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Hi Jonathan, here is my hot take on the issue.

When a user installs uBlock Origin, they are attempting to protect themselves from ads, not just privacy, but because the ads themselves attempt to manipulate them into buying things.

When Brave blocks ads in one place, but shows others ads instead, the users are not actually protected from the ads, any potential money that may have been generated by the ads is effectively stolen by Brave.

It's smells to us like you are just stealing peoples content.

> When a user installs uBlock Origin, they are attempting to protect themselves from ads, not just privacy, but because the ads themselves attempt to manipulate them into buying things

I'm not sure where you're getting this statistic. Most people that I know, myself included, aren't trying to protect themselves from buying things, rather from annoying ads that clutter everything up and slow everything down. Perhaps brave isn't the best choice for you, but it certainly will be a good choice for a lot of people who are currently using adblockers.

I didn't quote any statistics. Perhaps I should have said, "some users" or I could have said "users are also protected from manipulation".

I think if you thought about it for a while you would object to a constant bombardment of messages that you are not cool enough, or popular enough, or attractive enough, or fit enough.

Or that when you searched for things you were shown the "best results" rather than whoever paid google the most for your attention.

Or if you were thinking of buying a thing one day, but decided not to because you decided you didn't need it, you might prefer not to be constantly convinced to change your mind and buy the thing. Buy the THING!

My iPad is too old for an ad blocker so I have to suffer constant abuse when surfing the web on it. Don't get me started on Apple.

I'm part of the group GP refers to. I have no interest in ads. I might even be aggressively against them in most contexts. At best, they are a nagging distraction, and worst they are manipulation. I understand the value they bring to creators but where possible I opt for subscriptions or donations rather than ads, and have very few qualms about it.

I'm part of this group too. Fuck the current state of online advertising in its entirety. It's manipulative and is driving the web into the ground.

Considering their ads are opt-in this argument makes no sense. Which class of person both wants to “protect themselves from ads” and opts in?

Brave isn’t a browser I use but you guys are not even reading the comments you’re responding to.

People who are tricked into thinking they are helping content creators by watching the ads that Brave serves. People who feel like they might be stealing a contents creators work unless the watch the ads.

Why would anybody opt in to watch the ads otherwise?

Update: Sorry, I just ready below that _users_ are paid up to 70% to watch ads which I did not realize even though that is what is said above. Explains why you would opt in.

And what's wrong with that? Brave blocks adds then allows you to opt in to see their ads. If that some how is theft then so is blocking ads in there first place.

You're absolutely right that some people are not interested in ads, at all. And this is why they install content-blockers and more. This doesn't change the fact that many others install things like uBlock Origin for their security and privacy benefits. This is precisely why Brave ships with Brave Ads and Rewards disabled by default. We believe that the out of box experience should be blocking. This works for both parties: those who want the reduced noise, and those who want the added security/privacy. I hope this helps :)

I notice you didn't address one important part of my comment, that Brave is attempting to monetize other peoples intellectual property by stripping it of ads.

There is a big moral difference between a community of people blocking ads for their own protection, and a company blocking ads for profit.

--

When somebody reads a web page, but blocked the ads, I like to think the reader is saying, I'm interested in what you have to say, but I'm not spending money today.

When somebody uses the Brave browser and has opted in to other ads, I can only think the reader is saying, I'm interested in what you are saying, but fuck you, I'm not buying what you are selling, I'm going to check out these other ads, make some money for myself and for Brave, and If I see anything I like I'll buy there instead.

Would you then say it's disengenous to listen to the tv or radio while browsing the internet with an ad blocker?

> Brave is attempting to monetize other peoples intellectual property by stripping it of ads.

Brave doesn't make money by blocking third-party ads; that's a privacy and security decision. Brave could default to no-blocking (which would be unwise, given the threat to users), and still have its own ad model of displaying ad notifications.

> …people blocking ads for their own protection…

This is why people install Brave; for the privacy and security benefits. This is the baseline experience in Brave.

> When somebody uses the Brave browser and has opted in to other ads…

Why do you assume people aren't using Brave for their own protection? For many people, including myself, advertising isn't the motivator of installing an ad/content blocker. The primary reason is the security/privacy risk of running a small app (which is what modern third-party digital ads are) on my machine.

