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Comment by jonathansampson | Hacker News Reader

Brave Ads are opt-in, and user-configurable. You decide whether or not to participate, and to what degree (1 to 5 ads per hour). These ads are surfaced as OS notifications, which means they respect settings like Do Not Disturb, Focus Mode, etc. And, as always, you receive 70% of the ad revenue for your participation. Respectfully, that doesn't strike me as an "escalation of hostility" when you compare against the current option: forced participation, malicious ads, no revenue share, data leaked to a sea of third parties who use it for their purposes.

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I already decided my Ad participation. I block ads, and want the advertising industry to die. This does not seem like a value add to me.

So don't opt-in. There are other ways to acquire BAT and support the sites you visit in Brave besides watching ads.

No. You don't understand. It's not enough for me not to see ads anymore. I want the advertising industry to die. The entire thing. Its existence is harmful to society.

If people choose to buy BAT from exchanges rather than earn it by watching ads then content will be increasingly funded directly by payments from consumers rather than through advertising. If everyone did this then there would be a closed loop of BAT exchange between viewers and content creators (mediated by exchanges) without any ads in sight. This is an effective strategy to employ against the advertising industry if that's really your goal.

No, in making provisions for the advertising industry in their business model, they are aiding its survival. I will always recommend a proper adblocker over this.

You are of course free to do as you wish, but since you're applying "guilty by association" logic to Brave—regardless of the fact that using it without enabling the ads does absolutely nothing to help the advertising industry—I really hope that you also refuse to have anything to do with any sites that receive any of their funding through advertising. Enabling an adblocker doesn't reduce that contamination in any sense: The site is still "making provisions for the advertising industry" and "aiding its survival", far more so than Brave.

Funding the site with Brave and BAT would at least offer a practical alternative to reliance on advertising. Unless, perhaps, your goal is not to destroy advertising, but rather to destroy all sites which depend on external funding and yet aren't a big enough draw to justify a dedicated subscription?

>but since you're applying "guilty by association" logic to Brave

That's a misunderstanding. It's not a guilty by association thing. It's that there is already a thing more in line with accomplishing my goals, since uBlock Origin has no provisions for ad companies to still make money.

This just isn't true though. Or at least I don't see where you're coming from. You might see ads as intrusive, or getting you to spend money on something you don't want to spend money on... but that's not how many advertisers see ads. Ideally, they would only be at your attention when you want them there. If I'm looking to buy a washing machine, and I don't know where to start, advertising is one of the primary ways I get introduced to the options out there.

Furthermore, ads have driven most major media from newspapers to radio to tv... and what has made them so financially accessible to most people. Maybe you can afford to pay money to every single patreon out there, but not everyone can. And imagining a world where everyone uses an ad-blocker and advertising dies means that every content creator is just going to put up a paywall, which means information will be exclusively restricted to people with money. That sounds like a fantastic future.

Frankly the notion that advertising is objectively bad, or good, for that matter is reductive. You might say certain practices are good or bad, and certainly the ones we are seeing online right now are not good, but that seems to me the problem Brave is trying to solve - building an ad model for the web that actually works.

I wrote down some of the many ways in which ads are a societal ill, here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21528465

I just flat out disagree with most of the premises you have shared here. Also I don't understand how something can be wrong or right in an 'academic sense' but fine:

>They distort the product market as they favour those players with the highest marketing budget, rather than with the best product. Presumably the companies with the bigger budgets have that money to spend because they have a better product. When people buy your product, you have money to spend, and then you go and spend it on marketing and advertising (which are two separate disciplines, I won't get hung up on that but just know that using those two interchangeably betrays a lack of critical understanding). I can think of very few companies that became market leaders solely because of advertising while selling an inferior product. Beer/alcohol springs to mind, but even there I could argue that taste is subjective and that image is a huge part of what people are drinking regardless so much like fashion, customers are buying the label as much as the utility.

> They distort the media market as getting people to look in your direction is the only thing that has value. Clickbait and fake-news are a direct result of advertising, and wouldn't exist without it. This is also wrong-ish. People didn't tune into a TV show because of the advertisements that aired between commercials, they tuned in because of good TV. The better the TV show, the more money they could command from advertisers because of the audience size. They wouldn't invest that money into more advertisements, they would invest it into making better TV. Now, with clickbait you have a bit of a point - but that's more of a systemic issue. When people started giving content away for free, newspapers crashed as content moved online. Desperate for an audience, advertisers used yesterday's model (look for the place with the most eyeballs) and started migrating over there. There was a period of time where buzzfeed and clickbait reigned supreme for that reason, but that's starting to change as advertisers get wiser about where they are positioning their company. Respectable products tend to dominate respectable sites and clickbaity sites get filled with less respectable companies. It's far from perfect, but again - this is about the method, not really advertising as a practice. I don't see the connection with fake-news at all. Fake news happened because people were glued to their newsfeeds. If anything advertisers are terrified of fake news because it hurts their credibility to show up next to it.

