But they still will. They'll still have to bug people who don't use brave. You think they're going to recode their sites to recognise brave and hide everything away? You'll get the same experience as you do right now with an ad blocker, except you'll be paying for it while the majority of people don't. And then in a few years brave will go belly up and you'll be out of pocket, and the internet will still be full of intrusive ads
Will this actually cause producers to remove ads? Isn't there just an alternative monetization now? In other words, is there no way for a content producer to 'double dip' and earn from both Brave's payments and ads that work around Brave's ad blockers?
I prefer to think of it as "I'm really looking forward to an Internet that can survive without constantly nagging me for a subscription or running third-party ad code on my computer"
There are those of us who look forward to exactly that: the ability to own our participation in the content we consume. When you pay for content, you are the customer. When someone else pays for the content, you are the inventory.
Yes, ad blockers work. But they are susceptible to the tragedy of the commons: it's always advantageous to install an ad blocker. Then, as they proliferate, companies must insert more and more intrusive ads. This encourages more people to get ad blockers.
Allowing a tiered economy for content will enable those who wish to pay to do so, and those who don't to see ads. The ads can become less intrusive because the companies are no longer playing a cat-and-mouse game with their inventory. That should decrease the incentive to use an ad blocker, allowing that revenue stream to stabilize.
"When you pay for content, you are the customer. When someone else pays for the content, you are the inventory."
Subscribers to the NYT: are they the customer or the inventory (or product)?
Subscribers to Netflix: are they the customer or the inventory (or product)?
I really don't see why companies wouldn't treat them as both. So many businesses are operating on a subscription model, and still treat their "customers" as databanks ripe for mining and selling to their "real customers": advertisers and other purchasers of user data.
The 21st Century has really become the century of spyware, and I don't see paying for content as a reliable way for consumers to avoid being a target.
I am hoping there is a market for such a browser. I, for one, would much rather pay for a browser that looks out for my (privacy) interests than use a free browser that does not. But I fall in the boat of people who would also rather pay for a television set that only worked as a television set, and not a behavior tracker. Heck, I would happily pay more to keep that functionality as far away from me as possible.
I, for one, would much rather pay for a browser that looks out for my (privacy) interests than use a free browser that does not.
Doesn't Firefox do all of that already for free? It's FOSS and has a wide range of privacy features baked in including pixel blocking. Adding on ghostery and ublock covers the rest. Seems like the only difference is configuring options on installation.
It does, as I understand it. I personally use Safari on my Mac, as I prefer the interface (with ghostery, and whatever uBlock is on that platform these days) but... I honestly LIKE paying for things I use. I feel more comfortable with paying for a product as opposed to keeping my fingers crossed that something free will 1) continue to exist/remain free and 2) retain the features I like. I pay for email, I pay for a VPN, I pay for everything I can pay for.
Brave is wonderful. Whenever I encounter a site with bad advertising, or a paywall, Brave skips right around it. I really like the idea the browser puts forth that you can have some say over where advertising dollars go. It's a little clunky but hopefully that will get better with time.
Chromium skin (literally Electron app) with an adblocker and HTTPS Everywhere already integrated and an integrated payment thing, made by the guy infamous for inventing JavaScript and donating $$$ to pushing homophobic legislation? Whatever.
I don't agree with his business model. Instead of paying to block ads, Brave could hook into a P2P CDN like greta.io or peerweb.net to offset the bandwidth costs of sites you visit (or maybe just the sites you favorite/bookmark).
If I'm ever going to pay to block ads, I'm not going to share the payment with my browser vendor, especially vendors with CEOs that support homophobic causes.
He got run out of Mozilla for making a donation to a group that supported Prop 8 in California, banning same-sex marriage, which passed in a referendum in 2008.
I generally don't respond to low-road conduct like this on HN. But the arrant balderdash needs to stop.
Please stop calling Brendan Eich "homophobic" just because he donated money to the cause he believes in.
Nobody calls Paul Graham names just because he was in support of the end of death penalty in California[1]
In my opinion, marriage is nothing more than a contract of love and commitment, and I don't need government recognition or acquiescence for it. I also think proponents of gay marriage are more concerned with parity with heterosexual couples, something else I don't need or care. A civil union has worked just fine and asking the government to recognize my union as marriage just doesn't interest me.