So if the problem is security and privacy, and not advertising, it makes sense why somebody would opt to participate in an alternative advertising model which does not have the same security/privacy risks, and even rewards the user (with 70% of the ad revenue) for their attention.

> I'm going to check out these other ads, make some money for myself and for Brave…

And for the publisher, since the default configuration of Brave is to queue up auto-contributions for the verified sites you visit.

>Why do you assume people aren't using Brave for their own protection?

OK, sure, lets rewrite it as "Brave is attempting to monetize other people intellectual property by striping it of ads for the protection of readers."

And sure, you could argue that you are providing a service to readers. Unfortunately, in order to provide tha service you must harm the content providers by denying them ad revenue, whether or not they are actually doing any harmful tracking.

This is why I believe content providers will come after you once you get big enough.

And you might be able to scare users, but I doubt you will be able to convince a court that just collecting the data is harmful in any meaningful way.

But come on, we're all tech folks here, Brave is only blocking 3rd party tracking, the 1st parties are still tracking what pages on their site you are reading. Facebook knows what you see on Facebook. Newscorp and Tencent and Apple all know what you are reading across their own IPs. Netflix knows what you are watching and Spotify knows what you are listening to. You have to be logged in after all.

And anyway, I'm sure 3rd parties have started serving up scripts that run 1st party now, just proxxied through the first party server.

Update: And to be clear, if you were doing this all for the good of society alone I would cheer you on, but because you are doing it for profit it becomes unethical in my mind.

Now I know nobody asked, but if I were Mr Eich and I wanted to do this is a way that _was_ ethical, I would attempt to create a parallel internet that was attractive to both users and content providers. I think both parties need to opt-in to this new trackingless internet.

I have a lot of crazy ideas for making this crazy parallel internet good for everybody, but I would be here all night.

You've hit the nail on the head calling it the basic attention token. While you haven't literally replaced ads in the page you are still removing their ads then adding your own. You didn't replace the ad directly, but you've redirected the user's attention.

Brave blocks harmful third-party ads and trackers. This is a security and privacy matter, as these types of ads are actually small scripts/apps which run in the context of your local machine.

As malignant as third-party ads have become, they do generate revenue for content creators. As such, Brave didn't stop at "block, and let the creators figure it out." We did the work to propose a new approach to supporting content creators; one which doesn't cost the user their data/privacy in the process.

In Brave, user's have to opt-in to Ad Notifications. When they do, they set the limits (up to 10/hr) on how many ad notifications can be displayed. Matching happens locally, so the user's data never leaves their device. And 70% of each ad's revenue is allocated to the user's anonymous wallet, which can flow out to the sites they visit (and proportional to the amount of time they spend on those sites) each month.

This is indeed a replacement model; we cannot continue down the path we've been taking for 25 years. One which treats users like products, harvesting their data at every turn, and auctioning them off to a sea of third parties. There's a better way, and we're just seeing the start of it with the Brave model.

Keep digging.

Where can I buy these (banners?) and what's the min daily budget? I'm skeptical this will work long term as you're overlapping two of the worst sources of traffic: technically-inclined users and incentived attention. Would love to test it out for fun.

I would be interested to know what the conversion rate is like. Given users are literately paid to watch the ads, I'm sure it would be terrible. Worse even than a game were users have to watch an ad to get some in game currency.

CTR is at about 9% right now (industry is about 2%). The difference here is that the user gets to decide whether or not they participate, and to what degree (up to 10 ad notifications per hour presently). Ads are selected via a machine-learning component on the user's device, so with greater diversity of advertisers and inventory, relevancy increases. And, users are rewarded NOT for their clicks, but rather for their attention. If an ad notification appears, and is ignored, you're still rewarded 70% of the associated revenue.

We don't care what it does with the previous ad data, what's disturbing is that there is even a setting to opt-in to more ads in the first place. Many people (myself included) will be completely turned away because of that option. That's just the cost of doing business.

Person 1: Brave replaces existing ads, that’s bad

Someone from Brave: actually we don’t replace existing ads at all, here’s why

Person 2: no one cares what you do or don’t do with existing ads!