> They are an attempt at manipulation. People have to constantly expend the energy to counteract that manipulation. I also believe this to be a big factor in the decrease in trust in media. Since the stuff that is meant to inform you is always surrounded by stuff trying to manipulate you, how could you ever build trust to it? Are reviews an attempt at manipulation? Maybe you think they are better because they are a third party... but at the end of the day they are just trying to tell you one product is better than another. If "attempts at manipulation" are bad, then we should get rid of all review sites. If your issue is that the company is saying their thing is best, when maybe it isn't, what company in their right mind would say "hey, our product sucks". Do you have an issue with sales or selling in general? Is the very act of getting someone to try and buy your thing a cause for societal ill? As for people constantly expending energy to counteract this manipulation, this is my least favorite line of argument around advertising. It disrespects people and treats them as weak minded simpletons who have no thoughts other than what they are told to think. At a certain point you have to respect people and their ability to make decisions for themselves.

>resumably the companies with the bigger budgets have that money to spend because they have a better product.

Laughably wrong. Like, parallel universe wrong. Don't even know where to start on that one.

With response number two, there is so much wrong, I don't even know which part to quote:

-Who said people turned in because of advertising? I have literally no idea where you got that from?

-Fake news is a cheap way to produce content that gets a lot of attention. You make something up that riles people up, and then people share it. Without advertising, there would be no direct financial advertising to do so.

-Who cares that advertising companies would prefer not appear next to fake news. Their actions still directly encourage fake news.

And so much more. A real Gish-Gallop you got there.

> Are reviews an attempt at manipulation?

This is the mark of the ultimate dishonest argument or lazy thinking. Do you honestly not see the inherent difference (of kind, not degree) between a review you seek out from a trusted independent source, and an ad that someone paid for to put in front of you against your will, and who's only incentive is to get you to buy the product it is about? If you don't, I genuinely can't help you.

>It disrespects people and treats them as weak minded simpletons who have no thoughts other than what they are told to think. At a certain point you have to respect people and their ability to make decisions for themselves.

I don't like having to constantly spend that energy. I don't like constantly having to be on alert and defend myself from the manipulation attempts.

And this is such a bad argument in general. You could use the same argument against anything designed to make people's life easier and less stressful. Why does advertising get a past.

In conclusion, your entire comment is a collection of the very worst, lazy and dishonest arguments and excuses for advertising.

>In conclusion, your entire comment is a collection of the very worst, lazy and dishonest arguments and excuses for advertising.

And yet you couldn't address any of them without dodging the material part of the argument in favor of faux outrage, generalities, and personal preference topped off with a belittling logically unsound conclusion.

Cool.

I made an effort to address the argumentative core of your argument. It's hard, because there is no core to the argument, just a kitchen sink of bad assumptions and weak arguments.

And let me assure you that there is nothing "faux" about my outrage.

but that's not how many advertisers see ads

I've heard advertisers try and justify their work and it doesn't sound very convincing. The simple fact is they are paying to make you do something you wouldn't have ordinarily done.

As we have become more resistant to their activities they have become more underhand. Adverts will try and convince you that you can't be a good father unless you own an SUV, that your partner will become slim and attractive if you buy a specific perfume for her, that you will have a happy family Christmas if you just bought this oak table. This sort of manipulation is a scourge on society.

If I'm looking to buy a washing machine I either go to the electrical store or by a copy of Which (I guess consumer reports would be the same thing in the US).

It seems obvious to me that this is an extreme stance and greatly oversimplifies things, but a couple things to note:

* the global advertising industry is upwards of a $500 billion market [1]

* that industry employs close to 200k people in the U.S. alone [2]

I think it is safe to say that people who earn their living via the advertising industry and thus positively contribute to the economy would be a benefit to society. Of course one could still make the argument that the net impact is harmful, but I don’t think it is controversial to say that is a bold claim with many complicating factors.

1. https://www.statista.com/topics/990/global-advertising-marke...

2. https://www.statista.com/statistics/186066/employment-in-us-...

The size of an industry and the number of people that it employs is hardly a measure of how it benefits society. People are employed in the global spam, fraud, and mafia markets, and they spend their income on such wholesome things as housing, groceries, computers, expensive wine/cars/vacations, art. Doesn't mean that the industry contributes positively to society.

Old man yells at clouds

How old do you think I am?

Yea, I'd be happier if there was some notion of an inherent value in my eyeballs - and then I could just put that money into the system. Eg, I pay $5/m or $15/m, whatever, and that gets split up by the number of pages I view and content I consume.

I'm a firm believer that FOSS and (Internet) Content needs funding. Yet, I loathe ads. They promote (but are not solely to blame for) behavior that is a brain drain on society. Ads always seem to boil down to 90s style child cereal commercials. Loud noises and flashy attention grabbing tactics to pull you towards it within a tiny, limited window of bought attention.

