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Comment by strken | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla takes hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue a year. For decades it hired its engineers from the single most expensive place on earth to hire an engineer, the Bay Area. It boosted CEO pay into the millions shortly before laying off a big chunk of its engineering team. If they had taken the cash they spent on "diversifying their revenue streams" (i.e. getting distracted by side projects while their moneymaker Firefox got slower and lost all its users) over the last decade and a half and stuck it into a trust, they'd be sitting on a war chest of billions of dollars right now.

I also don't understand what will stop all five of their remaining users from switching to IceCat, Chromium, or Brave.

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I'm one of those five, and I'm not switching. Chromium is tainted, Brave is outright corrupt, and IceCat is seriously unpractical (they don't even build Windows binaries, because ideology beats practicality for them).

Do I hate the current exec team? Fuck yes. Do I have any serious alternative? Effectively, no. Am I a hostage? Sadly, a bit. I hope people with the power to influence this state of thing will, sooner or later, draw a line and find a better way forward (i.e. a new exec team). Either that, or the project will die and hopefully someone else will pick up the baton.

> Brave is outright corrupt

I am sure I will regret asking... but why do you think that?

For me at least, all the language Brave uses seems to indicate something similar to a pyramid scheme to me. I dunno, something about the whole thing sets me on edge.

Really? That is quite odd.

Users receive crypto if they join the brave rewards system. The rewards are directly related to Brave's revenue from their ad network - the notification ads. Advertisers put money for a known reason and a quantifiable investment. It's all opt-in. Users don't need to put any of their own money to be able to withdraw the rewards they receive. It's as much the opposite of a scheme as it can be.

What would you take to get you to take another look at it, to see it for yourself?

Any system which involves money and is not immediately obviously simple to understand is almost always created in order to steal people’s money.

The Brave system is pretty simple, though? They sell ad space, people buy ad space. Brave shows you ads and keeps a cut, they give their users a cut. Brave has a tipping service which lets users tip sites they like. End result is advertisers can advertise, and people making content get some of the ad money, the setup's just built to not track people.

The big concern there is that ads that don't track are generally less valuable so even widespread adoption of Brave's system would cause a decrease in ad revenue, same as Apple's recent anti-tracking changes.

It's incredible. I think Brave/BAT is pretty much the only project in the crypto space that has a straightforward answer to "how do you guys plan to make money?" question, yet it is called "outright corrupt" and implied they are stealing from users somehow. I really wonder why there is so much cognitive dissonance.

Just speaking personally, but every time I've ever confronted a Brave dev online it's been among the worst experiences I've ever had. Every time I try to espouse an issue that I have with the design or architecture, I get lambasted for sharing it and then they insist that I'm objectively wrong. Browser preference is ultimately subjective, like your choice of editor or operating system: the least you can do is explain your mentality in a way that isn't ostracizing to technical users, otherwise you're no worse than Apple with pocketing your 30% and leaving the users out to dry.

I don't know if your choice of words was intentional, but if I am developer and you come to confront me - I would also be more aggressive in the communication.

> Every time I try to espouse an issue that I have with the design or architecture

If you start a conversation with "issues that you have", you are going to have a hard time. Always. Starting with "issues that you have" is bad because (a) it assumes that you know more than the developers who have done the work of designing and addressing the trade-offs of the system and went through the actual work of developing the solution, (b) it assumes that your needs are more important than those of other users who are satisfied with the solution and (c) places the burden of solving your issue onto their shoulders while offering nothing in return.

In other words: no one likes a know-it-all.

If you start the conversation with the intent of understanding why things were done in a certain way and why certain design choices were made, you will be more likely to get in an engaging and productive conversation than just showing up with a laundry list of things that you'd like to see "fixed". By asking why instead of "confronting" design choices, you are more likely even to get them to recognize when a choice is sub-optimal.

I follow a good part of the lead members in Brave on Twitter. I've seen a lot of conversations from them with other people. Most if not all of them are working with false assumptions and don't even bother to question themselves. Those that come right away aggressive against them or assuming malice are indeed met with brashness. It might seem rude, but I would probably do the same after fending off the 100th random person on the internet accusing you of things you haven't done or demanding that you do something about the token price.

