The reason why “the internet is broken” is because of ads. Ads incentivize tracking and clickbait. In the end, ad companies, such as Google and Faceboook, act in the interests of advertisers, not users. Brave is an ad company.
On the other hand, companies which are supported by user donations act in the best interests of users. This includes websites such as Wikipedia and the Internet Archive.
Brave does offer the option to make a “tip” to websites, but it’s hardly necessary to have Brave be the middleman for all user donations.
I think FREE is the problem. Anything that is free will either find ways to make you pay for it or has other people pay for it. As a bonus you don't have any complaints either since you officially didn't pay.
Is Wikimedia acting in users best interest? It really doesn't need to beg for your money but it cant get enough of your money? haha
I don't know what it costs to host 250 billion page views per year but they claim 40% is spend on hosting. They have 180 million to spend so hosting would be72 million? 1 dollar would buy 1400 page views? If you simply use a crappy service, say hostinger's 1 usd per month x 12 you get 1200 GB bandwidth. Average wiki articles are 3.6 kb. That is 27 million page views. 20 000 times 1400? I'm not an expert but I imagine hosting on that scale is much cheaper.
It is acting in my interest 1:20000 which is certainly better than selling my personal information to creepy faceless money men.
I would much rather buy access to 250 GB worth of wiki articles for 1 euro but no one figured out the payment model.
Brave does seem lovely until you see them solicit funds in other peoples name without permission. It much seems like [say] collecting funds for Greenpeace but hey! I keep an administrative chunk for myself.
I think LetsEncrypt (ISRG) is one of the best examples when it comes to donations. They have a super small budget and a very small staff, but they single handedly made pretty much every web site today encrypted. One billion certificates issued so far, and the rate if it is only going up.
If you have a budget to make some donations, please out LE on the top of the list. They are doing a wonderful job and you are will make a massive change.
Free is NOT the problem. Free is the “business model” of the internet. Just because some people want to monetize it doesn’t mean we need to give up and just let them do what they want. Selling ads is not the purpose of the internet. Content created to sell ads is most of the time garbage. No chicken, no egg no puzzle to resolve.
Most content is garbage, but there exists content you want. If it didn't exist, you wouldn't be looking for it, and you wouldn't see any ads.
Ads are just the most friction-free way (from the reader's point of view) to pay for it. You don't have to install anything or connect your bank account. There's a lot wrong with that, including the proliferation of crappy content, but it does fund a lot of the genuine content as well. Both readers and writers want a better way, but results are mixed at best.
I think if you have something worth saying, having an audience I a reward. True that there are different types of content, say “tutorials” that are valuable and wouldn't have been produced otherwise, but the monetization platform are themselves an incentive to produce stuff that really no one ever would’ve wanted to read or watch. Look at the profits of YouTube. Yes 1% is very valuable but most of it pure rubbish, that’s not only is dumbing societies down and inciting violence, it’s also a horrible waste of resources, human an natural.
I don’t know what’s the answer. Maybe a separate “commercial” internet, sort of shopping internet, where you you accepting the rules and the reward is your attention, time and resources for free content.
I don't think the purpose of the internet is set in stone. It is an ongoing experiment, we are evolving the square peg to fit in the round hole. (haha)
I like the "asking the right questions" thing a lot. I'm never quite happy with the question, the way I've put it certainly leaves a lot of room for improvement. My formula is something like: First blow up the "problem" way out of proportion (summarize all parts that are wrong with something) then remove the most unreasonable arguments.
I do lots of things for free both online and offline. Its a gift really, I put in the effort, the time and the money. (I wouldn't call it a business model tho) The problem with this is that I can only do so much. With free software for example people have a drive to make something that works. We get a huge amount of great stuff but with rare exception the end results don't get polished. There is always a lack of effort with boring shit that would add a lot to a project. (I always feel terrible when looking back at the state I abandoned a project in.)
Say you have a product to sell, you have to find ways to find customers. The same goes for gifting free things (like software) So, uhhh... where is the free marketing?
Users expect the product to find them FOR FREE! but this simply doesn't work. If we paid some incredibly small amount to be found by products that are interesting to us we would be far less reluctant to provide the necessary personal details. I own 3 guitars that I never play. There are lots of products that fit that profile. If such a product finder was tied in with say 100 other subscriptions and my ISP billed me for those services it would be something incredibly cheap and worth buying. In stead google charges stores an arm and a leg to chase me with wimmens panties because my deceased mum ordered those 15 year ago. WTF??
People wrote fantastic free software that would have been even better if enough users could find it. Meanwhile the commercial alternative is rubbed in peoples face all day long. I would like to see the "build it and they will come" model work.
Adsense makes a hundred billion in revenue because free doesn't work. This is the puzzle. If you can figure out how to do it for free ill give you 5 internet stars and a standing ovation. Ill be pondering how to do it on the cheap. Call me unambitious ;)
I do. This is one of the few places where a tech outsider can be exposed to some of the topics that are on the minds of insiders. The caveat is that criticism of any of the conceptual bodies orbiting the starry notion of "tech startup" (social ramifications, diversity and discrimination, wealth and income, etc.) are heavily frowned upon. Now, are mods going through and sweeping away every comment that proclaims, "Tech bad."? (Mostly) no. But no one wants to bite the hand that feeds it, particularly when so many have usernames easily tied to their public personas. So it's disappointing but not surprising to see people hostile to or tip-toeing around said criticism.
In any case, the basic dynamic is interesting: the less you pay for things directly, the more power you give up to those who do. The abstraction is largely symbolic for ads (consumers pay advertisers in higher product costs), but apparently where and when money exchanges hands matters to who ultimately has influence.