I'm not convinced society is better because of ads. The dystopian movies with neons signs everywhere seem shockingly accurate (and I believe are already like that in many eastern cities).

I like some of Brave's attempt. At least their doing something. But Ads still seem wrong to me.

You can buy BAT with a credit card and participate in Brave's system without ever seeing an ad.

I don't understand, why would I spend money on something I don't want or care about?

The comment I replied to said:

> Eg, I pay $5/m or $15/m, whatever, and that gets split up by the number of pages I view and content I consume.

That's 100% possible to do with Brave's system.

My only issue with this, if I understand correctly, is that I must use BAT currency.

If I understand correctly, you don't actually use BAT, it gets consumed as you browse. You would just top it up like a pay as you go phone if you want an ad-free browsing experience, or you can generate BAT by enabling ads at a configurable level if you don't mind them.

So I don't use Brave, but it certainly sounds as though by purchasing BAT (or you can receive them through enabling ads) those are then allocated to the content creators whose stuff you're choosing to consume. Which supposedly--this is the part of the scheme I am most skeptical about, because crypto markets are mostly just hilarioujs--allows them to turn BAT into actual money.

Can you explain what exactly in this conversation you don't care about? Follow-up question, can you explain why you felt the need to air that don't-care-about-it without moving the conversation anywhere?

You are spending money on the creators of content you read, which theoretically you care about (not getting that vibe though.). It’s like supporting someone on Patreon but it’s a different take on direct support.

Do you hate click bait?

Do you wish the "free" content was of higher quality?

Do you think a insightful blog post, youtube video, or similar content is worth rewarding the person who made said content?

Seems like the main evil of advertising is that it doesn't directly reward the maker of the content. Most of it is sucked up by the middle men who siphon off most of the money and force the content providers to work ever harder for their ever smaller fraction of the proceeds.

Using brave seems much like using Patreon to sponsor your favorite content providers. But instead of trying to manually set a $ per month per provider you can just use your eyeball time to control each content providers share.

Seems like the internet where brave (or similar) was popular would be a much nicer place than the current advertising.

Wouldn't you be willing to pay $20 or similar a month if that meant zero ads for you and your favorite sites got more money than they get through advertising today?

The reality is that your eyeballs are something like $200/month. You are just not likely to pay that money. When you factor in money thrown away at bot/fraud, advertisers spend a shit load of money just to reach you (and indirectly pays for a whole lot of entertainment tv-shows/web-content)

Man that's rough. You're right, my content is way not worth that.

It's odd to me though. I could pay for content I care about at an amount far smaller than $200/m, and the content creators would make more from me I imagine.

Why the extreme overhead? There's no way some blogger is making $200/m off of a handful of clicks from me. I'd be shocked if they made $5/m directly from me.

So where is the disconnect?

(sidenote, i understand the $200/m figure was not for a single blogger. But, lets pretend that blogger was all of my traffic for the month. I still can't imagine it's even remotely close to $200/m)

Everybody at every step takes a bit of money. It funds a billion-dollar industry of parasites.

Agreed. Which is sort of why I asked that. The reply to me said it would be closer to $200/m. However, I was wanting to pay content creators, not parasites.

So my comment was talking about paying content creators. I can't imagine they come anywhere close to $200/m from me, as you put it it's all the middlemen. So why would I be concerned about $200/m?

Google has a market cap of 894.52B at this point in time. For instance.

Yea, but in my comment I didn't care about Google. We were talking about money going directly to content providers, to compensate for the fact that they don't make ad money off of me.

But do you care about all the services google provides? Do you use their search, email, etc? Those would also be things you would need to pay for.

Sure, and I'd love to see prices for those too. $200/m I doubt, though. Purely search though, nothing else from Google (I pay for my email/etc)

To say though that Google has to get a piece of the $200/m that some blogger makes assumes of course that Google is the ad provider. Not sure, but it seems like a weak argument.

I wish I could start seeing the real no-ads costs here.

Market cap has nothing to do with how much ads are worth, it is just how much people are willing to pay for Google stock.

Google's revenue from ads could be useful, though.

Here's average revenue per user (per year) for many top companies. https://mondaynote.com/the-arpus-of-the-big-four-dwarf-every...

For anyone who is a user of multiple brands, you need to add these numbers.

Interesting link. I'm not sure how to interpret these numbers though. It says Amazon gets $752 per user per year. But this seems like it is nothing to do with how much my eyeballs are worth - people give Amazon money in return for stuff. The only other brand on that list I use is Google. I'm outside the US, so it appears my eyeballs are worth $137 per year. That is an amount I'd be prepared to pay if it made adverts go away and the money was split between the content providers I do use. But it isn't really clear (to me) how the old guy on YouTube who restores the antique furniture would collect his 75% share due to my eyeball time.

