Hacker News Reader

Comment by HBlix | Hacker News Reader

I think given what the advertising industry has been for years, it’s arguable that attempts to sustain them are fairly evil. Being able to opt-in to it is still far less laudable than promoting ad-blocking (but of course that doesn’t allow for you to go ICO and rake it in). It’s not as bad as opt-out, but it’s still wretched, and no amount of “for the content creators” hand-wringing or tokenizing changes that. I do see how blending an ICO with this has the potential to make the people behind Brave richer regardless of long-term success or adherence to current ethics.

View on HN

Nobody at Brave is getting richer right now, we are a startup. My salary walked back to late 1990s level. The tokens locked up for the team and advisors are nothing compared to years of RSUs at Google or FB.

Anyway, as the last sentence reminds, attacking us based on compensation shows a strange double standard. The huge super-surveillance companies pay people way more than we make, and they do it by raiding user privacy, page load time, radio and so battery life and data plan, and safety from malvertising.

We are out to transplant -- with user consent always, creator too if they are involved -- the necessary minimum viable ads components into a clean ecosystem, to capture some of the huge funding from ad spend ($100B in US on digital this year) and give 70% or 85% to user or user+creator. See other replies on how our ad model preserves privacy.

Nobody at Brave is getting richer right now, we are a startup.

“Right now” is doing some terribly hard work in that claim.

My Mozilla vow of poverty (look at form 990s to see what top person makes; hardly poverty but more than I ever made) is over. Anyway, the ad hominem with a double standard vs. the huge tracking-dependent businesses is a bad look. Change it.

It’s hard to take image advice from someone who seriously goes from accusations of personal attacks to “Change it” in the same sentence. I’ll file that next to taking conflict de-escalation tips from Linus Torvalds. More topically, I have no problem with you trying to strike it rich down the line, only with the thin veneer of altruism you seem driven to coat those motives with.

You picked up the ad hominem axe. Are you really upset with me for my imperative-mode verb use? Ok, don't do better, if that helps. (Reverse psychology :-P.)

The question you seem to be avoiding by tone-policing in wake of attacking my motives is whether ad spend can be replaced quickly enough to save the "good" content. Perhaps it is time to let the ad-funded world burn, and rebuild afterward. I'm not yet convinced, so excuse me for trying to reform ad-spend rather than just go for baseline blocking + optional voluntary anonymous token contributions, and no other option.

You picked up the ad hominem axe.

Did I really? Looking back over our brief exchange I’m not seeing it, you just seemed to use my supposed impropriety as a justification to turn this into a fight. It’s a pattern that seems to hold throughout comments on this thread when you’re questioned on the ethics or wisdom of BAT. A more cynical person would suspect that your position is sufficiently untenable that you’re employing a bit of the dead cat strategy.

Here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18156361

Why is your only recourse, on the question of how to replace ad funding and keep even just the top 10% of the web alive, to attack our motives or ethics? Better to give a plausible version of how our rejecting ads, even skipping tokens for anonymous donations it seems, and just blocking to burn the ad-funded world down a little faster, leads to a better wider world later.

You seem to be conflating criticism of your actions with criticism of you personally. That’s not a game worth playing. As you said I’m questioning your motives in the context I already laid out, of existing solutions which are superior for the consumer. I’ll leave it to others who have already commented extensively to question the technical means.

It’s also worth pointing out that I’ve explained the core issue I have with your plan have nothing to do with your motives or ethics. I’m not sure how many times I need to repeat the idea that something like uBlock Origin is a superior performer, and “but the ad-supported content!” argument is unmoving for reasons I’ve already stated. It’s not that I’ve failed offered a broader perspective, it’s just that you’ve focused a lot on what you perceive as a personal attack, despite it being nothing of the sort.

"Nothing personal", you attacked the team, not just me. If you want to do that all day long, go for it.

But what I'm asking you to do, as a better course of action, or on top if you prefer, is say what "existing solutions" are superior and why they win. We started with baseline ad blocking and some of our users, who see the ecosystem problem of free-riding (which you still dismiss), asked us to build an option for giving back. So we prototyped with Bitcoin, and when that got expensive and cut off users who could not buy it, we created the Basic Attention Token instead.

