The Brave browser is brilliant, but probably not for the reasons you think

Ads are just the most friction-free way (from the reader's point of view) to pay for it. You don't have to install anything or connect your bank account. There's a lot wrong with that, including the proliferation of crappy content, but it does fund a lot of the genuine content as well. Both readers and writers want a better way, but results are mixed at best.

I like the "asking the right questions" thing a lot. I'm never quite happy with the question, the way I've put it certainly leaves a lot of room for improvement. My formula is something like: First blow up the "problem" way out of proportion (summarize all parts that are wrong with something) then remove the most unreasonable arguments.

I do lots of things for free both online and offline. Its a gift really, I put in the effort, the time and the money. (I wouldn't call it a business model tho) The problem with this is that I can only do so much. With free software for example people have a drive to make something that works. We get a huge amount of great stuff but with rare exception the end results don't get polished. There is always a lack of effort with boring shit that would add a lot to a project. (I always feel terrible when looking back at the state I abandoned a project in.)

Say you have a product to sell, you have to find ways to find customers. The same goes for gifting free things (like software) So, uhhh... where is the free marketing?

Users expect the product to find them FOR FREE! but this simply doesn't work. If we paid some incredibly small amount to be found by products that are interesting to us we would be far less reluctant to provide the necessary personal details. I own 3 guitars that I never play. There are lots of products that fit that profile. If such a product finder was tied in with say 100 other subscriptions and my ISP billed me for those services it would be something incredibly cheap and worth buying. In stead google charges stores an arm and a leg to chase me with wimmens panties because my deceased mum ordered those 15 year ago. WTF??

People wrote fantastic free software that would have been even better if enough users could find it. Meanwhile the commercial alternative is rubbed in peoples face all day long. I would like to see the "build it and they will come" model work.

Adsense makes a hundred billion in revenue because free doesn't work. This is the puzzle. If you can figure out how to do it for free ill give you 5 internet stars and a standing ovation. Ill be pondering how to do it on the cheap. Call me unambitious ;)

I'm not sure HN would benefit from requiring a paid subscription. I think that aversion to the aforementioned criticism would be avoided even more, or otherwise replaced with sheer entitlement.

Think how useless social media would be if it primarily connected together wealthy individuals that can pay the upkeep needed to operate a sophisticated global network while those who most need a voice cannot.

Think of how much worse society would be if news required an unpopularly high ad-free fee which meant that the best news organizations catered first and foremost to wealthy and already-educated patrons.

The illusion of a service being "ad-free", without serving the broad but lower class foundation of society, would ultimately just destroy the impact and democratizing power of technology. It's not just a machine for a small portion of wealthy, educated Hacker News elites to pay and keep for themselves.

Advertising influence is surely not all positive, but there is no silver bullet here, and I would consider the wet dream of those who want to get rid of advertising without a practical substitute to be a massive regression. I consider the alignment of profits with breadth of access to be one of the biggest engines of progress in the modern age. A poor child in Detroit and a simple mother in a third world country use the same web browser and internet as the most powerful political leaders and heads of industry. That's the world I want to live in.

Brave does not control BAT – it is an ERC-20 token on the Ethereum blockchain. Do they still own much of the BAT in circulation? Yes. But other than tanking the value of the BAT you own by selling all of theirs at once (a silly thing for them to do), there isn't much power they can exert.

So the good news is that there is a practical method of microtransactions! The minor downside is that is not C2B, but B2B.

For me, it's still the most acceptable "major" Chromium-based browser.

All true, and this is why I use Brave. Brave punishes privacy invading ads.

If you opt in to BAT, Brave values attention and gives users control over how the attention value is spent.

> In the initial Brave Ads release, users receive BAT for viewing the ad notifications. In future releases, users will be able to earn additional rewards for engagement events within the ad tabs. Brave does not reward users for clicking on the notifications. Brave’s position is that users should only click on ads that they have a genuine interest in engaging with.

If a vector can be randomized or otherwise arms-raced vs. the remote adversary via C++, then "Chromium" is not an obstacle for Brave. Consider the case of extensions, where your point would have been valid if you'd written "Chromium extensions".

Fingerprinting can be done many ways, but most are not economic: they cost too much for the too few bits they get from the target browser. The common methods, notably fingerprint2.js, use APIs that we at Brave, along with Apple and others in the W3C Privacy CG, are taking on.

ICYMI, https://brave.com/whats-brave-done-for-my-privacy-lately-epi....

2) How is Mozilla facilitating that at all, much less doing a great job of it?

3) Brendan Eich co-founded Mozilla, so that's pretty funny given your point (2).

1) advertisers were willing to pay Brave the same amount as they do existing advertisers, and

2) Brave took a similar cut as existing advertisers (including user payouts), and

3) Publishers were actually taking BAT from Brave

Then there wouldn't be much of a financial difference in who was placing ads. #3 is obviously not the case currently, which seems to be the point you were making.

To be 100% clear: I don't support what Brave is doing, have never used their products, and think their entire business model and its associated crypto-nonsense is at best a waste of time.

This means umatrix will break most websites by default and require you to check what elements are required and allow them manual but offers higher security because you essentially audit every website you visit.

Basically, when a website loads, it can access resources from various sources. For example, if you access www.example.com, it may also load Analytics from google.com, it may use sharing icon and javascript from twitter and Facebook, it may load some video file from Akamai content delivery network etc. etc.

With uMatrix you can control what resources load from where.

In the default mode, uMatrix will load the resources only from the domain you are accessing, i.e. if you are accessing example.com, it will allow images, javascript, videos etc. to only load from example.com and block from all other sites. This can break some websites - for example, youtube.com which loads videos and javascript from other servers in different domain. In such cases uMatrix allows you to allow resources from the other domains / servers to load and save this settings (or you can just switch off uMatrix temporarily for that site).

Since many resources aren't loaded by default (and a lot of websites include such crap resources from other sites like Google, Facebook etc), it saves bandwidth and the web page often loads faster. But it comes with added complexity when a website breaks.

I'm still figuring it out but it's more granular than merely off or on.

Like anything else, you would have to have sufficient practice with light on dark to be able to be good at it. Light on dark is known to be better for people with contrast decreasing visual problems. Black on white is generally lower contrast as the large bright areas tend to bleed into the tiny text areas.

When you combine the complexity of the system, the constant need to try to maintain backwards compatibility and the sheer number of people involved in the project, you have every reason to be skeptical.