That sounds crazy if true. The idea that companies are managing to change my behaviour enough with advertising to drive enough revenue and extra profit, for purchases that I wouldn’t otherwise have made, to justify $200 in advertising spend seems absurd. That would mean a significant portion of my monthly spending (much more than $200) would have to be directly driven by advertising. Is advertising really that effective?

The point a lot of people miss is that advertising doesn't just convince you buy new things. Many advertisements are designed to make you feel good about the products you already buy so you won't consider trying the alternatives.

When you grab a bottle of dish soap off the shelf, do you select the same one each time because you prefer it for reasons you can't quite articulate or do you grab whatever's cheapest because they're basically all the same?

I was about to disagree until I read your example. You're right - I buy a lot of stuff for reasons that aren't grounded in reason, and, although I usually relate to stuff such as "my Mom used to have this one at home when I was a kid", well, who knows if that's the actual reason or just some justification from my mind.

Think about the lifetime value the advertiser who influenced your mom is earning!

This is the realm most Car Ads fall under.

Their purpose isn't to randomly convince someone to spend $20-30k on a brand new vehicle.

The purpose is to convince people who've already bought the car that they made the right decision and to feel good about it - and to rave about their new exciting, big purchase to their friends/family.

I buy the allergy friendly one of the store brand that I’ve never seen an advertisement for. Since it’s the store brand the type variates since I don’t always shop at the same store.

But you’re right, I probably buy Coca Cola (and like it better) instead of Pepsi because of life long branding. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen an online advertisement for Coca Cola though.

> That would mean a significant portion of my monthly spending (much more than $200) would have to be directly driven by advertising. Is advertising really that effective?

That's why I believe a lot of value all these trackers provide to various companies is not so much the typical 'buy this product now' pop-up that you're thinking, but instead more nefarious value-adds.

Maybe that mortgage or car loan rate you applied for came back a little higher than others would have received on the same day. Perhaps that collection agency decided they wouldn't discount the medical bills because they know 'you can afford it'. I've seen several sites give me one price when I was logged in without an ad blocker, and then a lower price after clearing my cookies.

There is no way insurance companies aren't paying huge amounts of data to calculate rates offered to individuals based on thousands of data points. I imagine the government itself would be able to take advantage of user data in all sorts of clever ways - everything from solving crimes to catching tax cheats to provide better and cheaper background investigations for the millions who require it.

Companies interviewing candidates could save thousands on each potential hire if they could quickly have an algorithm avoid the 75% of candidates they wouldn't consider hiring anyway.

There are just so many ways companies can statistically make a few extra percent here or avoid an expensive loss there, it will be used until the government disallows it, which apparently isn't going to happen anytime soon in most countries.

They have no idea whether you would have bought something or not. Look at it through the lens of how much money you spend in a month, and what the average margin is on the things you buy. When you look at it that way it's not crazy to think there would be enough positive ROI indicators to justify that much marketing spend.

Ad sales are easy: appeal to the ego of the purchaser. I’m convinced ads are all a scam and are in effect money laundering.

The numbers coupled with lack of factual evidence of effect is staggering. I have a lot of distrust in the business. It’s about as accurate as Nielsen.

Total spending on digital ads in the United States, a reasonably proxy for the value of the ads to advertisers, has been cited at about $111B[1]. There are about 280 million Internet users in the U.S.[2] (averaging the 2018 measurement of 275M and the 2019 projection of 285M). That works out to about $33 per user per month—which is a decent chunk of change, but much less than $200/month.

[1] https://mondaynote.com/the-arpus-of-the-big-four-dwarf-every...

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/325645/usa-number-of-int...

Yeah, but I bet the typical hackernews reader is in an age group and wealth level that is more valuable than the average internet user.

I wouldn’t be so sure. I mean it’s anecdotal, but I rarely buy things. I buy all my clothes from the same internet store, and I do mean all, I have five pairs of shaping new tomorrow pants and when they get worn I replace them with the same damn pants. I heard about them from a coworker who uses them. Almost all my purchasing habits are like that, and I suspect I may not be the only one on HN.

I do click on the occasional Kickstarter boardgame advertisements, but I never end up backing because we always end up playing bloodbowl anyway.

On the other hand I do subscribe to the internet part of a Danish news paper that along giving you access to articles also removes all adds for paying users. I guess that’s sort of what brave wants to do, but who wants the hassle of buying alt-coins and reporting the taxes on it?

We all would like to see what these pants are, so good the style is good forever. You'll have to decide if you use an affiliate link ;-)

You might not buy things, but you have to do SOMETHING with your money (assuming you are an above average earner as someone in tech).

If you save your money, then financial companies are going to want to advertise to you to use their services. If you invest, investment opportunities will want to advertise to you. If you travel, vacation destination will want you.

Assuming you don't just put your money in a box, SOMEONE is going to want you to use your money in a way that gives some of it to them.