I think HN attracts a certain political/socio-economic bias (for better or worse) but as far as public internet forums go, it is definitely one of the better ones for high quality discussion, whether you agree with what's being said or not.
I'm not sure HN would benefit from requiring a paid subscription. I think that aversion to the aforementioned criticism would be avoided even more, or otherwise replaced with sheer entitlement.
Yes, I'm not quite sure what the solution would be. It's unfortunate that the purview of this forum would include discussion for which users tend to produce comments of both high technical quality and occasionally mixed quality otherwise. I'm not the first person to say this, also, but I think the technical expertise many can claim creates a false sense of security in attempting to analyze and comment on things outside their experience. raises hand I just wonder what structural changes would facilitate a better experience beyond just, "Hey guys let's do 'better'."
I think I'd just put that down to the human condition. We all like to have thoughts and opinions on things, derived from our own knowledge and experience. We can't all be experts in everything and neither should we be.
While some of these thoughts are definitely unwelcome, as they should be (we do need boundaries), I'm quite happy to engage with the mixed and low quality non-tech content either to educate myself to other points of view, or to attempt to counter them in the case of misunderstanding. And that's what a good debate is all about.
For me, that's a great experience because I enjoy being given the opportunity to be sensibly proven wrong.
Are you aware of any other forums with high quality discussion? The quality of discussion here can be found occasionally in a few subreddits but they are even more niche and users have less decorum overall.
To be honest, I used to frequent a few forums that were high quality because of the established community. RLLMUK was my old go-to for gaming chat and, at least back then, was frequented by gaming/games journalism industry insiders too. It was fantastic and most of the people I chatted with back then found careers as journos and game devs.
That was back in the early 2000s where if people wanted to protest against a forum's new policy, or a decline in quality, they'd just boot up a fresh instance of phpBB and essentially 'fork' the community. I don't know anyone back then who hadn't had experience setting up and modding a phpBB board, or dealing with vBulletin and Invision Power Board. I kind of miss that because now we just have various SaaS that run managed communities through apps...
There are likely plenty out there, but you're probably looking at niche forums that require some time and investment to become a part of. HN is one of those. Reddit will only offer you so much.
I would be more sympathetic to your worldview if the quality of the free services online weren't clearly lowered to service ad views.
Just think how useful google could be if you could filter out commercial results, or import a domain blocklist, or control the ranking algorithm.
Think how usable social media would be if it weren't a way to turn money into "engagement".
Think how much better news sites would be if journalists weren't dependent on wealthy patrons who have the power to withdraw their funding when they perceive bad or unfair coverage.
The illusion of a service being "free", without giving the user any power to actually dictate what makes a service high or low quality, is ultimately just lowering the bar on what the role of technology should be—it's not just a machine for a small portion of society to have "passive income".
Think of how small and untransformative Google would be if only middle and upper class people afforded or bothered to pay for it because it charged a fee for its sophisticated services.
Think how useless social media would be if it primarily connected together wealthy individuals that can pay the upkeep needed to operate a sophisticated global network while those who most need a voice cannot.
Think of how much worse society would be if news required an unpopularly high ad-free fee which meant that the best news organizations catered first and foremost to wealthy and already-educated patrons.
The illusion of a service being "ad-free", without serving the broad but lower class foundation of society, would ultimately just destroy the impact and democratizing power of technology. It's not just a machine for a small portion of wealthy, educated Hacker News elites to pay and keep for themselves.
Advertising influence is surely not all positive, but there is no silver bullet here, and I would consider the wet dream of those who want to get rid of advertising without a practical substitute to be a massive regression. I consider the alignment of profits with breadth of access to be one of the biggest engines of progress in the modern age. A poor child in Detroit and a simple mother in a third world country use the same web browser and internet as the most powerful political leaders and heads of industry. That's the world I want to live in.
Nationalizing the service would destroy its usefulness. The public sector has its advantages but creativity, technological innovation, and good UX are not among them.
Well put but hindsight being 20/20, it might have been nice to know before hand that the price of letting a 'poor child in Detroit' have accessible browsing was the relentless and pernicious invasion of privacy that 'free' internet provides. More importantly, all those examples you presented seem like what happens now in slightly obvious forms e.g. blue checkmarks, newspaper paywalls etc.
It’s actually worse since they’re clearly promoting it claiming it’s open source and it puts privacy first, which are better selling points then the fact that if comes with a Trojan horse in form of an ad network, clearly.
Maybe Brave doesn't technically control BAT, but last time I checked I couldn't even withdraw my BAT from the Brave Browser wallet without verifying my identity to Uphold (a crypto exchange that Brave partnered with). It also appeared to me that Brave Rewards (which uses BAT but is separate) is just a centralized website which people need to register on in order to get the money donated by Brave users.
I’m not sure how decentralized BAT is when a single entity, Brave, controls it. Like the blog said, if you donate to a website that isn’t signed up on Brave’a program, Brave keeps the donation for itself.
I can send you BAT right now, which you can then immediately sell for fiat currency, without the involvement of anything related to Brave.
Brave does not control BAT – it is an ERC-20 token on the Ethereum blockchain. Do they still own much of the BAT in circulation? Yes. But other than tanking the value of the BAT you own by selling all of theirs at once (a silly thing for them to do), there isn't much power they can exert.