Those that come with the intent of understanding and assuming good intentions are way more likely to be treated cordially.

I'm not a Brave dev, I'm not going to steer your ship for you. I'm coming here, outright to tell you that the amount of hand-waving that your dev team does is suspicious at best, and it's starting to become the laughingstock of the browser wars. Brave's rhetoric is remarkably similar to a plethora of other crypto scams taking over, which doesn't make BAT's sketchiness any more palatable. Your issue is deeper than optics, it runs through whatever management thought it would be sane to incorporate an ERC-20 wallet in my goddamn browser. If I have to explain the issue with wanting my programs to do one thing and one thing well, we probably have irreconcilable opinions.

This is not an issue on Firefox, Chrome, or even Safari god forbid. These browsers are the main contenders because they're simple, and just browsers. Trying to build an "everything machine" is what made Internet Explorer such an unbearable slog, which is why all of our modern browsers are defined more by their limitation than their capabilities.

Again though, these are not my problems to fix. Brave has already burned their bridge of trust by involving themselves in crypto (and pocketing a portion for themselves, worse yet), so I have nothing more to do here than kick back and watch your development slowly turn back into a Mozilla-type org again.

I am not involved with Brave so you may stop addressing me as such.

Anyway, you just created a bunch of strawmen and expect others to spend time trying to reasonably argue with you? If this isn't the biggest "QED" to my comment, I don't know what is.

I could point to at least 5 false statements in your 3 paragraphs, but it is clear that you are not interested in having a productive conversation. So, don't be surprised if others just tell you to piss off and be less of an entitled aspie prick.

The aspie prick is in the eye of the beholder :)

Their whole business model is predicated on effectively replacing ad networks with Brave's own system; I don't know about you, but I find that abhorrent from the perspective of site owners. If it became dominant, you'd just be creating a new monopoly.

> I don't know about you, but I find that abhorrent from the perspective of site owners.

No, I find it amazing and I can probably write an essay about it.

The "ad-supported" economy is directly responsible for a lot of content, but the majority of it is not just bad, it is also actually damaging to society. Think of all the sites that "make a living" on clickbait, content farming, fake news, SEO manipulation and outright fraud. Also, think of all the big ad tech companies that have no incentive in ensuring any kind of quality on its users and just focusing on metrics like "engagement".

It is not too much of a stretch to think of how the "ad supported" content economy is correlated with the increased polarization of people, the growing tribal divide and the isolation of individuals. I honestly think that we should be treating the majority of "ad supported" websites as heavy polluters of our minds and our societies.

"Ad-supported" sites have nothing to gain by working on quality content and can put all their efforts optimizing for controversy, shock value and eyeballs. When everything became "free", we lost our ability to vote with our wallet and lose any power in steering the market to produce the things that we value.

Given that we can not simply ban "free" sites, the next best thing is to find an alternative way to finance content creators, but where the users can have a say in how the resources are allocated. The Brave model does exactly that. Content creators still have a way to make money from their work, but it is not just enough to plaster ads on our faces and collect a check from Google. They will have to compete for quality. They will have to be able to demonstrate that their work is not just worth of the people's time (for those that want to put up with ads), they will have to produce something of value to us.

> If it became dominant, you'd just be creating a new monopoly.

No, not at all.

There is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING stopping Mozilla to create a similar ad network and to follow a similar model. In fact, they can even also base it on BAT and leverage all the work that Brave already did and avoid all the pitfalls that Brave had along the way when they were developing the system. Brave buys the token in the open market, Mozilla could do the same. They could use the same partner exchanges. They could probably even use the same codebase on the client side.

Honestly, if Mozilla did just that on Firefox, I'd switch back to it immediately. Like you, I also wish that Firefox continued to be a strong alternative to keep Google in check. But after the many years of poor management, blatant cash grabs and all the marketing spending that makes them more focused on "looking good" than "doing good", I've given up. I don't want wishy-washy feelings, I want to destroy Surveillance Capitalism.