If I could choose to pay for just the content I want, it wouldn't be $200/month, because I'd carefully pick and choose what I care enough about to pay for. I spend most of my online time on a very small number of sites and same few youtube channels, many of whom I already pay on patreon, if I had to pay a little more to cover streaming/video hosting, that cuts google out of the financial picture, I would totally do that. I do not like google, but I do like the handful of content creators that I follow. Any other time I spend online is idle time that I could do without and if forced to pay for it, it would actually help me break a habit I don't particularly want in the first place.

Quantifying your attention across specific sites and then rewarding them proportionately is precisely what Brave does.

The reward distributed to them is paid by you. Your balance accumulates either through opting into ads (advertisers pay you to intrude), or you can buy Basic Attention Token yourself (like via Coinbase) and top up your wallet.

Brave is doing exactly what it sounds like you want.

It's very hard to quantify attention. And also, is that the most important? Quantifying a reward should not be given to an algorithm. That's the only reason why things like this[0] happen.

For me the best way is either a Netflix style network (like safari books), or something like [1].

[0]: https://unhashed.com/cryptocurrency-news/are-fake-websites-a...

[1]: https://taler.net/en/

Remember when the internet wasn’t a center of commerce? People posted websites and information for free because it was cool and noble. That’s the internet I love.

The audacity of so many people who feel entitled to get paid makes me so sad. I adblock, strip affiliate links, etc.

Ad revenue drives censorship. Dumbs people down, etc. The whole biz should burn down to the ground.

holy shit a hacker on hn. i was not sure there were any of us left

Much of what you say rings true but ... I think without the incentive of monetization I don’t think we’d see as much good content in places like YouTube.

On the other hand that same carrot brings a lot of baggage like: ads, and lots of crap (content farms and idiotic buzzfeed listicles and cat videos) some idiocy is okay, but we get flooded ...

> I'd be happier if there was some notion of an inherent value in my eyeballs

Your eyeballs only have value if they’re willing to look at things that other people are willing to pay to have you see. Thus ads.

Yes, this is a perfectly sensible stance, which of course requires you to actively pay for content instead, either through brave or some other program.

I'm sure you're not just expecting content creators to make stuff for you full-time entirely for free.

Ads should die, but it requires consumers to realize that they need to pay for content one way or another.

I do pay several patreon, have automatic transfer set up for two projects, and a long standing subscription to a website I'm a fan of.

But people don't need to realize anything for ads to die. All they need to realize is that they should all be using ad blockers and never ever turning it off again.

Being able to make people look in your direction long enough to show them something else they might spend money on is not valuable. It doesn't need to exist.

> But people don't need to realize anything for ads to die. All they need to realize is that they should all be using ad blockers and never ever turning it off again.

That isn't true at all. What about when I play a youtube video on my chromecast and it shows an ad on my TV? What happens when websites draw all their content using the canvas instead of the DOM, and adblockers don't work anymore, or websites like Hulu which already make it difficult to enjoy the content while avoiding the ads.

Then getting rid of ads has to stop being a technical process but a legislative instead.

Hulu makes it very easy to enjoy the content while avoiding ads. Just pay them the ad free rate to offset their lost ad revenue.

> I do pay several patreon, have automatic transfer set up for two projects, and a long standing subscription to a website I'm a fan of.

Are these websites the only websites you visit? Otherwise, you're very short on paying for the content you consume.

Without ads, you have to pay the creator of every YouTube video you watch, the journalist behind every news article you read, etc. Unless the content creator is actively choosing to give it to you for free (i.e. never had any ads in the first place), then you need to pay them somehow for every bit of content you consume.

With how we consume content, this will have to be pay-per-view as a day of browsing would otherwise need possibly hundreds of subscriptions.

A mediator in form of Brave's "BAT" or similar is a good way to do fair pay-per-view.

> But people don't need to realize anything for ads to die. All they need to realize is that they should all be using ad blockers and never ever turning it off again.

No, everyone should not use ad blockers, there should be no ads. Ad blockers are a defective symptom of the decease that is ads, not a solution to the problem.

> Being able to make people look in your direction long enough to show them something else they might spend money on is not valuable. It doesn't need to exist.

It's important to remember that we're only fighting random ads plastered everywhere as brute-force marketing.

Other forms of marketing will always exist. Having a big logo on your physical store is marketing, done to attract attention of possible customers. Showcasing their products within the store is marketing to try to make you buy them. Nothing wrong with that.

Sorry but this is a very disingenuous stance.

The only way you would find new products or services is by 20th century word of mouth or search. And search is built on a mountain of ad dollars.

Are you claiming that you don't need Google?

I'm claiming a search engine can exist without relying on advertising. There are other ways of discovering products and services than advertising. In fact, I'd argue that the amount of things I want I discovered through advertising is minuscule compared to the amount I discovered through direct recommendation, seeking it out myself and professional reviews (I seek out myself).