The obvious counter is the one already deployed, if only implicitly, in response to your comment - that this analysis is selfish, and says nothing about whether gay marriage is socially valuable, but only whether it's valuable to you.
I spent a day's worth of HN participation arguing against gay marriage, a few months back, and came out net positive in karma. If you're interested in those arguments, they begin here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12976422
Should you take the time, I'd be interested and obliged to hear any thoughts they occasion.
Does it matter what his argument was, or whether it differed from mine or Overtonwindow's? If you're willing to assume we have reasonably sensible positions on the matter - I note you haven't inquired into these, in any case - then why not assume that he does, too?
Eich's story comes up frequently on HN, and he's the founder and CEO of a business that someone might choose to support or boycott. The article is about him and his company. It's reasonable for someone to be more interested in his position than yours.
Somehow you think the expenditure of money is exempt from moral consideration. This is the most amazing thing I've read on HN in a while. The "cause he believes in" is banning same-sex marriage... in other words, homophobia.
Your comment is the equivalent of saying "you can't call Paul Graham anti-death-penalty just because he's demonstrated that he's anti-death-penalty through donating to an anti-death-penalty cause".
Brendan sought to have the law declare a group of people unequal on the basis of their sexual orientation. There is absolutely no way to sugarcoat that or make it into a "well he doesn't actually believe this, he just tried to have it written into law for some other reason" thing.
And much as I don't eat at Chick-Fil-A, I personally won't directly financially support anything Brendan is involved with. That's called freedom of association, which includes the freedom not to associate with someone, and freedom of speech, which includes the freedom to say I find someone's views or cause repugnant and to argue against them.
If you do not understand or do not care for this, perhaps you are in the wrong place.
Comments which add nothing of value to a discussion, but show a strong propensity to add a bunch of political argument that is in no way topical or indeed worthwhile for anyone involved, tend to be rapidly downvoted. So do comments that complain about downvotes.
If you don't like his business model, say so. If you don't like his politics, say so - somewhere else.
Sheez FFS, someone learn how to write headlines. I was trying to figure out what that mean. 30 is not a dollar bill denomination? All the donations were under $30? What?
It has its appeal. An interface made in html/css/js is customizable and programmable from a user's pov. Only the performance can be annoying, but sometimes its not too much of an issue, as Visual Studio Code demonstrated.
I'll say this much, Brave has done a marvelous job of branding this advertising middleware platform as an ad blocker and privacy protector.
Look at question 15 in their FAQ. https://brave.com/FAQ.html They're gathering much more information than regular ads are able to, and they're using that information to push more highly targeted ads at you. That's the business model. All the handwaving about how that information never leaves the browser is irrelevant; it's still being used to push ads at you.
That's a really bad interpretation. By default any browser would "see this information" no matter what browser you are using.
Our auditable open source browser code protects this intent data on the client device. Our server side has no access to this data in the clear, nor does it have decryption keys. We do not run a MitM proxy or VPN service.
Right, as expected. So they aren't pulling your data - according to them. So I don't see the problem.
> By default any browser would "see this information" no matter what browser you are using.
Yes, but by default most browsers don't go on to use that information to decide "what preferences and intent signals to expose [to advertisers] to maximize user, publisher and advertiser [and Brave's] value".
>Our server side has no access to this data in the clear, nor does it have decryption keys. We do not run a MitM proxy or VPN service.
See, this is the brilliant marketing I was talking about. They don't use the data serverside and expose the results to advertisers. They use it clientside and then expose the results to advertisers. The end result is exactly the same, it just sounds friendlier. The references to MitM and VPNs is just verbal chaff: they don't need to run a man-in-the-middle attack to listen in on your traffic, because the end-user software is already doing everything a MitM would have done, and then some.
Not really. It seems like it's basically making everyone their own ad server in a pull process. Seems like the only way to do ad serving if you want to keep all your data private no?
Otherwise they would be breaking the exposure protection if you sent your "intent" to their or another ad server.
I think the trick here is that they don't want to completely break the capability for people to make money off of serving ads and people seeing those ads. So if that's the case then making everyone their own ad server makes sense.
