Mozilla founder unveils Bitcoin-based micropayments system for users, publishers
brave.com
brave.com
Every user could decide, how much information about himself he shares with advertiser (even up to eyetracking with webcam if user wants) and how high he prices adspace before his eyes. Advertisers could filter out whom they would like to serve their ads based on the price and information user was willing to disclose and past success of the ads that were presented to him.
If we agree that ads are good then most targeted ads that us as much information each user is willing to share are the best ones. If we agree that ads are bad, why not just ban them altogether and replace them with one single directory of stuff and stuff providers where customer would go to when he needs some stuff.
That's exactly what has happened. Web browser users have "banned" ads by using ad blocking extensions or some other means of removing ads. Then if they want to buy something, they search for it on Google.
Then they click on the first 3 results which are all ads.
Worst, just yesterday I saw someone do this. I asked them if they knew they were clicking on ads. They looked at me blankly as in "what are you saying, and what does it matter."
To have democracy you need to have information that comes with some degree of ethics and accountability.
Blogs and random outlets ain't that.
The press' current business model isn't necessary however.
Original content in the form of features, investigative journalism and opinion pieces might manage to survive with a model like microtransactions or subscriptions.
News (as in the generic 'here's what happened today' kind), is probably as good as dead, at least as far as being a product with any value goes. This is doubly true of any niche where any Tom, Dick or Harry could write about current events, like the tech world, gaming, sports or celebrity gossip.
Which bodes poorly for the average newspaper, but likely isn't as much of an issue for something like The Economist.
I don't go to your sites and look for news; HN or reddit link me to them.
I think this is the point of micro payments, maybe spend a dollar or two a month on internet in general behind the scenes.
There's the supporter model where a small percentage of viewers pays regularly because they like the content (works great for artists and YouTube rs)
There's the preview model: you pay extra to get the content sooner. Lots of examples of that everywhere.
Another example would be the freemium model, but there it's not obvious to me how to apply it here
I can't speak for the parent poster, but personally I don't want it saved. I stopped reading professional news years ago.
All published for-profit news has an agenda. Even if the journalist doesn't have one, it can be inserted by the editor picking and choosing which stories to run. It's hit rock bottom levels. In most countries, if you ask the locals, they can tell you which news outlets are aligned with which parties, and which newspapers publish for which prominent businesses.
For my mileage, I find places like hacker news much better sources of news. This place does a great job of aggregating the kind of high quality content that only pops up when a person /truly cares/ about a subject. You can't get that kind of quality out of someone who works 9-5 making news every day.
From my perspective, the traditional news industry gets a big fat shrug. If they can't keep themselves alive, I won't shed a tear.
Politics are completely different from tech news because in order to write about them, you need to do lots of research. If you want to write why languge A outperforms language B after your extensive benchmarking that took you hours, you only need to summarize it. Your paid job most likely required you to do this kind of research anyways and summarizing it is the smallest part (and not important for your employee). If you write about economics or politics, research is the crucial part and the sole reason for your article (at least most of the time). There are very few people who can afford to do that kind of research for free and donations won't work in the long term. Sure there is a bias and agenda in more traditional news articles, but you can choose which one to read and different news companies have different biases and agendas.
Disagree. I don't think tech news are any quality. Also, we have issues like encryption which can be regarded as a mix, but like FBI vs Apple is more of a politics issue imho, yet reporters can't even get the basic terminology right.
Ultimately, advertising is a form of inefficiency both for the end-users and producers. Perfect world, user's are aware of products and services they do/could/would want without annoying grabs for their attention while producer's can either reduce prices or focus capital elsewhere. Finding models that successfully reduce advertising inefficiencies is better for everyone. Consider how much better the internet is than television and print newspapers/magazines where you actually pay to consume what contains a substantial amount of advertisement (over 1/4 for television).
Because advertisement is a necessary efficiency I don't think just blocking advertisements is really a solution. For now, some model of efficient advertisement is better than the growing number of bloated and data gathering websites out there. I don't see any of the other browser vendors making efforts to move this forward.
Yes, a new browser is annoying and then again perhaps we wouldn't need one if Mozilla hadn't fired Eich for his political contributions?
