only browser that allows me to block ads without some sort of external plug-in app. I miss having ublock on iOS. But brave seems to do the trick for me and its place.
Only reason I haven't switched to brave on iOS (for that free ad cash) is that using the back gesture seems to always reload the previous page, whereas I don't think that occurs in Safari.
I suppose the other reason is that it's mostly the same thing due to iOS restrictions, but I do like Brave.
Yeah, I enjoy using it but I use 4 different devices throughout the day and not having sync and the clunkiness of its sync (sometimes it doesnt work at all for me on my home network between desktop/laptop) actually pushed me back over to Firefox yesterday when I got a new laptop.
I also finally got sick of the ads popping up as system notifications, which are far more distracting to me than regular ads, so I disabled that.
To counter all those throwaway accounts created to praise Brave, I have to say that I have no intention to use it because it's based on Chromium. Single-culture is bad even if your intentions are good. I never used Chrome either and have lived through ups and downs of Mozilla since 2002 when I ditched IE6.
I wish Firefox tech was easier to integrate into other browsers, so that we could have a more balanced ecosystem.
I don't want to accuse anyone of astroturfing, but the comments in this thread seem to be eerily positive and very marketing-y. Maybe it's my skepticism of everything crypto-related being incredibly biased one way or another.
Disclaimer: I’ve been using/testing Brave for the last few years. I've seen it evolve from what was basically a proof of concept running in Electron to what it is today.
I believe if you care to do some research, you'll see that the Brave team has put in the work to be taken seriously.
I get why people are skeptical, especially in this day and age. But the concept for Brave and disrupting the surveillance capitalism known as ad tech goes back to 2013; Brave is not a johnny-come-lately thing[1].
This was started by Brendan Eich, the same guy who created JavaScipt and who started Mozilla which gave us Firefox; it's not like he's someone who doesn't understand how this stuff works.
Every potentially unpleasant Brave feature is easy to disable (and often by-default disabled). Is is very good at ad-filtering, snappy and responsive, stable, can be audited (opensource)... and the underlying ways to provide for creators/publishers (and also people liking/needing advertising) are clever and disruptive.
Brave is worth a try.
I'm not paid for this (and there is no 'conflict of interest').
For whatever reason firefox seems to actively sabotage any attempts to reuse their technology. The one area where people were reusing it, mozjs has been nothing but heartaches for everyone involved because they literally break part of their API's with every release. Back a couple years ago they changed the library bindings from C to C++ basically forcing all their users to write their own shims even if they were C based projects.
This is likely a large part of why they are losing, I remember showing people how it was possible to create a web browser with a couple clicks and a line or three of code using the IE activeX component in delphi around ~2000. Back then it was possible to do similar things with KHTML.
So instead of a nicely structured project its got layers of crap, even in the build system where you have to dig through python wrappers around automake, etc just to figure out simple things where some options are in one place and others are in another depending on whether they bothered to convert one part of the project or not.
This was the weirdest part of my experience trying Brave–it doesn't block all ads. So for me moving from Firefox to Brave presented more ads to me. I couldn't find any documentation on how to actually block all ads similar to uBlock Origin.
I can't think of any ads that Brave hasn't blocked for me.
In fact, more often than not the issue is that Brave is blocking too much and breaks some sites. Ironically, this includes the identity verification service (Netverify) used by their wallet partner (Uphold).
In this case yes, Brave's POV is that ads that are hosted and powered by the publisher you chose to read are in fact OK. Brave isn't anti-ads so much as it's anti-cross site tracking and ad serving.
Thank you and that does make sense, but I don’t believe there is as clean a line between 1st and 3rd party ads as others perhaps. A first party ad can still track and share your data.
You can presumably install whatever additional blockers you were using in a different browser in Brave if their built-in blocking (which I've found to be VERY effective) is not enough for you.
I was unable to find an open source ad blocker for Brave, and the Brave community was less then helpful when I was confused as why I was seeing ads when the homepage for Brave talks multiple times about ad blocking without ever mentioning it is partial blocking.
I'm also not sure I would qualify Brave's ad blocking as "partial". It blocks all 3rd party ads and tracking by default, AFAIK. But it's not as opinionated about 1st party as some other plugins are (presumably to avoid false positives).
As far as I can tell, recent builds of Chromium have broken Google login in ways that not-chrome-at-all browsers still work? I have to log into my gmail in incognito now or it just 500s when the site tries to eat my browser.
Same. For me it combines the best of Chrome (speed) with the best of Firefox (privacy). In fact I'd argue it's like having "privacy.resistfingerprinting" on, but without as many sites breaking.
Interesting browser, but dear devs we are not in 90s -just a pc for net-browsing at home - and I am talking about the lack of sync of extensions/bookmarks.
Wow. Actual user oriented and ground breaking innovations. This is the future. And it's beautiful. I'm impressed. Mozilla now looks like a dying swamp.
Remember how there used to be pro-gay fried chicken and anti-gay fried chicken? Now we've got an anti-gay web browser. Amazing how the market provides. What's next? An anti-Jew web browser? An anti-black web browser? The only thing I can say for sure is that the next radicalized web browser will also feature blockchain.