For this to be a major problem, there has to be a large group of website owners, large enough to be enticing to other browsers, who both accept tips in BAT and are reluctant to accept tips in some other, additional cryptocurrency, and Brave's owners have to be able and willing to shut other browsers of BAT tipping, no? It doesn't look likely that all those conditions will be fulfilled, even assuming that that critical mass of BAT-tip-accepting sites is coming or is already here.
I wish there was some mechanism to pay for websites out of your monthly bill. You pay x for internet, and y% is proportionally used to pay for your visits to websites a,b,c.
You wouldn’t have to pay to host your site or worry about it bogging down if its been posted on reddit or hn, if it is payed for by visiting users out of their monthly bill to their ISP.
This is called microtransactions and it’s been a dream for a long time. The fact that it wasn’t baked into the web from the outset probably means it’s less likely to ever happen, and even if it did, you’d still have the same clickbait business models so aside from the advertising itself, it wouldn’t improve matters. In fact there wouldn’t be any reason for websites not to double down and have ads anyway!
Brave, ironically, is one of the few attempts to solve the microtransaction problem.
Am I the only one who uses brave with all bat stuff off? It's a fork of chromium that's up to date, completely open source, ad blocking and fingerprinting defeating built-in, reader mode, etc. Chrome but just better.
Just be aware that you're placing a lot of trust in them.
It is adding a dependency on the Brave developers not to mess up and create security holes, in addition to whatever trust you place in the Chrome project itself. (A browser plugin requires somewhat less trust since it's sandboxed, but the permissions are still pretty scary.)
But I guess it's like buying an Android phone from anyone besides Google? Or installing packages from Debian and hoping they fix more security issues than they add, compared to the original developer. It's usually true, but not always.
I know. I've been burnt before by Mozilla and Google. Brave will also mess up eventually. I'm just praying that there will be another good browser to hop to when that occurs!
It doesn't work. As in, can't render some perfectly renderable sites correctly. It seems Microsoft is chronically bad at making browsers, even when using a good ready-made engine.
I don't use it on desktop, but it's the best android browser I have used. For whatever reason, Firefox is a battery hog on my current phone, so I switched to brave. Although I agree with this article, the crypto model they have is scammy at best.
I should really switch browsers on my phone; while brave works OK the fact that their revenue model is broken should signal that they will likely need to do something shady in the future. I never opted in to BAT simply because I figured that maybe 1% of the sites I visit would be opted in to the program. Plus, I'm not going back to watching ads.
I use Vivaldi as a secondary/tertiary browser. It's a Chromium fork without the weird ad/crypto-stuff that Brave has or the shady Chinese ownership that Opera now has. (And the Android version seems to be the only browser app that's putting effort into good ChromeOS functionality.) I've never really been clear on why Brave is more popular than Vivaldi.
What kind of information from the user does Brave hold and/or give to their ad publishers? And for how long? You are going from a situation where many ad networks receive pieces of information (ok, google 90% of the time) to a single ad network receiving 100% of information, which I don't think is good. Not to mention Brave becomes the gatekeeper of which content publishers receive BAT and I remember there was controversy over them banning someone's account because they didn't like the content.
tldr; Brave as a 'single ad network' does not end up 'receiving 100% of information' because the overwhelming majority of that data stays on your machine, where it belongs.
I agree. I actually switched to the new Chromium version of Edge with uBlock. I still have Brave on both my iPhone and desktop which is permanently set to block all scripts. I use that for sites with paywall pop ups.
I will not use Brave because I disagree with the legitimacy it gives to ads on the web. I want an ad-free web, or at least an ads-in-anything-like-their-current-form web. If that means the web is 1000x smaller than it currently is, then fine - most of the web today is total garbage anyway. I don't care about jobs supported by ads, because they're another form of 21st century bullshit job and we can invent some other forms of bullshit job to replace those lost to an ad-free web.
Brave ads are off by default, enabled per user. It gives no legitimacy to "ads on the web".
Perhaps you heard some false claim we "replace ads" on pages -- this is usually asserted without skepticism. We've never done this, we talked about doing it again only with both user and publisher opt-in, via private matching and anonymous confirmation so no remote tracking at all.
Anyway, if you don't like ads on the Web, use Brave. If you want to try Brave Ads to get tokens to give back to your top sites and channels, rather than free-ride, cool. If you'd rather not try Brave Ads but want to give back, you can do that too (you have to sign up with Uphold, though; regulators do not make this easy but it's doable).
I did not say they should not necessarily exist, I said they should not exist in their current form. I also want to go back to the days where websites were a labour of love from individuals, not always for-profit enterprises. Ads right now are attention stealing, privacy invading monsters as a result of an arms race for users' notice. They actively harm users for profit. There are ways to advertise without harming users, and hence there is a way to make business work on the web. I will continue to block every ad I see and refuse to use websites that find ways to circumvent ad blockers until providers significantly change their behaviours.
Don't get me wrong, I am not being a contrarian for the sake of it, and I'm willing to be proved wrong and would be happy to find out someone has solved this. I just can't see how - related to your point about Brave punishing privacy invading ads - forcing advertisers to behave can be done effectively. Do Brave hire an army of ad referees to check if they meet Brave's criteria for privacy invasion (I doubt it)? Does it only let through same-origin, static ads that are part of the HTML source of the site? That'd be great but I also doubt it. Do I have to trust Brave to curate the ads I am allowed to see? Because they're also profit driven and have investors to please and I would not give them my trust lightly either. I'd be interested to find out how Brave actually achieve privacy respecting and non-attention invading ads.
I would also like further explanation, since it appears the parent is criticizing Brave because it has "ads", without differentiating between the implication of different methods of delivering ads. Since Brave ads respect user privacy, it seems that this specific criticism against ads is an argument in favor of Brave.