About that: have you ever noticed that C-level executives never get fired? They get to "resign to spend more time with their families". Being forced to quit is the same as being fired, it just sounds better for PR reasons
Second, while in some cases "spend more time with my family" is clearly an excuse, in the Eich case there is a much simpler explanation. He founded Mozilla and cared deeply about it. Boycotts were going to destroy it. Of course he would step down, it's his only option from his perspective. If he hadn't, it's very likely Mozilla would not exist today.
> Boycotts were going to destroy it...it's very likely Mozilla would not exist today.
I doubt highly doubt it: around the same time, some folk were threatening to boycott Dropbox over Condoleeza Rice's role and the board did not equivocate in their support for her. Dropbox is still around, who knows what would have happened if Mozilla's board had chosen to support Eich.
Since I have no interest in ads, targeted ads are worse because now my data is out there too.
From the perspective of a company, targeted ads probably make more money than untargeted ads, which make more money than zero ads. It's a compromise to try to get those who have zero ads to move to untargeted ads.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AllAdvantage
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zango_%28company%29#1999.E2.80...
The down-side was the overhead, it was a noticeable strain on my computer, which is what prompted me to set it up on a dedicated machine. Pretty sure I was on dial-up then too, which just made things worse.
There was a large group of us on IRC all doing the same thing. Little jerks like us ruined it for everyone.
I missed the part about the user getting a chunk of it. This makes way more sense now.
Its an experiment. This may fail, but bits and pieces of it will be built into future solutions.
Until they make a serious attempt at it, how will they know what holds back adoption or what problems they will encounter?
Well, it's clear that bitcoin based ones, wont.
If you miss a target it doesn't mean you learn how to make the target better.
The problem is that bitcoin as a micropayment solution sucks.
Flattr is stagnant at best, maybe Brave will do better though.
How about reverse-order micropayment for donations? The site lets you start tipping right away, but doesn't actually pay until you load money. So you can start using the service right away, and eventually you'll guilt yourself into actually donating in bulk.
you viewed 59 applications.
supported by teams totalling 489 people.
running 78 servers.
you didn't see 4900 adverts.
your charity account has reached $5, if you have the time, those teams would appreciate your support.
This would add complexity to the backend, but I'd be surprised if it had an inherently high cost overall. A user that actively uses flattr but doesn't put any money in each month probably only represents a small overhead in resources. I guess there's a risk that someone who otherwise would have setup a regular payment now doesn't (or contributes less).
This feels like one of those ideas that is incredibly obvious in retrospect but until I'd heard someone suggest it I hadn't thought about it.
You're suggesting that process is easier than preloading an account from a credit card?
To me, having a bitcoin hot wallet on my computer is what feels unnatural. I'm far more likely to use a service that will let me preload an account balance than I am to use bitcoin and all that entails.
Everyone is their own bank. All you need is a Bitcoin wallet and I recommend exactly that app, Bitcoin Wallet: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.schildbach....
There are many others as well. BitPay has a user-friendly one called Copay: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bitpay.cop...
I think they are hoping to be different than flattr in that they are a browser and so might have a more comprehensive experience than a website widget. Also, websites will get their ads blocked regardless of whether or not they have signed up for any service with Brave. I suppose the hope is that people feel guilty enough about blocking ads to pay a flat rate to have the sites they visit compensated.
[1] or some other function-- e.g. proportionally to sqrt(usage), in order to flatten out power-law returns, and reward creators who make it but aren't in the top 10.
I hope this wont cause any trouble for Brave.
Both ads and search engines benefit greatly from greater user profiling. The path I see for a privacy-sane future is a system where users get to have a personal program (like the Brave Browser) that manages their information and acts like a privacy firewall for third party applications.
I look forward to the day when I can search for something without Google and the likes trying to profile me to give me better results but simply ask in a anonymized and privacy conscious way a contextualized search query from my personal private information broker program.
The Brave ad system looks like a first step in the right direction where users get to control their information.
a browser is almost 100% a commodity wrapped around a search engine. they cant be decoupled. forking chrome and installing some security makes 0 difference to isers.
you have to build top notch security but dont expect users to care. fork apache products & elastic and build a personalizef search engine and browser. let people use your platform to transact and sell optimization and information, then the alt currency piece will make sense.
still like brave though. opera of 2016
I've seen you post this a few times, but I'm curious why you think this, because I haven't seen you give a good explanation and the connection seems like a total non sequitur to me.
