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Comment by IAmEveryone | Hacker News Reader

This sounds like exactly the sort of feature that usually triggers an online Lynch mob when it's Mozilla doing it: It's not part of the core feature set people expect from a browser, and it seems eminently possible to do it in a plugin?

I also find the self-acclaimed "Brave" browser company an odd partner to work with for an organisation dedicated to the open web like IA. This browser has exactly one purpose: to make money. In terms of the people working on it, it's arguably more commercial than Chrome, Safari, or Edge.

The proposition "Brave" is making is: "Don't you also feel what this world needs is an intermediary between you and the people creating what you like, skimming from both sides whenever money is involved?"

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This browser has exactly one purpose: to make money. In terms of the people working on it, it's arguably more commercial than Chrome, Safari, or Edge.

Chrome is the only one of these browsers that is produced by a company where at least 80% of its billions of dollars of revenue is generated by monetizing the personal identifying information of web users using ad tech.

It’s also the only major browser without built-in support for mitigating tracking cookies and scripts.

What Brave is trying to do is bootstrap an ecosystem where users can use a utility cryptocurrency to reward content creators they like while optionally getting paid to view ads that related to sites on the web they visit without leaking personal information due to zero knowledge proofs.

Brave really wants to increase the value of the Basic Attention Token by flipping the current business model of the web on its head.

That’s not a bad idea.

>Brave really wants to increase the value of the Basic Attention Token by flipping the current business model of the web on its head.

It's not a bad idea, but IMO it's a bad execution.

They're effectively running a business based on extorting everyone building anything for the web (everyone from big businesses to small hobbyists trying to make something new) by flat-out replacing the most common form of monetization (ads) with their own monetization and saying, "Hey developers, I know you worked hard on that website, so if you want that money (or, at least, a cut of it we feel is fair), sign up for our platform instead".

1st party ads aren't blocked. So if that developer wanted to monetize with ads, they're totally free to do so.

The dividing line is privacy invading third-party ads.

At a whole 12M users, they're hardly extorting anyone at this point. Let's back the hyperbole train up a bit.

>1st party ads aren't blocked. So if that developer wanted to monetize with ads, they're totally free to do so.

They're only free to do so in Brave's eyes if they roll their own ad solution, which is an option but not _always_ the best option. The "easy" (and, arguably, more featureful/secure/"better") route to monetize across the Internet (especially on hobby projects and small businesses) is third-party ads. There's lots of reasons someone might weigh the options and make the decision to go with a third party ad provider; Brave takes that decision away. Whether that's better or worse for the Internet as a whole is debatable.

Your response did not address privacy which was the main thrust of my point.

wrt third-party ads being more secure... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malvertising

You also point the arrow of causality in the wrong direction. It's not as though Brave magically shows up on devices. The current ecosystem and its host of problems (including privacy and security) are precisely why users are choosing adblockers of all stripes.

In Brave's case, at least they're conscientious enough to provide an alternative path to monetization for creators.

Hard to see how this is different from what Google does. They make money off of everyone else's content too.

A Brave user can choose to see regular web ads and allow for 3rd party tracking.

Or they can choose block 3rd party ads and tracking scripts and opt-in to seeing ads they are more likely to be interested in and get paid a percentage to do so.

Chrome—and by extension Google—does not give you that choice and certainly doesn't share any of the ad revenue with web users.

>I also find the self-acclaimed "Brave" browser company an odd partner to work with for an organisation dedicated to the open web like IA. This browser has exactly one purpose: to make money. In terms of the people working on it, it's arguably more commercial than Chrome, Safari, or Edge.

The browser company (Brave) only makes money if the user opts in to ads, which is exactly that; opt-in. That choice is on the user.

Brave have been very open about their focus on privacy and an open web.

> The proposition "Brave" is making is: "Don't you also feel what this world needs is an intermediary between you and the people creating what you like, skimming from both sides whenever money is involved?"

That sounds insidious but this is what most media platforms do.

>This sounds like exactly the sort of feature that usually triggers an online Lynch mob when it's Mozilla doing it

It's true, but I also think that people who pile on Mozilla when they do such things wouldn't touch Brave with a 10 foot pole to begin with so they don't really care much about it. From the start Brave's core proposition is to be more intrusive by default by shipping an ad-blocker, their ad system and a few other things. You're buying into that when you install the browser. This particular change doesn't seem out of line for them.

After all most of Brave's features (including this very one) are one extension away in Firefox, which is one of the main reasons I don't understand why anybody would bother with Brave especially if the goal is to avoid browser monoculture.

brave also makes it trivially easy to donate to IA (or any site for that matter)

Let's say I want to donate $100 to IA. Here's how I do it now:

1. Go to https://archive.org/donate/ in any browser, on any device.

2. Click "$100", click "Donate", enter credit card info.

Now you write out the process for doing it via Brave. Assume the user just installed Brave and has 0 BAT.

If we're going to assume the Brave user just installed Brave and has 0 BAT, then let's be fair.

You had to spend a certain number of years on Earth to become old enough to have a credit rating and legal standing to get a credit card.

You had to obtain a credit card by filling out paperwork and being accepted by the company issuing the credit card.

You had to wait for the card to arrive in the mail.

You had to activate it the card.

I don't think it's fair to just skip over all those steps just because they're already done. Sure, for you, today, the card is probably easier. But by that token a guy with a horse in 1900 who already had a stable and a bunch of hay could say, "Why would anyone buy a car?"

And he'd be right, on that particular day, for him. But not for everyone, and not forever.

I like the idea of enabling payments to content producers based on the amount of time spent on their site. Curious how much this is actually happening. A quick search for "brave payments to content producers" did not return anything resembling transparency about the aggregate amounts of these payments.

Some metrics on publisher adoption:

https://batgrowth.com/

https://www.bat.watch/

The payments are anonymous and private.

It’s the only browser on iOS that has decent ad blocking.

I disagree. I used to use Safari with Firefox Focus as a content filter and it worked perfectly fine for me. Other content blockers offer a ton of customization and should fit just about anyone.

Also Brave is the most private browser, according to this article—https://www.ghacks.net/2020/02/25/study-finds-brave-to-be-th...

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