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Comment by frereubu | Hacker News Reader

Say what you want about Apple here, but what's most striking to me is this part of Brave's business model, which I hadn't understood until now:

"Brave Rewards is built on the Basic Attention Token (BAT) and is a new way to value attention, connecting users, content creators, and advertisers. Users are rewarded in BAT with 70% of the ad revenue share of the privacy-preserving ads they opt into viewing, and they can support content creators they love by rewarding them with BAT."

This is, almost literally, Black Mirror stuff.

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Brave's ads don't leak your consumer profile to the advertisers. Only Brave themselves know who's seeing what (and even then, only client-side, unless they push a malicious update one day.) Advertisers only get to know how many impressions they got.

By contrast, every credit card with "rewards", retail loyalty card, or coupon app (e.g. Honey) you've ever signed up for is — very explicitly — selling your consumer profile to advertisers/market research companies. Then, to make you interested in being on the other side of that deal, they take some of the money they make from those data-buyers and pass it back to you as rewards/points/offers.

If neither of these business models already existed, and both were pitched at the same time, I think it'd be the second one that would put people in mind of dystopian speculative fiction.

Just because lots of companies do it, doesn't mean it's a good thing though, does it?

The point is that Brave is doing something different though?

Something where your privacy is not violated and the value generated from your attention goes directly to the content producers you like most.

All machine learning happens locally with Brave. The user retains control of their data.

https://brave.com/intro-to-brave-ads/

Can you ever ensure that the trusted computing base won't send all your info to a company?

Maybe there is a backdoor in Google Chrome or something.

What if they just "cache it", or make it available on other devices etc?

Apple does it with iCloud. And google does it too. You log in with your google account everywhere on your browsers, they don't even hide it.

>Brave's ads don't leak your consumer profile to the advertisers. Only Brave themselves know who's seeing what (and even then, only client-side, unless they push a malicious update one day.) Advertisers only get to know how many impressions they got.

Isn't this how Google ads work?

No, Google has your entire life story associated with your verified name, server side and only under your control insofar as GDPR/CCPA deletion requests.

Not to say I personally have a problem with that (I looove my Google Maps history) but it's a very different model.

No. Almost all of Google’s revenue comes from gathering and monetizing user data, all while repeatedly saying they don’t “sell” user data.

Thank you for making the distinction between what brave is doing and what the rest of the market is doing. To little attention is directed at the soul selling privacy violating business practices of the advertising establishment. Long live Brave!

Well maybe... it's certainly a different approach than being tracked, surveilled and served up personal ads.

Brave is using cryptocurrency as an alternative revenue model for content creators than advertisements, and in some ways it's much more of a "white mirror" kind of tech.

It's also fundamentally untenable in a world where the purpose of the ads they replace is to pay for the content you're viewing.

The web needs a real solution to the problems ads present at the moment, but we're unlikely to get one when the dominant browser vendor has deep interests in keeping users trackable.

Why, because it places a price tag on user's attention? the price of which google and FB want to keep forever at $0?

If anything we should be asking google to name their own price

I'm not sold on the crypto aspect, but this seems fairer than beaming ads into our brains, burning our glucose reserves.

Noise has a cost.

the content you consume also has a cost

Yes, but the marketplace sucks. Little has improved in the 30 year history of the web.

We need a better way of assessing what is and isn't clickbait.

I'd also like to pay a la carte. I'm not buying 15 different website subscriptions.

It's just taking the current model and exposing all the gears so people see exactly how it works and cutting out the middle men.

If they allow you to load your own money into it and make the amount required explicit for transactions, all the better, we're even closer to direct payment for resources again. Then the watching of adds to pay for the content is just like doing the dishes at the restaurant to pay for your dinner (as long as you work it out in advance). I don't see any problem with that, it's still just an exchange of goods and services.

It's like money. Welcome to money.

I don't understand your point, if you have one.

> if you have one

Sigh.

Can I just pay the sites that I visit with money directly? I would say "can I buy BAT" but I don't like that this makes brave the middleman.

Brave is only the middleman with advertisers.

You can buy BAT directly from any crypto exchange (or better yet exchange ETH / any ERC20 token for it on a decentralized exchange). Then you can put that BAT into a wallet on your Brave browser, enable a setting, and every month your browser will automatically disburse the BAT proportionally to the content creators you are consuming, as long as they have their own BAT wallet.

That's what I do. I don't opt in to the Brave Ads. But you can if you want, and it's worth pointing out that Brave's ad system is very privacy focused, in that all classification of you as an ad-target happens in your browser. The only thing sent to Brave is basically just a list of keywords. Then Brave lets advertisers bid on putting up ads for people with certain keywords.

As opposed to the status quo, where our attention is monetized and we get no benefit?

Of course you get to benefit, you get to see the content without paying for it.

But I'd rather pay for it than have my eyeballs mined for vastly more than the value I'm getting.

Brave allows me to do that easily.

Most people don’t, and if enough people did it would invalidate the model for everyone since adverse selection would mean only the worst residual customers get left viewing ads.

It wouldn't invalidate the model, because advertisers aren't actually essential to the whole thing.