I never really looked into BAT and only use Brave on mobile (mostly then as its UI for its javascript switch is far better than dealing with uMatrix on firefox mobile).
I had no idea that the whole thing is yet another altcoin IPO with excellent marketing. They really must be laughing all the way to the bank...
> I had no idea that the whole thing is yet another altcoin IPO with excellent marketing.
Excellent marketing and a useful product with widespread appeal. It's weird that you focus on the coin as if it was the primary goal. It's merely a means to an end, and one of the best real-world uses of cryptocurrency that I've seen.
Not to mention, if someone manages to make a useful product that benefits users and makes themselves money isn't that exactly what we want? Rarely do incentives align with consumers these days.
Yes, I should have precised. Web extensions are a work in progress in Firefox preview. Currently it is only supported in Firefox preview nightly and only ublock origin is available.
Do you know of any individuals to whom this would apply? Or is this just speculation? This comment reads to me like poisoning the well and presumption of motive.
being in the camp of "nothing ever good comes from adds", I've never considered Brave.
A browser is a remote code execution engine for attacker-controlled content. Looking at their bounties on H1 https://hackerone.com/brave/hacktivity they are still solving problems which Mozilla and Google have researched and extinguished long ago. I don't trust Brave to get the security right. Also Ethereum is a scam and doesn't scale but that's a whole other topic.
As for their claims around paying content generators with their fake monopoly money, this article was absolutely on point.
Brave is Chromium-based...it's literally a fork of the core source code for Chrome, so I don't think it would be any more insecure than that. And with Microsoft forking Chromium for Edge, Chromium should continue to get top-notch support on that front.
Ethereum is not a scam. It has evolved a great deal over the past 6 years, and thanks to zero-knowledge proofs, ETH does scale now (up to 2300 transactions a second, without any need for further upgrades...see Loopring for an in-production implementation of this tech https://loopring.org/#/), so you should update your knowledge on the subject.
It's not fake money. It's getting paid to view ads. This is not even a new idea. I used to use an internet service back in the 90s that was free as long as they could spam me with ads (NetZero). Facebook and Google make hundreds of billions of dollars off of ads, do you really think there's no room in that to give back to consumers of ads some portion of the revenue? The only reason they don't is because their duopoly over internet advertising is pretty stable right now.
Inventing a currency out of thin air so they can mint as many dollars as they want and you and other geniuses can form a secondary market where all of you can trade it is the genius of brave and the point of this article.
Instead of paying you, they make their own currency and pay you. You can make some money off of it in the secondary market because some other idiot thinks it's worth actual money.
Yeah it is worth money. Similar to how heroin is worth money.
You know what else inarguably has monetary value? A perfect one to one copy of an american 100 dollar bill. This absolutely has monetary value and therefore you should buy it, just like how you should buy crypto.
No buddy this is called an analogy. Meaning some things are similar but other things are not. Through average human intuition and intelligence you can derive that I'm not comparing the physical nature of heroin to the abstract nature of crypto.
What I am comparing is the illegitimacy of heroin to the illegitimacy of the crypto issued by Brave. I am sorry that you were incapable of deducing this. But now with this simple explanation of the nature of an analogy you get it!
If a bank gives me a note that says this piece of paper represents the amount of money you have in the bank, this is not producing currency out of thin air.
If a company issues stock and says this piece of paper represents a percentage of the company, this is also not producing currency out of thin air.
If I print out american dollars that don't represent anything and start trading those dollars in the capital market then I will go to jail for counterfeiting. This is 100% producing currency out of thin air.
But wait, change that american dollar to crypto, then everything is legal. This is because crypto represents high technology and buzz wordy concepts. Everybody knows that buzzwords makes everything legal and right.
It's pretty hard to understand something that's wrong. So in a stock IPO the stock represents a proportion of the business. You're saying that those cryptos represent the company? If the company liquidates I can exchange the crypto for the liquidation proceeds? Yay or nay?
This is a "tech" site, no stupid people exist on a "tech" site because of the word "tech," so everything you say must be 100% correct and infallible. Makes sense.
That's a weird and provably false belief. I have found many goods and services that have vastly improved my life via ads.
I have a beautiful very large framed print of a schematic of the ship from The Life Aquatic in my office I admire several times a day I bought from a Facebook ad.
It is something I likely never would have searched for myself but something that has vastly improved my general mood. Any time I'm frustrated, I glance up at the details of the ship. It helps me find center.
To be fair to them, I think a good portion of those bugs were back when they were an Electron app. These days they’re a full on fork of Chromium, and no longer are easily subjected to a lot of those potential mistakes.
I've been clicking the desktop ad notifications like a madman. Earning BAT, then taking that BAT and converting it to an interest bearing stable coin token in DeFi (~8%). Some of the BAT I earn, I also convert into ETH so I can pay for gas, making my transactions 'free'. It has been a fun experiment in playing with this stuff, but it certainly isn't going to make me rich or anything.
Has anyone tried running a bunch of Brave instances in containers or VMs to farm the ads? I wonder if you could automate the entire process. How can they tell if you're a human?
> In the initial Brave Ads release, users receive BAT for viewing the ad notifications. In future releases, users will be able to earn additional rewards for engagement events within the ad tabs. Brave does not reward users for clicking on the notifications. Brave’s position is that users should only click on ads that they have a genuine interest in engaging with.
To save folks a search: that's worth about $24 at current market price (less whatever fees it would take to convert in to your currency of choice). $4/month.