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
> On March 24, 2014, Eich was promoted to CEO of Mozilla Corporation. Some employees of Mozilla Foundation tweeted calls for his resignation, with reference to his donation of $1,000 to California Proposition 8, which called for the banning of same-sex marriage in California. Eich stood by his decision to fund the campaign, but wrote on his blog that he was sorry for “causing pain” and pledged to promote equality at Mozilla. Some of the activists created an online campaign against Eich, with online dating site OkCupid automatically displaying a message to Firefox users with information about Eich's donation, and suggesting that users switch to a different browser (although giving them a link to continue with Firefox). Others at the Mozilla Corporation spoke out on their blogs in his favor. Board members wanted him to stay in the company in a different role. On April 3, 2014, Eich resigned as CEO and left Mozilla; in his personal blog, he posted, "under the present circumstances, I cannot be an effective leader".
They teamed up with Coil which sets on an open standard named ILP. We don't need more walled gardening.
All relevant Browsers support it alredy. W3C is behind ILP. Doesn't need it's own Token. Supports Fiat an Crypto.
Most major browsers support the Web Payments Api, but Firefox still has it behind a feature flag [caniuse]. The Web Payments API does not enable micropayments by usage. The W3C is absolutely not (yet) behind Interledger Payments (ILP), Coil's proposed spec. You can determine this from the fact the unofficial draft spec has giant red watermarks saying "UNOFFICIAL DRAFT", and the following disclaimer:
> This document is draft of a potential specification. It has no official standing of any kind and does not represent the support or consensus of any standards organization. [draft_spec]
It is being discussed on the W3C's Web Incubator forum, which is promising but not an endorsement by the W3C [wicg].
The Firefox addon, which acts as a shim until they can get native support in Firefox, may well be in partnership with Mozilla (I couldn't find anything about it), but the partnership would most likely be in very early stages. When I click on the link you shared to Mozilla addons I get the warning:
> "This is not a Recommended Extension. Make sure you trust it before installing."
It has around 350 users, which includes people who installed the add-on but didn't setup payment.
In summary, the tech is promising but browser support is a long ways down the road.
The Payment Request API is something completely different. Coil is about webmonetization see https://webmonetization.org/
Ah and ILP stands for Interledger Protocol not Payment it's a Protocol
W3C is a consortium (That's the C in W3C) anyone can join and become a member and join the different work groups to push a new technologies. ILP was originally created by Ripple and got further developed by Coil. Both are members of the W3C. W3C isn't some kind of web-overlord to puts a stamp on things that they like. The consortium creates it they shape it and they approve it. Everyone can participate but the driving force comes from the companies who use these technologies. They are the ones who want to shape it. But as long as a tech isn't widely adopted it will never get the recommendation status. Even HTML5 existed for at lest 6 years before getting recommendation status in 2014 but in 2011 every mayor browser had 95% HTML5 covered already. Getting IPL to a W3C REC is a very long term goal not something people need to wait for to use it.
Nonetheless it should be obvious that this whole tech is at the very start, far form perfect and may or may not change the web as we know it today. Still comparable to the Brave tech and I think it tires to solve the problems instead of re-create different versions of the same problems.
I assumed you might have been referring to the Payment Request API when you said "all major browsers support it" because that isn't true for ILP. Thanks for the correction on the acronym's meaning.
You're right, Coil is a member of the W3C [members]. You're also right that W3C approval isn't necessarily necessary for something to become implemented.
However, when I hear "the W3C is behind ILP" I (and I assume many others) interpret that to mean the W3C as a consortium has taken some step towards creating a standard, or even that the consortium has issued some statement that they hope to do so. I don't think that most people would interpret one of the W3C's 400+ members proposing something and putting it up on a domain they bought as the W3C being behind it.
HTML5 is a great example of how tech becomes implemented and standardized in the modern era. HTML5 exists because Apple, Google, Mozilla, and Microsoft agreed on it (through the organization WHATWG) and then implemented it. HTML5 was implemented through an even more centralized process, I wouldn't call getting something pushed through by the major browser members something anyone can do just by putting up a good spec.
I agree completely that a W3C spec isn't something people need before they can use the extension shim, of course. All I meant to respond to was your claim that browsers and the W3C were behind IPL. A company called Coil is behind IPL.
You can get it at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/coil/
However you need to register at coil.com to actually donate to content creators. If you are a content creator and you want to enable Webmonetization on your site you need to add a Web Monetization Meta Tag to your HTML <head> an probably register at coil.com too (assuming you want to use coil as payment provider.)
well this seems like a 'pay to access' platform which is not what i want. Plus the chances of me convincing users to install an extension, and also pay are very slim. with brave i can at least receive a reward for users downloading the browser and i dont need to paywall my content
You need to read into it more. Pay to access is possible but optional. Creator can do however they like.
Installing an extension is required but of course not the final solution. The idea is that browser come with ILP enabled by default in the future. Anyway I convincing users to install a browser is any better.
>and also pay are very slim.
Just like with Brave its only a fraction of user who use it. Adoption takes time.
The good thing is you can make your website web monetized and people who don't use it will not notice at all.