Again if you dislike our ethics, no need to rehash. But I'm still interested in how you think pure blocking, AKA "free riding", will result in a superior outcome for anyone in the long run. Publisher revenues have been falling for years, decades if you look at newspapers. How do your top ten sites keep their lights on?

"Nothing personal", you attacked the team, not just me. If you want to do that all day long, go for it.

I’m done with attempts to frame yourself or your “team” as a wronged party.

I don’t dismiss it, I encourage it. I’ve actively stated several times that it’s a model in need of a bullet in the neck. I’ve pointed out that much ad-supported content and “journalism” exists on a scale between useless and toxic. Moreover, the ad industry itself is inseparable from the industry of information brokering, creating demand for crap, and the subsequent environmental catastrophe of modern consumer culture. The death of it, and the noisy bollocks which exists to draw attention to it would be a good thing. Given their history they don’t deserve more chances, and it’s reasonable to suspect that even if they started off allowing for good intentions, over time the envelope would be pushed until we were back where we are now.

I understand that you disagree with what I’m saying on several levels, but the good news is that ad blocking is free and easy, not to mention popular compared to what you’re attempting.

asked us to build an option for giving back. So we prototyped with Bitcoin, and when that got expensive and cut off users who could not buy it, we created the Basic Attention Token instead. Again if you dislike our ethics, no need to rehash. But I'm still interested in how you think pure blocking, AKA "free riding", will result in a superior outcome for anyone in the long run. Publisher revenues have been falling for years, decades if you look at newspapers. How do your top ten sites keep their lights on?

Less noise, more signal. Will “free riding” kill loads of clickbait, outrage factories, and “journalism” that is really a collection of affiliate links? Yes, and it’s a feature, not a bug. As a bonus it could even encourage a more functional and less societally destructive means of remuneration for content creators that isn’t mediated by profiteering sociopaths who call themselves advertisers.

Yes, just below is a comment where you said you "already explained that the majority of ad-supported content is hot garbage, more clutter than content." I won't quibble!

But in the interest of greater knowledge, I'll try one more time to get something less broad that addresses risk. Here is a top-by-revenue-and-subscriptions publisher trade group. They get 80% in aggregate of revenue from ads, are shifting away from ads, but cannot drop ads. Ideas other than high dose rad & chemotherapy (to use your "cancerous" trope) welcome.

https://digitalcontentnext.org/membership/members/

Random Brave annoyance: when I look at the Mozilla form 990 in Brave, it prompts me to download the PDF. When I look at it in Chrome, in views it inline. I'm fairly certain Brave is capable of viewing PDFs inline; I could swear I've had some load. What gives?

https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/2014_Mozilla_Found...

Something throws off our Muon (fork of Electron) browser, but it isn't lack of content-type: or funky content-disposition: or whatever. Good news is it works the way you expect and the way it presents in Chrome (but still via PDF.js, we are not using the 0day factory known as pdfium that Chrome uses) in brave-core. Dev channel: https://brave.com/download-dev, beta channel: https://brave.com/download-beta.

How is offering a completely voluntary option to subject yourself to a more benign version of advertising than the standard, in order to fund the content you use, "wretched"?

“More benign” yet still cancerous, is the answer to your question. I’ve already explained that the majority of ad-supported content is hot garbage, more clutter than content. I’ve pointed out that the ad industry has decades of questionable-at-best track record, so “wretched” naturally follows. I’ll grant that it’s less wretched than the current state of advertising affairs, yet more wretched than currently available ad blockers.

> the majority of ad-supported content is hot garbage

I cannot argue with that, I very much agree. But plenty of people not only like consuming what I deem hot garbage, they're more than comfortable supporting it via ads; something I would never subject myself to if given a chance.

But I don't believe I should be able to dictate how other people experience their content or how they fund it, and there are still mountains of ad-supported content that is actually good and that would likely be non-viable on a patronage/subscription system due to things such as their target demographics.

So, Brave seems to tick our own boxes of "no ads" and provides the option for others to subject themselves to them. Unless we're arguing for going back to the old "pre-mainstream" Internet (to which I say, there are many places for that, and the Tor network is particularly fertile for fostering such a culture) then I say the Brave model improves the situation on every front.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com