I prefer http://1inch.exchange/ which aggregates multiple exchanges for the best price. It also has limit orders so you can catch the small swings in stable coin rates if you aren't in a hurry.
The way Brave is doing it currently though makes it look worse than snake oil. Why would they advertise a fingerprinting if it actually makes your fingerprint more unique? Why would they advertise Tor although using it inside Brave makes you instantly unique???
If this wasn't the case I'd not have a problem with it. This way it just seems like a huge scam (which considering you can just use Firefox with some add-ons it probably is Mr. Brendan Eich)
You are aware being based on Chromium means you cannot fake many vectors? Even Tor browser isn't able to spoof e everything Chromium hardly can spoof 1% of what Tor/Firefox can.
You will maybe have a randomized fingerprint but it doesn't matter if 99% of other fingerprinting vectors are Stoll left open.
Just look at their github. They have fingerprinting bugs that are beyond uniquely identifying (fonts best example) which are open since years. It isn't solvable through Chromium which all of Brave knows yet they market this.
Chromium is just C++ and it can be hacked. The claim that something "isn't solvable through Chromium" shows magical thinking.
If a vector can be randomized or otherwise arms-raced vs. the remote adversary via C++, then "Chromium" is not an obstacle for Brave. Consider the case of extensions, where your point would have been valid if you'd written "Chromium extensions".
Fingerprinting can be done many ways, but most are not economic: they cost too much for the too few bits they get from the target browser. The common methods, notably fingerprint2.js, use APIs that we at Brave, along with Apple and others in the W3C Privacy CG, are taking on.
Again. If it's so easy to modify Chromium code to hide for example fonts and window decoration and css leakers why didn't you do it yet? The bugs are open since at least 3 years.
I mean benefit of doubt is one thing but you claim it can be done while it's hard to read it out with JS (which it isn't it's a ten line script to identify all of those vectors). But the cpp code that requires thousands of lines of edits is easy?
Please can you then explain why the font fingerprinting bug and window decoration/css leak hasn't been addressed since the last 3/4 years since it has been recognized by your devs as a issue?
That Chinese girl (sorry don't know your name) explicitly said it's too hard years ago but 4 years later you sat it's possible yet the bug is still left open?
Brave is a really tough sell on mobile. It doesn't have mobile extension support like Kiwi and Firefox on Android, or a horizontal tab switcher like Bromite. On top of that, the adblocker is worse than uBO and there's this shady cryptocurrency stuff.
Most people don't restart their browsers as often as you might think (the modern trend is very much away from desktops). Especially on mobile, where things stick around in the background without your knowledge.
1. user privacy – the data for ads is processed in your browser and then only meta is sent to the ad network. Rather than the current system, where Google's/Facebook's ad network fingerprints your browser and then tries to track everything you do on the web.
2. convenience – you can have the browser automatically donate money to the people/websites you visit most without any payment processor middleman.
1) being open source doesn’t mean much in this context.
2) Mozilla’s stated goal and track record is user privacy. Brave’s is a Trojan horse for an alternative ad network.
3) we know who Eich is. Having co-founded Mozilla doesn’t make him a saint. The fact that his world view (expressed through real substantial action that has impact on people’s lives and happiness) is not compatible with what Mozilla stands for, is the reason why he’s not there anymore.
Ignoring Onyva's misstatements, please note that Mozilla does depend for most of its revenue on Google's ad system (people don't use "ad networks" much any longer, but as a loose term for a platform such as Google's Authorized Buyers and AdSense programs, it'll do).
Brave does not have such a data-breaching ad "network" or "real-time bid" platform. Instead the Brave browser downloads a fixed-per-day-for-large-N-population ads/offers catalog of URLs with metadata for each URL, including the first level text-y search-like ad call to action, only if that browser's user opts in. This catalog compresses well and delta-updates, similar in scale to anti-malware/anti-phishing lists. For ad confirmations we use a blind signature protocol (Privacy Pass variant).
Mozilla doesn’t embed an ad network in your browser!?!? Why would anybody want a browser that does this?
You can do whatever you want to do with Firefox. Enjoy the free blocking mechanisms, including fingerprinting, and install whichever 3rd party ad blocker.
Users understand the relationship there, so please don’t try to spin it. It’s not about user’s data.
You’re embedding an ad client into the browser. You want to sell ads yourself. Selling ads and controlling the browser is Google. That’s a conflict of interests.
Brave doesn’t “embed an ad network in your browser” either. If we should bother taking more, let’s agree on common definitions first.
We give no browsing data out to any server including ours, and we pay users 70% of the gross. This user-first design flips the Google model that Mozilla facilitates by default for its ad revenue share. If our users don’t like it, we go out of business. If Firefox users remain unaware of their uncompensated value to Google, Mozilla thrives. Got it?
I'm grateful to the author for the detailed analysis of the cryptocurrency part of the grift. Before I'd never got past the "Brave is taking ad revenue from publishers and keeping it for themseleves" part in any detail.
All ad networks keep revenue for themselves, so in this regard they aren't any different than Google or Facebook providing the ads. But, they also give a cut to users, so unless Brave's cut + the user cut is less than the existing ad networks' take, that's less money for publishers.
What a facile turn you took there. Google and Facebook have agreements with the websites they place the ads on. They asked for those ads to be there. Brave did not.
I think I misunderstood your comment - you are right, Brave's status quo is that they keep all of the revenue from by replacing publishers ads (minus they amount they give to users). My point was that in theory, if:
1) advertisers were willing to pay Brave the same amount as they do existing advertisers, and
2) Brave took a similar cut as existing advertisers (including user payouts), and
3) Publishers were actually taking BAT from Brave
Then there wouldn't be much of a financial difference in who was placing ads. #3 is obviously not the case currently, which seems to be the point you were making.
