5 ms·

It is very difficult to take Brave seriously given how very shady its fundraising (the entire premise of brave is that they can capitalize on selling your atten

It is very difficult to take Brave seriously given how very shady its fundraising (the entire premise of brave is that they can capitalize on selling your attention) was and how historically dishonest Eich has been about using his money for socio-political, anti-libertarian activism. It's quite a disservice to Palemoon and Waterfox to include such an anti-user project as Brave.

randallsquared 9y ago
> historically dishonest Eich has been about using his money I'm not sure what this means. Can you expand on how Eich has been dishonest in how he used his money?
- KirinDave 9y ago
  > https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/07/brendan-eich-has-the-right-to-fight-gay-rights-but-not-to-be-mozillas-ceo https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/07/brenda... Eich did everything he could to conceal that his libertarian image was a facade and in fact he was a social authoritarian. Once it came out he was actively using his money on political campaigns designed to try and further empower and justify the state to decide what relationships between consenting adults was forbidden, he had a rather hard time being taken seriously in this area. I'm not sure why someone who's actively and monetarily supported politicians saying homosexuals should have to register in a special registry parallel to the sex offender registry is being taken seriously in the privacy arena. Privacy is not something that can be decomposed as an asset to purchase. Every person who doesn't have it leaks information about the people they interact with, and that undermines privacy for everyone.
  - randallsquared 9y ago
    Thanks for explaining!
  - BrendanEich 9y ago
    Hey, Dave. I’m not sure why you thought I was a libertarian. I haven’t identified as such since the ‘80s. As for Buchanan in the ‘90s, I don’t support everything he said - I was most supportive of his economic nationalism. Did you ever support a politician (say, Obama) only to find they said something you disavowed? Sam Yagan of okcupid did. I disavow Buchanan’s unconstitutional AIDS registry, and probably other proposals he has made. As for “social authoritarian”, California regulates and licenses marriage via family law, as do all states. I come from an older generation of allies who supported Mark Leno et al. when they labored over, passed, and amended to full positive-rights equivalence with marriage, CA’s Domestic Partner Law (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_partnership_in_California https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_partnership_in_Cali...). This was considered just and sufficient, until it was not — and then anyone who questioned the revolutionary tactics used to cast former allies as haters and bigots became a hater too. I dissent from all such revolutionary tactics and agendas. I agree with dissenting LGBTQ scholars of note on this point re marriage equality, e.g., Camille Paglia. (I don’t agree with those scholars on everything, of course. Same as with most people, including politicians I’ve supported in the past.) Now the shoe is on the other foot. Marriage equality is law and I’m an officer of a corporation with a genuinely diverse roster of employees. I am committed to the fullest definition of inclusivity, which covers right wingers as well as left, libertarians and non-libertarians. For you to gin up a case that I pretended to be a libertarian is silly (I never pretended that). But worse, if you judge Brave by a past and too-narrow slice of my opinions, you are doing what haters who boycott Apple because of Tim Cook do. It is your right, of course, but it looks like consequentialism (end justifies means) or really just Who/Whom ax-grinding. I hope you will use Brave in view of what we are trying to do, as a group of people who share a cause and set of beliefs, whatever our other or past causes and beliefs.
    - dragonwriter 9y ago
      > I come from an older generation of allies who supported Mark Leno et al. when they labored over, passed, and amended to full positive-rights equivalence with marriage, CA’s Domestic Partner Law [...] This was considered just and sufficient, until it was not Oh, please, no, it wasn't by, well, almost anyone. Most LGBTQ advocates and allies never considered it “just and sufficient”, they (at best) considered it at best a distasteful compromise that was better than the pre-existing state and at worst a capitulation to those who wanted to give religious groups a veto over he definition of civil marriage which ignored the enduring lesson of the struggle for civil rights that separate institutions are inherently unequal nnyour and entrenched in law the othering of LGBTQ people and thir families and relationships. The idea that there was ever a consensus, either in society or among LGBTQ advocates and allies, that the separate institution of domestic partnership was “just and sufficient” is rewriting history.
justsee 9y ago
Your critique of Brave doesn't square with my understanding of the Brave ecosystem since I started seriously following it just before the BAT ICO. This technical interview with Eich was extremely illuminating and I'd urge you to watch it, particularly the second half: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUtHhYes6-A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUtHhYes6-A The current ad-tech ecosystem is a complete disaster, and Eich's vision for replacing it is, I think, genius. Leverage properties of cryptography to build a browsing experience which respects privacy but retains opt-in ad relevance and anonymous metrics, and further leverage developments in cryptoeconomics to balance the requirements of user <-> publisher <-> advertiser in a properly-designed content generation and consumption ecosystem. I find the whole idea elegant, ambitious and pragmatic. What specifically do you find anti-user about Brave?
- KirinDave 9y ago
  > The current ad-tech ecosystem is a complete disaster, and Eich's vision for replacing it is, I think, genius. Eich's SALE of positioning his company as a gateway to all online advertising while spinning this as "pro-privacy" is indeed genius. His actual vision of the product and the positioning of Brave as a controlling arbiter over all ads (and thus, as a central collection and monitoring point for data around ad consumption) is quite dystopian. Nothing about logging our ad views to a publicly inspectable blockchain is in the interests of privacy. All it does is offer Eich's company an opportunity to make yet another skeezy ad platform with a new series of buzzwords. It will not be more difficult to game than any other browser, but it will sound impressive and current and gain ad buys. And I submit that the inevitability of the ad network is itself a questionable notion when a more direct service economy is not only historically how things were done. That model faded as broadcast technology outpaced other IT, but as other IT caught up we've been seeing a return to direct-to-customer service models and these are outperforming ad models in some media markets. It is not inherently a "blockchain" idea to sell off your time as ads in order to pay for your browser, and other folks are at least pretending to align their business model with user interests while building an information and attention economy (e.g., Steem)
  - BrendanEich 9y ago

randallsquared 9y ago

> historically dishonest Eich has been about using his money I'm not sure what this means. Can you expand on how Eich has been dishonest in how he used his money?