> I think the trick here is that they don't want to completely break the capability for people to make money off of serving ads and people seeing those ads.
You appear to be in agreement with my original point: Brave is advertising middleware and privacy intrusion branded as an ad blocker and privacy protector.
The default behavior of Brave is to _block ads, trackers, and fingerprinting_. The ability to show safe, relevant ads is part of a future opt-in component of Brave.
I'm glad to hear that ad blocking is now the default.
You might consider rewriting the FAQ page that your CEO described as "out of date" which repeatedly refers to ad replacement in the present tense; I see no mention anywhere that it's "part of a future opt-in component", welcome though that news is.
The blog post at https://www.brave.com/blogpost_2.html from January also describes ad replacement as a current feature, and as the default behavior, not opt-in; and seems to indicate that it is using the tracking and fingerprinting behavior described above:
> You’re game to try our default mode of operation, for a better ad-supported Web. Just leave the Replace Ads item checked. This is the default mode of operation. We insert ads after blocking without hurting page load speed, and those ads will support the sites you browse. We choose ads based on browser-private user data with no remote tracking -- not even by our servers.
So I'm not entirely sure what to make of your description of it as a 'future component', as that seems in conflict with much of your marketing material.
(I do see you've added a disclaimer to your "About ad replacement" page at https://brave.com/about_ad_replacement.html which I'm pretty sure wasn't there when I made the comments you're responding to. Perhaps this is a recent change in your software? Did you used to have ad replacement built in as the default, then removed it?)
(Edited to add: on closer reading I do see that that blog post is describing a "mock user interface", so perhaps I've misunderstood the mixture of present and future tense within the rest of the text as referring to actual, rather than planned, implementation. You guys could certainly stand to be a lot clearer about what your product is and isn't doing, especially since it seems to change fairly frequently.)
Sorry, that FAQ's way out of date. We won't do anything other than what other browsers do for history, anti-tracking (see Apple's announced on-device machine learning for third-party cookie blocking exception management), etc. in baseline Brave without users opting in. Any machine learning ad matching code will be a separate open source codebase and downloaded component.
That's good news, and represents a significant change for the better compared to the last time I took a serious look at your company. I still find the whole ad replacement concept problematic, and I wish your marketing materials were a bit clearer about which ideas are current, which planned, and which abandoned -- but making it opt-in does go a long way toward allaying those concerns.
Could you do me a favor and point out any more old junk on the site that you see? We scrubbed but clearly missed FAQ items, too much eng work not enough mktg, lol. Thanks!
There needs to be a fairer distribution of the tokens if they want this to succeed. This is because token holders become the ambassadors / evangelists for the project.
There's probably a lot of disappointed people who missed the crowdsale - this means the project would have a lot of salty opponents now.
64 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 128 ms ] threadYes, ad blockers work. But they are susceptible to the tragedy of the commons: it's always advantageous to install an ad blocker. Then, as they proliferate, companies must insert more and more intrusive ads. This encourages more people to get ad blockers.
Allowing a tiered economy for content will enable those who wish to pay to do so, and those who don't to see ads. The ads can become less intrusive because the companies are no longer playing a cat-and-mouse game with their inventory. That should decrease the incentive to use an ad blocker, allowing that revenue stream to stabilize.
Subscribers to the NYT: are they the customer or the inventory (or product)?
Subscribers to Netflix: are they the customer or the inventory (or product)?
I really don't see why companies wouldn't treat them as both. So many businesses are operating on a subscription model, and still treat their "customers" as databanks ripe for mining and selling to their "real customers": advertisers and other purchasers of user data.
The 21st Century has really become the century of spyware, and I don't see paying for content as a reliable way for consumers to avoid being a target.
Doesn't Firefox do all of that already for free? It's FOSS and has a wide range of privacy features baked in including pixel blocking. Adding on ghostery and ublock covers the rest. Seems like the only difference is configuring options on installation.
[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1329996
A direct-pay model mean that content creators have to adhere to what their audience approves of.
I know which one I prefer.
If I'm ever going to pay to block ads, I'm not going to share the payment with my browser vendor, especially vendors with CEOs that support homophobic causes.
Nobody calls Paul Graham names just because he was in support of the end of death penalty in California[1]
I don't understand these mental gymnastics you are trying to do.