To be 100% clear: I don't support what Brave is doing, have never used their products, and think their entire business model and its associated crypto-nonsense is at best a waste of time.
Fair enough. I think the concept of some alternate way of paying publishers is great. But that's not what Brave is doing. They're more like the AdBlocker Plus shakedown, where they deprive a site of their ad revenue and then say "well if you want some of that back you can have part of it back from us by showing the ads we want you to."
> The idea that a single user browsing the web could have earned Brave anywhere near $25 in ad revenue is (coming from someone who worked in the ad industry for a couple years) completely absurd.
Wait, is that what my attention is worth to the online ad industry? I would gladly pay <$25/month to not be tracked for ads. (Or, even better, enjoy that as a consumer right protected by law.)
I currently pay $0 for a decent ad blocker but my DNS is still unencrypted. I would not be surprised if my former ISP (Big Cable Co) found a way to track me that way, hopefully my current ISP (local utility) would not. Also suspect that data can leak through the ad blocker anyway via first-party requests.
It's literally taking other people's content, putting their own ads on it, and paying you fake money for the privalege. If I create content, I should be allowed to charge for it. I'm okay with people not wanting to pay or being worried about their security and disabling those ads. I am 1000% not okay with them stealing content to run their own ads. I don't want their fake money, they are essentially running a scam. They may as well just rehost other people's articles and videos with their own ads and skip the whole browser thing entirely, same scam different name.
I don't care that a tonne bat shit has real monetary value. I don't want it. It's not legal tender, I'm not willing to accept it. I don't care that their fake internet tokens have monetary value. I don't want them. Brave is stealing from people and paying them in shit.
The article should be entitled "Brave Executive Team is Brilliant."
Brilliant in two ways: (1) they are an ad company that has fairly successfully wrapped itself in a Klingon Cloaking Sheild made up of "open source" and "pro-privacy" atoms; and (2) they did an ICO at a perfect time (peak of hype with BC soaring) and ease of implementation (Etherium). It was so good (bad) that it brought a tear to my eye.
Getting back to the article, I felt that the grade school "Daddy-O" interludes were unnecessary and distracting but I otherwise really liked it. And the illustrations were boss!
In fact, I liked it so much that I wanted to buy the author a coffee. So I clicked the link and...I was taken to some startup payment service that made it a chore to pay $3, so I bailed. I thought that was ironic as that payment site reminded me of Brave. Intermediating a common transaction with useless clutter and therefore foiling it.
So the Brave exec team and founders made a nice chunk of change and have perpetrated a ruse. But, luckily for users, they balanced Karma by producing a mighty-fine browser. Its capabilities rank it among the best.
It’s been almost 30 years and I still don’t understand why browsers exist. Isolated client-server apps were always better. Except that app design now emulates the browser. Soon we’ll have wasm apps that look and feel like windows 1.0 and call it revolutionary.
I actually prefer web apps because browsers make it easy to view control what’s being sent over my network. Requests are decrypted in the browser and can be viewed in plaintext with the browser console. They can be blocked using tools such as uBlock Origin.
Standalone client-server apps have full, unsandboxed control of your computer. It’s impossible to see the content of encrypted network requests, short of hacking into the app. See: Wacom’s drivers track the name of every application that you open:
This is a good point, and I agree with you, but it seems there are better methods of isolation. Cell phones do this pretty well, and they are the dominant platform anyway, so I guess we're moving in that direction. I just wish I could use the UI features of a PC for all they offer beyond screen-based gestures.
Browsers were built to distribute information via web pages (not apps originally). They’ve evolved since then (in the name of distributing information and entertainment more efficiently), to the point where they can emulate a native app.
Apps are deployed via the browser today for one simple reason - they’re everywhere, and you can write your app once an run it just about anywhere.
Browsers provide a cross-platform runtime allowing users to run remote code in a sandbox. Users don't have to download and install executables, and developers don't have to worry as much about getting people to update their clients.
I'm not very happy that browsers and JavaScript have become the dominant app platform, but I think we'll need something with similar features to displace it.
Misleading title. I thought it was going to eschew the cryptocurrency stuff and focus on the fact that it's a just Chromium with some built-in privacy features, which is the only reason I use it.
Exactly - add uMatrix to the picture and it decreases page load time and gives you even more control over what can load in a website. I am tired of this constant social media promotion of this clone of a browser that is built to support the online advertising industry (an industry that constantly "innovates" to violate our privacy while irritating us in the process).
UMatrix will block everything by default(more or less). Ublock will use pre defined lists that block known advertisement networks and similar.
This means umatrix will break most websites by default and require you to check what elements are required and allow them manual but offers higher security because you essentially audit every website you visit.
It also allows you to add certain common sites, that you may consider ok, to its white-list. That means over a period of time, the amount of auditing required generally goes down.
uMatrix is a bit more harder to use than uBlock Origin.
Basically, when a website loads, it can access resources from various sources. For example, if you access www.example.com, it may also load Analytics from google.com, it may use sharing icon and javascript from twitter and Facebook, it may load some video file from Akamai content delivery network etc. etc.
With uMatrix you can control what resources load from where.
In the default mode, uMatrix will load the resources only from the domain you are accessing, i.e. if you are accessing example.com, it will allow images, javascript, videos etc. to only load from example.com and block from all other sites. This can break some websites - for example, youtube.com which loads videos and javascript from other servers in different domain. In such cases uMatrix allows you to allow resources from the other domains / servers to load and save this settings (or you can just switch off uMatrix temporarily for that site).
