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Comment by BrendanEich | Hacker News Reader

If you dislike ads, then don't opt in. You are welcome to use baseline Brave and just block. But why comment as if you mean to tell others what to do?

If you think the web can do without $100B in US on digital this year, ~$250B globally that goes through ads, then please demonstrate replacement funding models, or just show some evidence of any that could scale that big.

We can't count ads out, but by lifting 3rd party to 1st ad context (avoids brand safety and reverse: bad ads on good content), aligning interests, and cutting out all the trackers and other intermediaries that evolved because browsers were passive slaves to the system, we hope to more than replace the value of our users to publishers that was "lost" via our users blocking by default.

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I think the web as it exists today is bloated with “content” that could never survive without that money, and the loss of that “content” would be a gain for the web. I’m hard-presses to think of many worthwhile examples of ad-supported content; certainly HN here doesn’t take that path.

You could argue HN being an advertising platform for YC and certain YC posts being inserted early on like hiring posts are ads. So using HN isn’t a good example at all.

Absolutely. And the idea that he’s trying to convince us that as users we would like to support this “economy”, is preposterous. I want it to go away. If it needs ad revenue to exist, it’s very unlikely to be of value to me.

I’ll stick with Firefox, as Mozilla is the only organization users can truly trust today for their privacy

First point, to separate concerns.

I am among the founders of Mozilla, and I'll speak only about what is public and happened or at least started while I was there:

1. We rejected 3rd party cookie blocking patches, three times. Safari has had a blocker from birth.

2. We got too dependent on Google revenue shares while Google turned from search (1st party ads) to full surveillance (1st and 3rd) superpower.

3. Tracking protection work that started while I was there was delayed for years, then allowed only in private tabs, then a pref was added. Now, after Safari and Brave have taken the lead, Mozilla is turning on tracking protection in some form by default (which is good).

The claim that Mozilla is the only organization users can truly trust for privacy is belied by these facts.

I tried my best to get the tracking protection patch shipped after you left. There were no realistic technical concerns with it. The entire engineering team wanted to enable it. The patch was ready for prime time. I was overruled for non-technical reasons. I left not too long after.

Second point: I don't have to convince anyone that ads are necessary to fund most of the visible web. They obviously are doing it, poorly, and if the hundreds of billions gross spend per annum globally (rising to a trillion in a few years) went away, many sites would shut down -- including newspapers and other homes for journalists.

You may not care; I care about some but not others so do not take this as me twisting your arm. But "I'm all right Jack" is a bad attitude in view of the fact that ad-funding is required for millions of sites today.

Second point: I don't have to convince anyone that ads are necessary to fund most of the visible web.

You’re selling an ICO based on that premise, I’d argue that yes you do very much need to convince at least some people of that. In addition I’d argue that you need to convince people (against the evidence of their own experience) that the majority of the “visible web” isn’t a dumpster fire that would be better off dead.

Our token sale is over, it ended in 24 seconds. I'm not selling anything, least of all to you who are free to use Brave as a baseline ad blocker. Publishers working with us call that "free-riding".

It's great you don't like most content. Who does? Sturgeon's Law (90% of everything is shit) has not been repealed. But we do not all agree on which 90%, and even the top 10% by many measures needs ads. Why are you trying to make your animus against ads into a universal? Seems cultish.

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