"Content creation" is oversaturated. I'm willing to pay for the content I consume, but it is evidently true that most people are not - and I don't blame them. Would you really pay for a Logan Paul video? Without ad revenue, many lowest common denominator content creators (and other parasitic scenarios like "instagram influencers") go away. I fail to see that as a bad thing.

That is just peeing in the pool.

It's fine if only some of us do it (and I do as well) but it just leads to the death of free internet, and subscription models for all news sites.

That might be fine for you, but don't think for a second that's not a privileged position, and if the internet moves behind a paywall that is a significant detriment to a massive class of people.

Sure, your system works for you, but don't pretend like your solution scales.

By default, you don’t see ads; you have to opt-in.

And even if you decide to never see an ad, you’ll still receive grants in BAT from time to time, which you can use to tip content creators.

What happens when everyone makes the same choice in this prisoner's dilemma as you? Are you ready to lose all of the content that is supported by advertising (regardless of whether you view ads or not)?

Content adapts to users that pay. Advertising is not all that lucrative, especially if you are not that big.

Yes. It would be a net gain if we got rid of advertising in the process.

So you also want the media industry to die as well? Too bad, but most of us don't.

If the only value of media is to make you look in its direction for long enough to show you something else that you might actually spend money on, it actually has no value at all.

And I suppose adding, "...while keeping you informed about what's happening in the world" or "...while entertaining you" wouldn't matter to you, would it?

If it has significant value to people, it can find a way of getting money from the people it provides value to.

That’s why it’s opt in.

I’m somewhat in your camp. Why I’d like the ad industry to die is because they’ve collectively decided that privacy is a relic of the past.

I’d rather they work with the likes of DuckDuckGo and share context based ads. Context does NOT include my personal details :)

>when you compare against the current option

To me the current option is no participation because I see no explicit ads. The web is pull and not push, and my browser renders whatever I want it to. As for the revenue, they can keep it for all I care, why would I want to make money browsing the web? It'd be like making money for talking a walk in the park

> To me the current option is no participation because I see no explicit ads. The web is pull and not push, and my browser renders whatever I want it to.

Yes and Brave's argument is that if everyone acted like you, the web as we know it would collapse. Perhaps it's an argument worth taking seriously. And I say that as someone who acts like you.

The only thing that would collapse are the parasitical entities that feed off of tracking data from ads. I think this is a good thing.

> "if everyone acted like you, the web as we know it would collapse. "

So blocking ads is an effective way to enact social change? Great!

>Yes and Brave's argument is that if everyone acted like you, the web as we know it would collapse.

Maybe the people that rely on the ad supported, user data selling model that primarily destroys the privacy of technologically less advanced users should have thought about that before they started the invasive ad arms race?

So fewer people will make money unethically on the web. If we adopted Brave's point of view then making money from cryptolocker ransomware would be okay because only ignorant users would not have anti-virus and backups in place, so it's really the users fault.

That really isn't an argument worth taking seriously. Much of the web would be fine. Another chunk of it would have to shift more toward existing revenue sources. And some would have to develop new revenue sources.

The only thing that would be particularly at risk is stuff funded exclusively with display ads, but where users don't care enough about it to support it. Or, put differently, we'd lose sites that people don't like much, but that survive through manipulating people into buying things. Doesn't sound like much of a loss to me.

When the Tivo was new, it was argued that it would destroy television, because people could now skip ads. 20 years later, TV is doing better than ever as a medium. Why? Because a lot of us are now paying directly for the things we like. I think the same thing would happen with the web.

> TV is doing better than ever as a medium. Why? Because a lot of us are now paying directly for the things we like. I think the same thing would happen with the web.

What are you on about, TV is essentially dead as an over-the-air/cable-bundle medium.

The only reason "TV" survived, is because it was reimagined by streaming services who charge a monthly fee. That model has certainly been going through a golden age, but the story is far from finished there and things are about to get very very bad with dozens of streaming services on the horizon, all wanting 5-10$/month.

We have yet to see what's going to happen when consumers rebel against their content needing 100s of $/month to access. The Tivo of the 2020s will involve VPN, or Piracy with a new face, or some form of account sharing, and will be resisted just the same.

That's an interesting fantasy, but I see no evidence that people will go from paying happily for content to refusing to pay for anything. People have been paying for video for a hundred years, and there's no reason to think the business will die now that technology has drastically decreased distribution costs, lowered production costs, and increased quality.

> That really isn't an argument worth taking seriously.

I think it is. I've used Google search, gmail, youtube, and Google docs since they've existed. I've paid $0 for them. My understanding is that these services are paid for by ads but I've had an ad blocker most of that time. If everyone started using an ad blocker, what would happen to Google/those services? I don't know, but I feel uneasy about the fact that services that I use depend on people not doing certain things that A. seem rational and B. I have been doing for years.

> When the Tivo was new, it was argued that it would destroy television, because people could now skip ads. 20 years later, TV is doing better than ever as a medium. Why? Because a lot of us are now paying directly for the things we like. I think the same thing would happen with the web.