I don’t have any connection to Brave but I find it odd they’ve become some kind of hate figure here on HN. Their iOS client IMO is quite good. Their privacy is miles ahead of the other options. But merely by trying to be privacy first they get crap for not always being perfect. See also: Signal, OpenPGP, Firefox.

> Their privacy is miles ahead of the other options.

If by "other options" you're purely referring to "the 5 most popular browsers", you're mostly right. Brave still uses much more telemetry than UnGoogled Chromium and Vivaldi, so make of that what you will.

I reviewed Vivaldi back in 2019 on Twitter (see https://twitter.com/jonathansampson/status/11653581559220592...), and later again for an official blog post (see https://brave.com/brave-tops-browser-first-run-network-traff...). It was indeed much better than many of the other top browsers. Brave does, however, still come out on top when you consider Vivaldi proxies few, if any, requests to Google.

On the topic of telemetry, I just updated it and launched a new window to find an immediate call to vialdi.com/rep/rep passing along 25 distinct pieces of information, including what appears to be a distinct 16-character ID (key: _id). Another 6-character ID (key: pv_id) was also passed along for the ride. I'd have to take a closer look into the traffic to determine how sticky these are to the user, device, or browser instance.

Anybody interested can download Telerik Fiddler (or the HTTP Toolkit) and conduct a cursory review of the network activity as well. Vivaldi does still come out near the top of the list of browsers though. For example, they don't send keystrokes to Google or Bing behind the scenes as you type. That's a unique restraint not commonly observed in browsers today.

At this point, I think I'm more comfortable with Google getting my data than Brave. Thanks for the help!

Ah yes, brand good

Vivaldi user here. If anyone is interested in Vivaldi's network requests, feel free to check their blog post that addresses the same: https://vivaldi.com/blog/decoding-network-activity-in-vivald...

I didn’t realize Brave had become a “hate figure” here but it seems like the discussion in this thread took a hard turn to the kind of conspiratorial, reactionary, nasty “gotcha” reply behavior I come to Hackernews specifically to avoid. In this thread are multiple examples of the Brave employee saying Thing A and just getting mean-spirited responses reframing A as negatively as possible as if it’s an argument retort.

Example: “Oh this person works for Brave, don’t trust them.” Or in reply to the post explaining what sounds like a bug in the application being misread as a way to grift money from traffic, “No revenue made? So you got caught before you got paid?” Or the clarification that Brave browser ads are confined to the browser and OS UI followed by repetition of the same insisted point that they “block then replace browser ads,” while the rep seems to have explained quite clearly opt-in browser ads are not presented inline to the webpage content. It is, sorry to use a tired comparison, “Reddit behavior.”

I recently saw a note by dang in a Bitcoin thread about how crypto tends to generate repetitive arguments on HN and it seems like that blind spot for the community may have eclipsed Brave by association (maybe in addition to HN’s negativity towards anything ad related). I keep scrolling further expecting to learn something salient about why I shouldn’t trust Brave but instead I see a bunch of people beating on a community rep.

This bullshit has nothing to do with Brave. Brendan Eich (Brave CEO) was cancelled years ago, and the mob is still after him. That's what going on really, it's cancel culture at its finest.

Won't anyone think of the poor homophobe?

Thank you for making my point

You're welcome. Someone should justify the imaginary boogeyman people cry about, it's no fun otherwise.

I wrote up a too-long message trying to rationalize some of the repeated animosity directed at Brave Inc in almost every single Brave-related post (for as long as I can remember seeing them on HN), but I'm beginning to think even discussing it at a meta-level would prompt some of the same old repetitive arguments on HN and not be worthwhile.

Instead, I'd like to just respond to this small bit of your comment, if you don't mind:

>I keep scrolling further expecting to learn something salient about why I shouldn’t trust Brave but instead I see a bunch of people beating on a community rep.

A lot of anti-Brave comments are flat out wrong, factually incorrect, or just pure conspiracy/hate. A lot of other anti-Brave comments used to be true but aren't anymore. A few anti-Brave comments still are researched and reasoned.

But it feels to me like any and all comments critiquing Brave instantly get either heated responses from Brave fans and/or dismissed entirely by Brave employees, regardless of their validity, which doesn't breed good discussion and typically devolves into argument and/or personal attacks (even from the Brave reps, which probably doesn't help their brand image).