Advertisers are included because they're part of the status quo, but the system works pretty well if you just have content creators + users that pay them with BAT (the key part being it's automatic and doesn't require 10 different subscriptions to support 10 different creators).

I have not watched Black Mirror. In what way is it similar? Can someone condense it in a few lines?

There's an episode where someone is forced to watch adverts for rewards, and they're harangued if they close their eyes. I can't remember the details, but it's the concept of explicitly selling your attention that caught my eye. It seems pretty dystopian to me.

It does not sound like the same thing if you are not forced to watch ads (I think you have to opt in to receive rewards). In fact what Brave does is they replace existing ads, iirc.

It's not identical, hence "almost literally", but the notion of explicitly selling your attention to advertisers is getting pretty close in my eyes.

Brave doesn't replace ads. You can do either, or both of:

1) Block existing ads (like any other ad blocker)

2) Opt in to Brave ads (which are served via system notifications).

If you opt in, you can get "paid" in BAT. You can cash this out (from an exchange) or donate them to the sites you visit.

Realistically, it will never be an amount worth cashing out, so I suspect most people donate it to the sites and content creators they like. Thats what I do anyways.

There is an episode where you essentially directly pay with attention. Each episode is different, often inducing "mind fuck" with respect to alternative futures based on differing societal or behavioral standards

Each episode presents a dystopia based on an element of our current world, overstretched, in a way that makes you uncomfortable because it looks like we are almost there.

And actually, some episodes have been realized since their release.

In the episode “Fifteen Million Merits” the main character is fed ads on the walls of his bedroom and his eyes are tracked. If he wants the ads to stop and close his eyes in peace he has to pay a small fee each time.

this would be after <attention token> has become the new fluid currency and you've gone deep into debt by paying more attention than you had

Well, the economy in general didn't make much sense in that episode. The people "working hard just to get by" spend all day on these bicycle things that generate power, but thermodynamically there's no way they could be producing more than what it costs to feed them. Nor do I recall any sort of education or training for actual careers going on. And that's not something I can entirely ignore, when "how empty everyone's lives are" is relevant to the general plot.

Maybe they could have substituted some kind of factory assembly work, although that might have raised questions of why it's not automated.

BAT sounds to me like just another form of airline miles or cryptocurrency?

It is a cryptocurrency, so that's a fair understanding.

Wouldn't "Black Mirror stuff" be the current way things are done with Google, Facebook, and all the other companies engaging in surveillance capitalism?

Brave is privacy preserving. Tips and contributions are anonymous.

Fair point - it's probably a mix of both. But I find the idea of selling attention to be a fundamentally unsettling one.

Selling attention is what twitter, facebook, google, and co do. They just don't name it "attention token" and they don't give you anything for yours. Brave pays for your attention with "BAT", and you have to opt-in for it. Once you have BAT then you can pay it forward however you see fit - for most frequently visited sites, for sites you chose manually, for git-hub commits, individual reddit comments, etc (Brave has separate buttons near those). Or you can decide to keep it for yourself.

I am pretty sure it is a massive improvement over the current way of doing things. Sure Brave would get a big cut because of being in the middle of this. But it manages to use ads in a way that profits everyone: users, content creators, ad companies, and Brave themselves.

> they don't give you anything for yours.

Well they give you access to a bunch of useful services.

In their case the ads are not used to support the services, rather the services are used as a trap to feed customers for advertising.

But you have a point, I have to admit.

> Say what you want about Apple here

Okay.

"A shitty company uses its monopolistic power to forbid another shitty company to apply its shitty business model".

I think that's pretty much going to be N-Gate's summary of this post :D

Well, I did not have this in mind but I can't wait for the N-Gate summary now!

A lot of people in this thread don't understand how Brave works -- despite commenting on multiple submissions regarding Brave. It's peculiar because the HN crowd prides itself on being technical and correct.

a token as proxy for (the value of) your actual attention is just the innocent prerequisite to some incredible dystopia. as with javascript, Brendan Eich appears to be channeling technology up from the depths of hell. I wonder if he created the prototype in a 10-day fit of a fever dream as well.

> as with javascript, Brendan Eich appears to be channeling technology up from the depths of hell. I wonder if he created the prototype in a 10-day fit of a fever dream as well.

This made me laugh! But hyperbole aside, this premise would seem to (by nature of efficient laziness) eventually result in people spam watching ads with bots - despite any ways of preventing this, people will find a way.

All systems with value at stake attract fraud, including paywalls (credit card fraud, obviously; circumvention too). This does not mean we give up and go home. On the contrary, Google and FB take all your data and do strong antifraud work on their native ad-inventory properties. Brave aims to do the same on your device without all that tracking, along with other projects such as https://hcaptcha.com and its protocol foundation, https://www.hmt.ai/.

The protocol foundation whitepaper looks like an interesting read - how far along are the open source implementations?

I'm particularly interested in applications of dynamic open-sourced metrics (ranging from corporate carbon footprinting to labour tokenization) - is this the vision for hmt? Only things I've found online so far are Grafana/Prometheus (etc) and Uber's m3, which is built on top of the former. Anything else you know of tackle that topic?

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