It seems to me that Brave is attempting to make it so that people "pay directly for things they like" and they're attempting to solve that problem generically, in the browser. Maybe it would be better if this problem wasn't solved in the browser. Maybe all the companies providing free services funded by ads should solve this problem individually, by charging a monthly fee. But that solution:

1. Leaves out individuals who make a living providing "free" entertainment who are funded by ads (so-called content creators)

2. Requires people to juggle many monthly subscriptions

3. Will cut out people who cannot afford subscriptions

4. Will never happen unless something forces these companies to change (maybe something like a browser with a built-in ad-blocker gaining market share...)

Brave's approach is interesting. I have no idea if it will pan out but I think they've identified a real problem.

>My understanding is that these services are paid for by ads but I've had an ad blocker most of that time.

Google makes money by collecting behavioral data generated by its users, which it then uses in the form of raw materials to create products for its actual paying customers: advertisers.

Whether you're using an ad-blocker or not, you're still contributing to the advertising machine by using its products, you can't stop Google from crunching your personal behavioral data on their platform.

I have no interest in Brave and I still use Google products (for now), I just wanted to point out that what's really happening is a bit more sophisticated than you may think.

Either way, indirectly or not, Google makes money from people looking at ads. What would happen to "advertisers" if everyone blocked ads? Would the whole industry collapse? It's hard for me to see how that wouldn't affect Google.

I didn't say it wouldn't affect google. If everyone who uses the internet suddenly realized the joy of ad free browsing, then that would be something of a paradigm shift in my opinion.

Yes, Brave's approach is interesting. No, there's no reason to think that Google will have a problem finding other ways to fund services that people like and use. They already charge people for Docs, Gmail, and YouTube. Search is funded by non-display ads, which most ad blockers don't bother with because their relevance means people like them.

The idea that "you know" what would happen if, overnight, everyone started using ublock origin, is silly. What part of Google's revenue comes, indirectly, from "display ads"? I have no idea.

I think it's safe to say that there would be repercussions if everyone started blocking ads. Maybe Google isn't the best example but there are websites that block my access because I have an ad blocker. They aren't doing that for no reason.

Nothing happens overnight, so I'm not seeing the relevance.

What I am sure of is that the economy generally as well as most companies specifically display a long history of being able to adapt to changing business conditions. If you want to claim they will suddenly lose that resilience in the face of continued rise of ad blocking, you have to prove it.

Yes, some places are currently dependent on ads. If ads continue to decline as a revenue source (something they've been doing for years even without ad blocking) then those companies will either find new revenue sources or go out of business.

Since companies do both those things all the time without disaster, and since ad-only companies are a small portion of the total web, I maintain that the notion that "the web as we know it would collapse" is absurd drama. It is not an actual risk.

Good riddance. The web was a finer place before this ad boom.

What gives you the right to say I don't deserve to see ads if I want to,?

That's an argument against using Brave.

It'd be like taking a walk in the park and paying/supporting the park if you feel the need to.

> It'd be like taking a walk in the park and paying/supporting the park if you feel the need to.

It'd be like taking a walk in the park and paying/supporting the park - by having a salesperson walking beside you trying to pitch some product - if you feel the need to.

It'd be like taking a walk in the park and paying/supporting the park utilizing a corporate currency - by having a salesperson walking beside you trying to pitch some product - if you feel the need to

Recent cross-platform options with surveillance capitalism:

* Google Chrome: mandatory

* Firefox: opt-out [1]

* Brave: blocked

That's the primary issue.

It's great that Brave is pioneering a new opt-in, privacy-respecting funding model for the web - we need innovation here - but it's a secondary issue.

[1] Thanks to Google $, slowly changing presumably thanks to forcing effects of Apple's increasing privacy defaults in Safari

I’m having a hard time trying to decide if people are trying to dirty capitalism with “surveillance” or surveillance with capitalism. Seems like the latter has become a dirty word over night for no apparent reason.

Adjectives modify nouns.

In the case, it's a bit tricky, but "surveillance" is acting as an adjective, more specifically a noun adjunct

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_adjunct

Except the adjective in this case is sufficient as a noun on its own. Unless you want to bring capitalism in for ulterior motives.

Surveillance capitalism simply describes the business model of spying on users to build hidden psychological / behavioural / demographic profiles which are then sold through opaque backroom market mechanisms, all with zero regard to consent.

You can have a positive view of each separate word (depending on context) and the term still works perfectly in describing the business model society is beginning to reject, through mechanisms like the GDPR and CCPA.

Like it or not, revenue is required to keep sites online.

Hosting costs money. Design costs money. Maintenance costs money.

If the internet is to stay as alive and as open/accessible as it currently is for the public at large (despite increases in censorship), there needs to be more effort put into high availability and accessibility by more people than the enthusiasts who run revenue free sites/businesses that have other revenue streams.