Brave has made a lot of mistakes over the years (both in bugs and business decisions they've since reverted). From the company/rep's point of view, they've made mistakes, learned, and improved. From the haters' point of view, the company's laundry list of shady scandals has decimated any trust left of what their reps say, especially when defending what looks like The Next Big Scandal. When those same reps dismiss what is or used to be a legitimate concern (for example, injecting affiliate links into URLs) as just "Brave doesn't do that", it only reinforces whichever perceptions people already have about Brave (those for-Brave see haters with invalid critique, and those attacking Brave see a rep gaslighting or dismissing what they believe to be true).

I don't know what the solution to repair Brave's brand is for haters, but it's probably somewhere between acknowledging the mistakes of their past (instead of framing every response in the ultra-present-tense "Brave doesn't do that") and/or providing better educational materials for people to actually learn how Brave works instead of just vaguely knowing "they hide ads, but also show ads, but also something about cryptocurrency, but only if you watch their ads?"

The problem is that trust takes so long to build and so little to destroy. I still won't install or use Brave because I have a nagging suspicion in the back of my mind that I'll wake up to a forced update tomorrow that goes against my interest. They have an insane tightrope to walk in a world where they need to support their work yet not corrupt their product in the name of profit. Thus far, they've made several decisions which have knocked them off that tightrope. Each time, the long road to regaining trust is lengthened and reset. If they go a couple years with a clean track record, I'll consider trying it again, but at this point the brand is entirely tainted for me. Importantly, it doesn't matter if my feeling is currently true, it's been informed by history.

Haters gonna hate.

This problem is all too common though in all parts of life. Someone does something with a good intention for the betterment of people/society and then some others who are not on the other side of the status quo have have to come bring negativity because all they have in them is destructive and constructive (hate vs compromise/support)

>Person 1: Brave replaces existing ads, that’s bad >Someone from Brave: actually we don’t replace existing ads at all, here’s why

Me: Brave guy used a lot of words but what they said was they remove ads from one place and move them to another place, that's still replacing ads.

not if it's opt-in... if i install a firefox plugin that puts all pages full of ads, it's not firefox doing that.. it's me.

Did Firefox implement a nice button for you to turn it on? Did they sell the ads to the advertisers? Did they take a cut of the money? Did they trick you into thinking it was a good idea?

That's not you.

We're discussing 2 distinctly different ad models:

1) Forced upon the user, rewards them in no way for their attention, harvests their data, auctions them off to a sea of third-parties, and may in fact be dropping malicious scripts onto their machine for client-site execution.

and

2) An opt-in model which harvests no user data, rewards users with 70% of the revenue for the ads they choose to view (the user controls frequency caps), and gives everybody (not just the wealthy or well-off) a way to support content creators.

And you feel the second one is the "disturbing" model?

As much as I know you want to chime in here, I'm not going to play any games where you draw the goalposts. My current options are the following:

1. I can continue to use Vivaldi and uBlock origin as a completely open-source and so far flawless combo

or

2. Go out of my way to switch to a browser with dubious privacy claims, a goddamn personal cryptocurrency and (the cherry on top) a developer who spent the better half of his afternoon tracking me down and asking me why I don't like their browser.

I think I'm good.

Happy to hear that you're staying safe online. Nobody is tracking you down though. You and I happen to be on the same page, engaging in conversation. Check my comment history and you'll see that you make up only a small fraction of the individuals to whom I have responded. All the best to you though; sincerely wish you well.

You have more patience than I would have had in this thread. I guess it's your job to be patient though, or at least to deal with occasionally nasty elements of the community.

Is Vivaldi open source? The only reason I don't use it is because it's closed, so this would be great news!

No. They publish their changes to Chromium's code, and kind of dodge answering that question: https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/privacy/is-vivaldi-open-sou...

They do not publish any code relating to the UI, but the Chromium part is absolutely open: https://vivaldi.com/source/

Also, Vivaldi is entirely moddable.

Why Vivaldi over Firefox?

I actually don't mind seeing ads for stuff I like, and the idea to redirect revenu to support content creators is appealing. Right now I see 0 ads, maybe will get fancy and try Brave for fun