I am always open to changing my mind, yet when I see the same untruths mustered to poison-the-well ('swapping ads with their own' - not true) I wonder why the same dishonest and distorted talking points come up instead of any valid criticisms.
What you call 'cryptocurrency nonsense' is a model that potentially threatens to overturn Google's ad model, and with it the current ad-tech ecosystem.
That obviously means there's a huge number of high-stakes players who are very keen for this particular model not to 'take' in the online world, and so we see the same untruths constantly amplified.
Brave must be doing something right, and even if there's a purist's position which says their model is not the holy grail, I'd prefer innovation and disrupted business models over a continuation of the current ad-tech status quo.
Only by the strictest definition of swap. They block ads and show ads from their own ad network, which they collect revenue on. That the Brave ads don't appear in the same place as the blocked ads doesn't impact the ethics of it.
And in what way is it unethical for that same company to provide the service, which I desire, of blocking ads that I've already decided I don't want to see, because the people serving me those ads are violating my privacy?
Many people seem fixated on trying to frame this in the most disparaging way possible, which distracts from the reality of what is actually happening here.
This line about 'swapping ads with their own' has been an attempt to imply in the reader's mind that Brave was / is nefariously replacing actual ads with their own, which is not true.
The truth is Brave blocks all ads by default, and nothing more.
Do you believe it's ethical for a user agent to block ads, or that it's unethical and a form of theft?
I'm with gorhill of uBlock on this [1]:
That said, it's important to note that using a blocker is NOT theft.
Don't fall for this creepy idea.
The ultimate logical consequence of blocking = theft is the criminalisation of the inalienable right to privacy.
The ethics around this are clear:
* if a user wishes to opt-out of an insecure, fraudulent and privacy-harming ad-tech ecosystem for content on the open web that is their right
* if that same user wants to opt-in to a privacy-respecting alternative ad model which operates in a very different way, that's also their right
Attempting to claim the combination of these optional user choices is 'ad swapping' in a nefarious, unethical sense is simply dishonest.
A more accurate phrase considering the individual user choices involved might be 'model swapping'.
As a user I deliberately choose to swap the current ad-tech model with a new, innovative model. That model may have to evolve, but from a technical and human perspective appears to be much better than the current status quo.
> Attempting to claim the combination of these optional user choices is 'ad swapping' in a nefarious, unethical sense is simply dishonest.
...
(For the benefit of anyone else on mobile who finds HN's quotation style unpleasant, here is the gorhill quote:
"That said, it's important to note that using a blocker is NOT theft.
Don't fall for this creepy idea.
The ultimate logical consequence of blocking = theft is the criminalisation of the inalienable right to privacy. ")
Code blocks are definitely not HN's quotation style and not recommended for quotes. They are often used for that purpose by mistake. It is an understandable mistake considering the lack of formatting options here.
A common quotation style that works on all devices is what I used above, a leading '>' followed by the quoted text enclosed in asterisks, like this (with code formatting here to show the special characters):
> *For the benefit...*
> *Blank line between paragraphs*Can somebody expand a bit on how the ads are shown in privacy-respecting way? Are they not personalized? That seems unlikely.
If the matching is done locally, is Brave downloading hundreds of ads on the device, and then showing only the one that were picked by local ML algorithm?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20831014
For convenience, I'll also quote it here:
> The user opts-in to Brave Rewards/Ads. This kicks off a machine-learning model that begins to study the user's habits and interests.
> On a daily basis, the user downloads a regional ad catalog (as to other Brave users in their region). This catalog contains numerous ad options, which your device studies for relevance.
> If/when your device identifies an ad within the catalog that might be of interest to you, it displays the ad as an OS notification. At this time, 70% of the ad revenue is deposited into your in-situ wallet.
> At this point, the user has made absolutely no contact with an advertiser. If the user chooses to click on the ad, it is opened in its own tab in the Brave Browser. This tab, like all others, is subject to Brave's default security/privacy settings. No third party trackers, etc.
> The advertiser will know that you are interested in their product/service, because you clicked the ad. But no other information about you is given to them; only what can be inferred from standard first-party browsing online.
It's ethical if the user chooses to do so due to privacy concerns or other related reasons.
It is NOT ethical if the maker of the user-agent is profiting from it, being essentially copyright infringement.
Projects like uBlock Origin are very different from Brave, because the company behind Brave directly profits from blocking ads. Without ads and ads blocking, Brave doesn't have a business.
Thus it is ethically justifiable to block ads on the grounds that we should come up with a monetisation model for content that is not ads. Blocking ads and then offering your own ads is not ethically justifiable in the above context (and in fact is a bit tacky). Personally opting to replace ads with different ads is also not ethically justifiable in the above context (and is a bit defeatist). It's nice that the replacement ads pay you money, but this is unrelated to the ethical argument (and obviously the advertiser comes out ahead even in this scenario, because otherwise they wouldn't run the ads).