Since many resources aren't loaded by default (and a lot of websites include such crap resources from other sites like Google, Facebook etc), it saves bandwidth and the web page often loads faster. But it comes with added complexity when a website breaks.
uMatrix gives you a drop down that shows a grid showing css, scripts, media, cookies, images,frames, XHR, other. Blocked by default you allow what you want.
I'm still figuring it out but it's more granular than merely off or on.
I was surprised how many websites actually work without changing anything... (and loading a lot faster without all the javascript bloat.)
Once you understand how uMatrix works, it's 1 click to temporarily whitelist a site, which i hardly ever use while browsing the web/reading articles.
Note that I do 'online shopping/purchases' in another browser, though.
Only in the beginning. After a week or two, you'd probably visit every site you visit regularly anyway and you'd have set all you need in uMatrix. Additional bonus is that all cookies, scripts, ajax requests etc. from Facebook, Twitter, Google, Instagram, Disqus and God knows what else are blocked for good on all sites I ever visit!
If one of the selling points of Brave is that it saves my time, then spending hours trying to set the right extensions and updating rules doesn't sound that appetizing.
this. so much this. the web is so clean with firefox, everytime I read these kind of articles or people complaining I'm like "what are you talking about?"
Plus, on Mac OS I run Little Snitch with a set of custom blocking rules that's updated on a regular basis.
Also, at this point, I don't trust anything based on Chromium...even if it's all open-source etc. The last time I checked, it still phoned home to Google some telemetry data. Granted, I haven't looked into it for a while as I've turned my back on all things Google a while ago.
The best thing about Brave is that all of the ad / tracker blocking is built into the browser itself - it's noticeably faster than any extension. The blog posts about the implementation make an interesting read:
I never notice performance problems with my Firefox, except for Gmail (which sucks in Chrome too). And uBlock Origin is pretty well optimized already, I'm actually skeptical that Brave can be much better.
Is this an actual thing that's noticeable by people?
What is more noticeable to me is that projects like uBlock Origin are entirely community driven and thus less likely to succumb to monetization schemes like "acceptable ads".
Plus I trust Firefox itself more than I trust Brave, because Firefox has been with me ever since 2005 when I started my career.
I use Brave everywhere, from desktop to iOS. I do not use their BAT thing at all, so my praise is not incentivized.
I love the page that shows me time saved/ads blocked/redirects/etc. I'm sure the time saved stat is highly questionable, it's only as good as heuristics in it, but it's fun.
Anecdotally, last summer, we were vacationing on the Oregon coast, where the service was really poor. I experienced multiple cases where safari (on iOS) just was not going to load any time soon if ever, but brave did and handily. IIUC, Brave is using the same low level rendering engine that safari is, but the top part (UI and request handling) is different.
I think it's cool that Firefox users have lots of knobs and buttons they can turn and push, but for right now I value that the Brave experience is an ad-less experience that Just Works out of the box.
Yes. I use safari on both, never see any ads and often get disappointed that I can’t be outraged when a post pops up about how we can see how FB/Google tracks us.
On mac I use adGuard, in iOS I use Refine content blocker.
i use nextdns.io to block at os level vpn. its free and they are partners of mozilla, so good enought for me. When I asked why should i trust them with my dns request they told me that i should not do it lightly.
I'm a big fan of Brave!
Not only do I have a mostly ad-free web experience but it also saves me bandwidth and time. 22 hours saved in one year to be precise.
Hey there @rudism, I'm glad you found out about Brave, thanks for sharing about it! You should consider verifying yourself as a brave publisher so we can tip you on this platform that you're "not going to use any time soon" :)
My brave browser tells me:
"
rudism.com: Not yet verified
This creator has not yet signed up to receive contributions from Brave users. Any tips you send will remain in your wallet until they verify.
"
But hey Rudis is probably right. Everything should be free and no one should get paid for work. lets not even try to fix or attempt a different economic model. We're all so happy with the current one...
Totally off-topic but I really liked the CSS/design for this site. Simple layout, nice choice of fonts, and a sensible and easy-to-read colour combination for this "wall of text" style presentation. Nice one.
Interesting... I find it absolutely terrible. White monospace font on a
black background - no thanks. Without reader mode I wouldn't stay a
second on such a page.
You're not alone. The book "Type and Layout" by Colin Wheildon describes a "readability" experiment measuring the impact of various typographical techniques on whether subjects comprehend a magazine article. Light text on black background performed abysmally.
(Naturally I believe people who say white-on-black works for them, but I don't believe that preference is universal or should be a default if readability is an important criteria.)
Was this on some sort of glowing screen? Or white paper surrounded by a lot of black ink?
Like anything else, you would have to have sufficient practice with light on dark to be able to be good at it. Light on dark is known to be better for people with contrast decreasing visual problems. Black on white is generally lower contrast as the large bright areas tend to bleed into the tiny text areas.
Print and screen are not the same - as print is reflective, while screens are typically a light source. E-ink is closer to (low resolution, poor quality paper) print.
Granted, dpi and ppi aren't the same - but print would normally be more like 1200 dpi. Even low en laser printers are 600 dpi. So while you might print a 300 ppi image, you'd probably print it at much higher than 300 dpi. E-ink screens are in a kind of middleground - they certainly have lower contrast and resolution than movable type (depending a bit on paper quality, but compared to say printed books).