Before you answer, you might like to know I'm gay. Self-hating, no doubt...
I know my reasons. What are yours, if I may?
I spent a day's worth of HN participation arguing against gay marriage, a few months back, and came out net positive in karma. If you're interested in those arguments, they begin here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12976422
Should you take the time, I'd be interested and obliged to hear any thoughts they occasion.
And that's because the death penalty is unjust.
Brendan sought to have the law declare a group of people unequal on the basis of their sexual orientation. There is absolutely no way to sugarcoat that or make it into a "well he doesn't actually believe this, he just tried to have it written into law for some other reason" thing.
And much as I don't eat at Chick-Fil-A, I personally won't directly financially support anything Brendan is involved with. That's called freedom of association, which includes the freedom not to associate with someone, and freedom of speech, which includes the freedom to say I find someone's views or cause repugnant and to argue against them.
If you do not understand or do not care for this, perhaps you are in the wrong place.
If you don't like his business model, say so. If you don't like his politics, say so - somewhere else.
Sheez FFS, someone learn how to write headlines. I was trying to figure out what that mean. 30 is not a dollar bill denomination? All the donations were under $30? What?
Look at question 15 in their FAQ. https://brave.com/FAQ.html They're gathering much more information than regular ads are able to, and they're using that information to push more highly targeted ads at you. That's the business model. All the handwaving about how that information never leaves the browser is irrelevant; it's still being used to push ads at you.
Our auditable open source browser code protects this intent data on the client device. Our server side has no access to this data in the clear, nor does it have decryption keys. We do not run a MitM proxy or VPN service.
Right, as expected. So they aren't pulling your data - according to them. So I don't see the problem.
Yes, but by default most browsers don't go on to use that information to decide "what preferences and intent signals to expose [to advertisers] to maximize user, publisher and advertiser [and Brave's] value".
>Our server side has no access to this data in the clear, nor does it have decryption keys. We do not run a MitM proxy or VPN service.
See, this is the brilliant marketing I was talking about. They don't use the data serverside and expose the results to advertisers. They use it clientside and then expose the results to advertisers. The end result is exactly the same, it just sounds friendlier. The references to MitM and VPNs is just verbal chaff: they don't need to run a man-in-the-middle attack to listen in on your traffic, because the end-user software is already doing everything a MitM would have done, and then some.
Now do you see the problem?
Otherwise they would be breaking the exposure protection if you sent your "intent" to their or another ad server.
I think the trick here is that they don't want to completely break the capability for people to make money off of serving ads and people seeing those ads. So if that's the case then making everyone their own ad server makes sense.
You appear to be in agreement with my original point: Brave is advertising middleware and privacy intrusion branded as an ad blocker and privacy protector.
As always, Brave is hosted in the open: https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/
You might consider rewriting the FAQ page that your CEO described as "out of date" which repeatedly refers to ad replacement in the present tense; I see no mention anywhere that it's "part of a future opt-in component", welcome though that news is.
The blog post at https://www.brave.com/blogpost_2.html from January also describes ad replacement as a current feature, and as the default behavior, not opt-in; and seems to indicate that it is using the tracking and fingerprinting behavior described above:
> You’re game to try our default mode of operation, for a better ad-supported Web. Just leave the Replace Ads item checked. This is the default mode of operation. We insert ads after blocking without hurting page load speed, and those ads will support the sites you browse. We choose ads based on browser-private user data with no remote tracking -- not even by our servers.
So I'm not entirely sure what to make of your description of it as a 'future component', as that seems in conflict with much of your marketing material.
(I do see you've added a disclaimer to your "About ad replacement" page at https://brave.com/about_ad_replacement.html which I'm pretty sure wasn't there when I made the comments you're responding to. Perhaps this is a recent change in your software? Did you used to have ad replacement built in as the default, then removed it?)
(Edited to add: on closer reading I do see that that blog post is describing a "mock user interface", so perhaps I've misunderstood the mixture of present and future tense within the rest of the text as referring to actual, rather than planned, implementation. You guys could certainly stand to be a lot clearer about what your product is and isn't doing, especially since it seems to change fairly frequently.)
There's probably a lot of disappointed people who missed the crowdsale - this means the project would have a lot of salty opponents now.