If you agree, how would you disrupt the existing ad models in an effective way?
Something doesn't feel right.
Brave's business-model experiments to support a tracker-free internet – like the crypto-tokens & user-agent-controlled ad-replacement – are opt-in.
And further: who's better for users?
Boycott Google & Microsoft, sure. But boycott tiny Brave? As Brave pushes the envelope on both privacy technology & privacy-respecting business models? That's a peculiarly self-defeating kind of righteousness.
Shitcoins require public, and trackable, ledgers, so you literally cannot say 'uses shitcoin' and 'tracker-free internet' in the same sentence.
Chances are people just roll their eyes and scroll on to the next comment before they even finish the sentence.
Yes.
> but resorting to such childish naming only ends up hurting your point.
Well, I'm not wrong.
If you just wanted an excuse to shit on crypto then... ok.
Bitcoin, & close relatives, require a public ledger, but some altcoins use other technologies to prevent a publicly-readable ledger.
But, Brave uses an off-blockchain technology ('ANONIZE': https://tech.cornell.edu/built/anonize/) to tally attention without per-browser/per-user tracking. So, the use of their BAT tokens to net-out rewards, even though on the public Ethereum ledger, has no contradiction with the "tracker-free internet" goal.
I disagree. Existing browsers are "good actors" in an online wasteland devoid of privacy [1], and Brave is a "bad actor" in this context because they're trying to disrupt this awful status quo. Per Krishnamurti, "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." So it is with the browser landscape.
No doubt they will make some missteps, that's typical of any novel approach to finding a balance of privacy vs. viability of free content. The ad model is perfectly sensible in this context.
[1] https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf
PS the only place I hear about Brave now that their clickbait articles on tech sites all but disappeared is here. Yes. The verY sites their revenue we are suppose to want to protect so they can sell us infomercials pretending to be content.
It’s obvious we can’t leave the web in the hands of corporations, neither Microsoft, or google and definitely not brave? which is ran by a morally questionable and compromised Brenden Eich to begin with.
Brave's cryptocurrency scheme gives the Brave owners a 30% cut of all profits.
I am not 100% in favor of Brave's monetization strategy, though I'm very glad they are trying something less common. If their overall execution was more to my liking, I would gladly pay them for the service. You have no business presuming to decide for other people what they find worthy of compensation.
Well not just any browser company, but a browser company that improves the status quo and convinces me that they deserve it. In this hypothetical, the answer to your question is "because they deserve it".
The revenue usually isn't moving from me as the consumer directly to the producer, rather it is provided by advertisers who are engaged in ever escalating tactics to increase their efficiency, with little regard for me and my privacy as a consumer. With adblocking, we have two sets of people: a smaller group who browse without benefiting the advertisers who compensate the producers, and a larger group who browse while being enablers to the user-hostile privacy violating tactics used by most advertisers.
Neither of these situations is truly desirable in the long term. I don't seen any ideal solutions, and I believe that any entity which can move us towards a new and better model might be deserving of compensation, regardless of where they sit in the stream of data.
It's my choice which browser I use, and if I decide to use one that pushes money in a certain direction to fund better browser software, then I don't see that anyone can really complain.
Some of us aren't yet comfortable with blocking the easiest way for users to compensate creators, while still consuming said content.
No one is being compensated there at all and the site itself often can't even gather 1st party analytics.
If I use the Brave in its intended mode, then EFFECTIVELY it does swap ads. By intended mode, I mean the way Brave is supposed to be used. From [1], here are the main selling points of Brave:
1. "Block data-grabbing ads and trackers"
2. "Tip and contribute to websites directly through Brave Rewards"
Turning both those options EFFECTIVELY swaps developer ads with your own ads. The web developer who spent tons of resources in creating the content is effectively at the mercy of the Brave who makes tons of money.
HNers should be rooting for crypto to succeed - decentralized networks have the most promise for protecting privacy. Federated networks like email result in centralized entities - decentralized protocols like BitTorrent remain much harder to shutdown.
Edit: not exactly decentralized in practice.
As a hypothetical example, imagine that Brave is sold, and new owners changed the code so that 50% of the tokens go to the PRESIDENT RE-ELECTION FUND, instead of the website user looks at.
Brave could make a new BAT token and point their browser to use it, but they don't get to do anything with the original code controlling the tokens everyone is already using. It cannot be disabled, modified, or deleted, by Brave Inc or by any person.
[1]: https://etherscan.io/address/0x0d8775f648430679a709e98d2b0cb...
This by itself is strong proof of centralization. Brave can unilaterally make this change and give themselves total control over BAT 2.0 while leaving the original BAT worthless.
1. More than 12 employees at the time of ICO. 2. Check the UGP status. Tis well distributed. 3. Check the payout to freecodecamp, over $2k.