Brave is brilliant at mobile design is what they're brilliant at. I find Chrome and Firefox on Android unusable because of how much better browsing with Brave feels. Firefox Lite and Microsoft Edge get closer to the pleasure of using Brave on mobile but neither comes close to matching it since Firefox lacks the reliability of Chromium browsers (I know, boo choosing browsers based on usefulness) and Edge has a fetish for bloated sub-menus.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for others to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
There is a lot of anti-Brave FUD, particularly on HN. It's good to see people pushing back against it in favor of a more rational treatment of the pros and cons of Brave.
The author discovered how capitalism works. Everything that has value, has it because there are people willing to pay for it, not necessarily because it has value or purpose. To use a tangible example instead of a virtual one - go read how diamonds have been pumped up by the mining-cutting cartels to be perceived as very valuable while in fact it's very hard to convert them to cash without a significant loss. PS. I've read recently that to move large money in times of crisis it's best to use diamonds, rubies etc. over gold or cryptocurrencies (cash is a non-starter, too much space). Well good luck with converting these stones back at purchase value. It boggles the mind that people can't see how much freedom 24 seed words give in times of crisis. You could move a billion dollars stashed in pages of a harlequin novel through every border & customs check and nobody would ever know. Try that with physical materials.
> how much freedom 24 seed words give in times of crisis. You could move a billion dollars stashed in pages of a harlequin novel through every border & customs check and nobody would ever know. Try that with physical materials.
But there's a problem: you never moved the money at all. You need to bookend it with two transactions to move the real money in and out of the bitcoin system, which nearly always involves intersecting the controls of the real system. It's more like hawala banking. And can suffer 50% exchange rate swings in a very short time.
If you can have the same ad free experience without a token doesn’t that make the token redundant and in long term Occam principle dictates it won’t catch on.
Until content publishers go out of business or lock their content behind paywalls, and the "ad free experience" only has hobbyist blogs and amateurs.
A lot of low rent internet chum would also disappear. So maybe that's a fair trade off, but it will also hurt your local newspaper pretty badly.
Nobody has really come up with a good sustainable alternative to ad-funded content for a lot of publishers. Brave is one of many attempts at this, too bad it smells a lot like a crypto currency scam.
> A lot of low rent internet chum would also disappear. So maybe that's a fair trade off, but it will also hurt your local newspaper pretty badly.
Wow, we have _completely_ different understandings of the value of the Internet. To me, the (realized) promise of the Internet is not just an additional channel for established media, it's the decentralization of publishing in the first place. "Low rent internet chum" is a consequence of that, but IMO it's been far more than worth the tradeoff.
Ad networks have been a key enabler of decentralized publishing. Anyone can sign up to an ad network and start getting paid for clicks. No traditional gatekeepers there. So I'm not sure where you get this idea that what I'm saying is in any way contradictory to what you said.
The implication of the above comment is "low rent chum will die (good) but establishment channels like newspapers will also die (bad)". I'm saying that the decentralized "low rent" stuff is the value of the Internet imo, not providing another medium for channels that already exist.
One of the problems with BAT is that ERC20 doesn't scale so as they get more users, they will need to cut back on the frequency of payments. Also, a lot of that value is absorbed by the Ethereum network as transaction fees (GAS).
ETH2 phase 0 _may_ come at the end of the year. It will be many more years before ETH2 is live and trusted with real funds... enough to either absorb ETH1 or switch over to it. Heck, it may not happen at all. Amazing how this group mindset around ETH2 works.
Agreed. I think most people don't realize how massive of a technical challenge it is to shard something as large and complex as the Ethereum blokchain without introducing critical security vulnerabilities.
When you combine the complexity of the system, the constant need to try to maintain backwards compatibility and the sheer number of people involved in the project, you have every reason to be skeptical.
I've also been following the progpow debate rather closely for the last 1.5 years. ProgPoW is supposed to be a simple PoW change to keep ETH1 asic resistant now that asics have been developed.
This is a 2 year old codebase that has had a paid audit and tons of eyes on it. Just this week, someone discovered and announced an issue. While the fix is relatively trivial, the amazing thing is that it went unnoticed for so long.
I can only imagine ETH2, which is a brand new codebase, whole new consensus model, using cutting edge research (zkSNARKS) and shaped like a rube goldberg machine, will be full of issues nobody has even dared to imagine. I couldn't imagine trusting billions of dollars of value to that literally over night.
They've been promising this for years. I've been working in the blockchain space for 2 years and I have experience working on scalable distributed systems as well so I'm skeptical of Ethereum's approach to sharding.
Aside from major technical challenges that are specific to Ethereum, a major problem with sharding a blockchain in general is that it somewhat obscures the reality that each shard is in fact a separate blockchain with separate network participants and so it might as well have a separate unit of value and not be constrained to a single token.
The ideal solution IMO (to really promote decentralization) is to have multiple independent blockchains and networks interlinked together via open source decentralized exchanges - This will mean that any token's value could be instantly determined relative to that of any other token in a trustless way by polling decentralized exchanges.
It is temporary. Any suggestion to the contrary usually comes from a BTC maximalist who fears his investment in a 'digital-gold' is in jeopardy from a network which is actually achieving useful things.
Brave is indeed very fast and particularly on mobile it is useful that the ad blocker is built-in. Thigh I think for most normies the fact that no plug-in is needed is underrated.
I haven't opted in to ads. They pop up as notifications on mobile and it is very annoying.
On the other hand, companies which are supported by user donations act in the best interests of users. This includes websites such as Wikipedia and the Internet Archive.
Brave does offer the option to make a “tip” to websites, but it’s hardly necessary to have Brave be the middleman for all user donations.