It would be huge for Brave to gain Opera's level of marketshare, for instance, and no one is downloading Opera because of its search engine.
so onbvious consolidation risk aside, and allowing one org to control how the world receives info (using pagerank/clone pf pagerank) a browser is a wrapper through which we receive info and typically that is through a search portal.
i think brave is awesome and totally great. great product. great team. good vision. however, i think it is unlikely to 10x. it cant 10x my integration with search/info gathering(browsers browse literally synonym of search) and it likely cant 10x my(generic me) experience if i use adblock/ublock.
browsers help you browse. search engines help you find. you can't browse if you don't know where to look. also, there are only ~3 browser engines that have serios market share. most browsers render the web the same way because of standards so they are just varying degrees of ui, convenience/ux and exterior service integration.
does this make sense? that is how i have been thinking about it.
Ads do matter to users, as if you remove them then the user sees they are no longer distracting and that things are faster.
And if they won't replace other ads but only interact with their partners, I don't see how that'll work. There are billions of websites, unless they got some really big contracts, they won't make it.
Interesting project, anyway.
What country are you talking about? (Legality of course depends on country.) What law could they be breaking? And bonus points if there's somebody else who's ever been prosecuted for something remotely similar.
ClearPlay, for example, works by marking video frames where unwanted content appears and then skipping over them during playback. The Family Home Movie Act 2005 carved out an exception for this in 17 USC 10(11): https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/110
There's an analogy between deleting objectionable portions of a film and parts of a website. I'll ask my copyright attorney friends, I'd bet this is an unresolved question.
Other transformations have been done on webpages forever. In fact blocking all images was a built-in feature of most browsers until a few years ago.
Maybe users will flock to it to earn a few pennies in ad replacement mode? Certainly not for the oppty to pay for ad-free mode.
Targeting can be much better if Brave gives the user the option to anonymously share information with them.
At this point, it's no different from Google.
It seems they would have to block everyone using an ad blocker (or everyone using chrome using an ad blocker). Which seems unlikely, but you never know I guess.
In that context, it's hard to take any of their efforts without a pinch of salt.
Now we are talking, let's cut the we love browsers PR talk. So we are back to the financing content discussion again, and they offer disrupting ads with well, more ads. Because it will be so much better this time if it is them who make a cut. Users are not that gullible, sorry. There are many more bad properties of ads, and the pro people try to argue is that they support content. It is pure fud. Why should I care if some content disappears I would not pay for anyway? And that is a big if, I would argue declining margins at most. Yet there are still many other ways to sponsor content (no pun), often discussed on HN.
1. You really need to remove that picture of Eich. It's just bad. We get it, he's a visionary who wears suits. Please don't downvote me, it's legitimate criticism. It's vain and out of touch. A picture of him is fine but one that is less market-y, more down to earth, isn't trying as hard.
2. The ad-experience-oriented value-add over existing browsers is too low. The vast majority of people just want a fast/stable/free browser to search google and browse Facebook. For the most part they aren't conscious of what browser they are using. When it comes to web-based tracking/advertising they either don't care or don't know to care. It's sad but inescapably true.
Additionally, for those who do care about privacy and/or are aware that their browser is a program they can change, they definitely don't want to pay for an ad-free experience. Why would someone pay for ad-free Brave when they can use ad-free Firefox/Chrome for free? If you're going to argue that they can make money with Brave, how much money are we talking? I'd guess dollars if not cents, is that worth it?
I really hope the Brave team can realize their project is a mistake before learning the hard way. There is definitely a more successful thing out there that they could work on.
I like that picture. I'm glad for once, that someone in the tech sector is wearing a suit. I don't view suits as a reflection of personal quality, but I do like them as a fashion statement.
To be honest, I've never really understood the US motif where wearing a tie and/or suit is equivalent to being dressed up or out of touch with the common man.
School children here (and also in the UK), wear ties and blazers so wearing a tie doesn't feel 'corporate' or stuffy at all to me.
Even still, my criticism isn't specifically or especially the suit. That's just a superficial component of the deeper flaw. It's just looks like it's trying too hard, doesn't look natural, feels cringy. I mean, who sits on a bench in a suit by themselves looking ambiguously into the distance while clasping their hands together? It's weird.