Mozilla/Firefox are not working on anything to do that. Brave is.

> Content creators still have a way to make money from their work, but it is not just enough to plaster ads on our faces and collect a check from Google. They will have to compete for quality.

That's a huge jump. Incentives are basically the same, at worst the same as subscription-supported services that are slowly becoming the standard for news websites that still care about their reputation. The Brave system simply moves some of the power from multiple ad networks to a single entity, Brave. No thanks, this is not the open web.

> There is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING stopping Mozilla to create a similar ad network and to follow a similar model.

It doesn't matter who runs the network, you are still creating a massive bottleneck that can potentially determine the fate of any site.

I'd rather have a browser be a browser, without any cryptocurrency bullcrap, thank you. If that means I'll be limited to Konqueror when Mozilla goes down in flames, so be it.

> news websites that still care about their reputation.

Those with brand recognition and that can charge subscriptions are not the ones in the long tail. The rewards system is supposed to be a way to help those that are in the long tail: Youtubers with a small but engaged community, Open Source software developers that want to work on their own project, kids making Fortnite skins, investigative reporters that want to cover stories that are not getting picked by mainstream media.

- "Well, these people could use Patreon", you can respond.

Yes, some of them could. But Patreon requires people to contribute their own direct money and requires that people to have access to the global financial system. While with Brave anyone, in any corner of the world, can take whatever little amount of money they want and send as a tip.

> this is not the open web.

Do you use an ad-blocker of any kind? Over 40% of internet users do. Do you think they are "against the open web" and "abhorrent"?

Are you against ad-blockers? Are you okay with Google's push to make it difficult to run ad-blockers on Chrome? To me working actively against the interests of the users is the abhorrent thing.

> you are still creating a massive bottleneck that can potentially determine the fate of any site.

HOW??? To a site that is dependent on ads, I'm still failing to see what the brave rewards program does that is different from any other ad-blocker. That revenue opportunity is already sunk, Brave has no fault here.

> I'd rather have a browser be a browser, without any cryptocurrency bullcrap.

You started to move the goalposts. You only need to deal with "cryptocurrency bullcrap" if you decide to cash out the tokens you receive. If you just want to take the BAT token to tip for other creators, you don't even need to signup to an exchange and you don't need to give away any personal data. If Brave was able to run its revenue share program by transacting with cash, would you be okay with it?

> If that means I'll be limited to Konqueror (...), so be it.

Honestly, it just seems like you just have a bunch of misconceptions and prejudices you don't want to re-evaluate. If you don't want to use it, fine. What is not fine is to be calling companies and people "outright corrupt" without anything to actually back it up.

> Do I have any serious alternative?

Vivaldi?

I'm using Firefox myself and have been using it almost exclusively since it was named Firebird back in the day, but I have considered Vivaldi as an alternative at one point.

I like Vivaldi but the issue is that you're still locking yourself into Chromium's Blink rendering engine which just serves to strengthen Google's push to be the de-facto standards enforcer of the web.

Exactly. Thanks for writing it out.

Anything wrong with Opera or Opera GX?

Same engine.

Also owned now by a China-based company and closed source

Personally, a proprietary browser really rubs me the wrong way

What other browser has a tree style tabs extension?

Also, Firefox mobile lets me block YouTube ads with ublock origin.

Chrome-Brave, Chrome-Chromium, Chrome-Vivaldi, Chrome-Edge and other Chrome clones are no go because it entrenches Google monopoly and bad practices. IceCat doesn't exist on Windows.

There is really close to no choice for browser alternatives.

Seamonkey (which I'm using to write this) is one option. Built for all platforms, no Mozilla tracking/ad/pocket-partnership nonsense. Unfortunately the team is small and Gecko has been changing a lot lately.

Long term the gemini protocol and browsers like lagrange might be the only option - its just too hard to build a modern standards supporting web browser these days (even Microsoft has thrown in the towel and adopted Chromium for Edge).

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