KirinDave 9y ago
> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/07/brendan-eich-has-the-right-to-fight-gay-rights-but-not-to-be-mozillas-ceo https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/07/brenda... Eich did everything he could to conceal that his libertarian image was a facade and in fact he was a social authoritarian. Once it came out he was actively using his money on political campaigns designed to try and further empower and justify the state to decide what relationships between consenting adults was forbidden, he had a rather hard time being taken seriously in this area. I'm not sure why someone who's actively and monetarily supported politicians saying homosexuals should have to register in a special registry parallel to the sex offender registry is being taken seriously in the privacy arena. Privacy is not something that can be decomposed as an asset to purchase. Every person who doesn't have it leaks information about the people they interact with, and that undermines privacy for everyone.
- randallsquared 9y ago
  Thanks for explaining!
- BrendanEich 9y ago
  Hey, Dave. I’m not sure why you thought I was a libertarian. I haven’t identified as such since the ‘80s. As for Buchanan in the ‘90s, I don’t support everything he said - I was most supportive of his economic nationalism. Did you ever support a politician (say, Obama) only to find they said something you disavowed? Sam Yagan of okcupid did. I disavow Buchanan’s unconstitutional AIDS registry, and probably other proposals he has made. As for “social authoritarian”, California regulates and licenses marriage via family law, as do all states. I come from an older generation of allies who supported Mark Leno et al. when they labored over, passed, and amended to full positive-rights equivalence with marriage, CA’s Domestic Partner Law (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_partnership_in_California https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_partnership_in_Cali...). This was considered just and sufficient, until it was not — and then anyone who questioned the revolutionary tactics used to cast former allies as haters and bigots became a hater too. I dissent from all such revolutionary tactics and agendas. I agree with dissenting LGBTQ scholars of note on this point re marriage equality, e.g., Camille Paglia. (I don’t agree with those scholars on everything, of course. Same as with most people, including politicians I’ve supported in the past.) Now the shoe is on the other foot. Marriage equality is law and I’m an officer of a corporation with a genuinely diverse roster of employees. I am committed to the fullest definition of inclusivity, which covers right wingers as well as left, libertarians and non-libertarians. For you to gin up a case that I pretended to be a libertarian is silly (I never pretended that). But worse, if you judge Brave by a past and too-narrow slice of my opinions, you are doing what haters who boycott Apple because of Tim Cook do. It is your right, of course, but it looks like consequentialism (end justifies means) or really just Who/Whom ax-grinding. I hope you will use Brave in view of what we are trying to do, as a group of people who share a cause and set of beliefs, whatever our other or past causes and beliefs.
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    > I come from an older generation of allies who supported Mark Leno et al. when they labored over, passed, and amended to full positive-rights equivalence with marriage, CA’s Domestic Partner Law [...] This was considered just and sufficient, until it was not Oh, please, no, it wasn't by, well, almost anyone. Most LGBTQ advocates and allies never considered it “just and sufficient”, they (at best) considered it at best a distasteful compromise that was better than the pre-existing state and at worst a capitulation to those who wanted to give religious groups a veto over he definition of civil marriage which ignored the enduring lesson of the struggle for civil rights that separate institutions are inherently unequal nnyour and entrenched in law the othering of LGBTQ people and thir families and relationships. The idea that there was ever a consensus, either in society or among LGBTQ advocates and allies, that the separate institution of domestic partnership was “just and sufficient” is rewriting history.

justsee 9y ago

Your critique of Brave doesn't square with my understanding of the Brave ecosystem since I started seriously following it just before the BAT ICO. This technical interview with Eich was extremely illuminating and I'd urge you to watch it, particularly the second half: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUtHhYes6-A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUtHhYes6-A The current ad-tech ecosystem is a complete disaster, and Eich's vision for replacing it is, I think, genius. Leverage properties of cryptography to build a browsing experience which respects privacy but retains opt-in ad relevance and anonymous metrics, and further leverage developments in cryptoeconomics to balance the requirements of user <-> publisher <-> advertiser in a properly-designed content generation and consumption ecosystem. I find the whole idea elegant, ambitious and pragmatic. What specifically do you find anti-user about Brave?

KirinDave 9y ago
> The current ad-tech ecosystem is a complete disaster, and Eich's vision for replacing it is, I think, genius. Eich's SALE of positioning his company as a gateway to all online advertising while spinning this as "pro-privacy" is indeed genius. His actual vision of the product and the positioning of Brave as a controlling arbiter over all ads (and thus, as a central collection and monitoring point for data around ad consumption) is quite dystopian. Nothing about logging our ad views to a publicly inspectable blockchain is in the interests of privacy. All it does is offer Eich's company an opportunity to make yet another skeezy ad platform with a new series of buzzwords. It will not be more difficult to game than any other browser, but it will sound impressive and current and gain ad buys. And I submit that the inevitability of the ad network is itself a questionable notion when a more direct service economy is not only historically how things were done. That model faded as broadcast technology outpaced other IT, but as other IT caught up we've been seeing a return to direct-to-customer service models and these are outperforming ad models in some media markets. It is not inherently a "blockchain" idea to sell off your time as ads in order to pay for your browser, and other folks are at least pretending to align their business model with user interests while building an information and attention economy (e.g., Steem)
- BrendanEich 9y ago