People have been trained not to accept paywalls. But they do tip, as we see with patreon, superchats, etc, and and they do accept some modicum of ads and freemium services.

Brave provides options for all of those things; what I like most about brave is not its ad model, but its site donation model. It’s a very direct form of person to site donations that is built to be extremely convenient. I don’t know how it’s implemented, but if it's sufficiently decentralized (which I think it is, unless the BAT crypto currency is just a distraction from some centralized mechanism required for donations), that’s a potentially very valuable/difficult to censor/easy means of direct value exchange. Plus you don’t have the privacy concerns you do with ads.

My hope is that it becomes so convenient and popular to send money to sites via Brave and potential future competitors that the ad revenue model can be mostly replaced. That might be pie in the sky, but it seems plausible to me.

I also think it’s great that users get a big chunk of ad revenue. That percentage may change in the future, but for low income people who can get a few extra bucks by browsing normally/might be less likely to use ad blockers, something like Brave seems way better than seeing ads and not getting any revenue.

> Like it or not, revenue is required to keep sites online.

> Hosting costs money. Design costs money. Maintenance costs money.

Then maybe we'll get less blogspam and have a higher signal-to-noise ratio of sites run by people who are passionate about things and know what they're doing, instead of crap trying just get clicks to get paid.

Maybe videos would be 1 minute of quality content rather than 10 minutes of "be sure to click subscribe". Etc.

I'd prefer if those people had some sort of income so they could do what they're doing full time. Do you have any sort of idea for how that would work or do you just dislike the current system without any prescription for a better one? (The patreon model still requires people to follow your content, and subscribers help with that)

> As for the revenue, they can keep it for all I care, why would I want to make money browsing the web? It'd be like making money for talking a walk in the park

?? I don't understand this logic or analogy even remotely. I would love to make money by doing things I already do for free

Notifications:

So if I have a couple of PCs idling, do they show ads? If ads are shown then there is a waste that someone is paying, and publishers will complain.

Can I set 10 raspberry pi to start farming BAT?

At this point Brave should start tracking what the user is doing to see if it is convenient to show an ad and that's is where all the problems start again... user/behavior monitoring.

Is just a bad but noble idea followed by a terrible implementation. Just let it pass by...

Do these notifications fire only when the browser is focused, or do they fire when the browser doesn't have focus too? Either way, the full range of 1-5/hour seems way too frequent. Maybe one a day would be tolerable (though I have no motive for tolerating even that.)

And they make money by you having to buy BAT to give it. Either with the information gathered from which ads you view or by having to buy it to begin in the first place.

Actually, they don't make money on sales of BAT. Like most cryptocurrencies, its price is determined by supply and demand.

Sure, they’ll benefit if BAT goes to the moon because part of the team’s compensation is in BAT, but that’s no different than a startup and their stock.

So, can you only "mine" bat by watching ads?

Brave distributes grants from time to time.

When I updated to the latest iOS version, I got 20 BAT, for supporting content creators.

If you’re a content creator and you register your site or YouTube channel, you can be tipped in BAT.

Brave also allows you to tip folks on Twitter and GitHub.

And of course, you can buy BAT on various exchanges like Coinbase, etc.

They started popping up for me without any opt-in.

GP is on track to become my highest rated comment on HN, which suggests more people agree with me about this than anything else I've said here.

There are some of us that think the distraction economy is making the world a worse place.

OS notifications have a higher participation rate than side-bar ads because 1) nobody has learned to tune them out, and 2) theoretically speaking, these are the things we opted not to filter out, so we are more inclined to peek.

I know people who will stop mid sentence of an interesting conversation with you to figure out why their phone is chirping at them. I'm sure you do, too. It's painful to watch even when it's not you.

My reaction to "it's opt-in" is a little bit like my reaction to "tobacco is opt-in". It's not reassuring, maybe even a little troubling. The best reaction you can expect is, "And?"

That your comment was highly upvoted doesn't necessarily mean what you think it does. I often upvote items I disagree with only because they bring up something worthy of discussion. I'm curious how many other HNers do the same.

Yeah I could have done without that comment. My point was fine before I added it.

Still getting quite a few me too responses.

On tired old political debates like this, most votes are just cheers for one team or the other.

> I often upvote items I disagree with only because they bring up something worthy of discussion. I'm curious how many other HNers do the same.

I do, though it's rare. I've done it for comments a few times, but mostly just for low-karma threads that don't have any comments yet, where I want to see what other people have to say.

As far as I understand it, using the browser with the default settings is basically like using Chrome with ad blocking (and tracking protection and all of that) already built in.

The only opt in part is allowing ads, which you get paid for viewing.

You don't get paid. You get tokens which you can then provide to creators.

You do get paid, considering you can sell the tokens. I expect the tokens I've earned across all my devices to be worth a nice few hundred USD some day.

It seems like the transaction is more akin to 'rewarded' than 'paid', but I'm not sure that detracts from your point.

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