6 ms·

I love the irony in “You are not a product“ from a commercial product (open source, I know) designed to monetize surfing (aka pay-to-surf), as if this is what t

by onyva 8y ago

I love the irony in “You are not a product“ from a commercial product (open source, I know) designed to monetize surfing (aka pay-to-surf), as if this is what the internet is about. I think we should resist such an effort and stick with projects (not companies) that want to keep the internet as it was meant to be, ie Mozilla Firefox. No problem with monetization but I want a browser that puts me first, not a middleman that tries to profit from the trend to subvert the open culture of the internet, pretending they put my privacy first. It’s an excuse, not the main purpose of this browser.

akerro 8y ago
Because Mozilla is totally not a corporation. Brave makes usage of BAT and their ads optional and disabled by default.
- onyva 8y ago
  We've discussed this Mozilla is a "corporation" many times before, here and elsewhere. https://blog.mozilla.org/press/2005/08/mozilla-foundation-forms-new-organization-to-further-the-creation-of-free-open-source-internet-software-including-the-award-winning-mozilla-firefox-browser/ https://blog.mozilla.org/press/2005/08/mozilla-foundation-fo...
  - akerro 8y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation
    - ngokevin 8y ago
      I agree Mozilla is a corporation, despite its marketing and brand efforts, everything else is very corporate. It started out as a foundation with corporation-as-necessity, but no longer the case. They are able to distance themselves from ad money through Google, but it's the same. If they could make more profit and growth, they would choose to do so. A small example has twice been ads in the browser (now using local targeting), and if it was 100% a non-profit foundation goodie-goodie, would probably go with a default search engine like Duck Duck Go, but survival as a corporation prohibits otherwise. And I think that's totally okay, but I don't think we can pretend they aren't a corporation.
      - Yoric 8y ago
        Well, even foundations need to survive. Going Duck Duck Go by default would mean firing pretty much all the developers and letting Google win. Do you think it would be a good strategy?
        ngokevin 8y ago
        No. I mentioned "I think that's totally okay" and natural. My main point was only that Mozilla Corporation behaves as a corporation, internally and externally, not a non-profit foundation. They do have an external-facing mission / angle, but so does every other company.
- jhabdas 8y ago
  What makes you believe the guise of privacy as a right is anything more than a trick to gain network effect? If the rewards system doesn't make it out of beta, or worse, does and leads to adtech having an easier time profiling you, what we may end up with is more centralization around data collection—it just won't be as obvious. And with the move to Chromium It's time for me to bail on Brave. Because if Muon doesn't compete with Chromium we've simply inched closer to a closed loop system. Orfox here I come!
lgbr 8y ago
> not a middleman that tries to profit Brave doesn't profit directly from advertising revenue. BAT is completely separate. The point is, specifically, to remove the incentive for the current trend of stealing your privacy by offering an incentive to directly pay content creators.
eksemplar 8y ago
I think it’s worse than that, I mean, it’s anecdotal but I think their premise is flawed. Because I don’t think enough people are going to enable adds for it to ever be viable option for advertisers. I mean, their business case evolves around advertisers paying users to watch adds instead of paying Facebook or google. But Facebook only earns a few dollars per user per year, who in their right mind would turn off their adblocker for a few dollars? Probably not people that have an income which is attractive to advertisers... Then there is the part where they want users to pay for content, but that already exists with superior tech, lower middleman fees and better consumer safety. I know, I know, crypto will get there or whatever, but when is the last time an inferior option ever disrupted anything? One the other hand, if they didn’t put their premise/vision of a revolutionised web ahead of their users, then they might as well be working on Firefox.
- adwhit 8y ago
  > But Facebook only earns a few dollars per user per year, who in their right mind would turn off their adblocker for a few dollars? This is a good point and it is interesting to think about the economic logic of advertising. It seems to me the burden it places on it's viewers is far greater than the (often questionable) value it brings to the advertiser. A huge unaccounted-for externality. In fact, when you consider the huge psychological weight that a consumerist society places on it's citizens, and the attendant healthcare costs, you could easily make the case that even strictly in economic terms, advertising is a huge net negative, before even considering the social costs. How much does my city make from all the billboards everywhere? It can't be more than a few dollars per person. I'd happily pay that much more in tax to have them all removed.
  - proofbygazing 8y ago
    > A huge unaccounted-for externality. Not even close to the definition of an externality. Everybody involved in the transaction is there voluntarily.
    - drb91 8y ago
      Voluntarily implies some kind of consumer choice beyond “accept my terms or get the fuck off my site”. Not to mention... ads affect us all. You’re delusional if you think it can be neatly packaged into a transaction.
user812 8y ago
The fundamental question is who decides. Ideally the browser is the product, but not the user. For that, the browser needs to solve the question of the flow of money. Using Firefox makes you the product, because Mozilla monetizes you with selling you to Google. That is not a browser that "puts you first" or promotes the "open culture of the internet". Giving people the ability to chose whether they want to participate in the monetization makes Brave more of a browser that puts "you first". Besides that, Mozilla is basically a company, and their non-profit organization is basically a fig leaf. Even if you don't agree with this assumption, the browser is as commercialiced as any other project, as proven by Pocket, Google search partnership and Amazon affiliate links. The Brave browser also doesn't claim this is "what the internet is about". On the contrary, the default settings in Brave make the Web essentially non-commercial and ad-free. Finally and philosophically, there is no collective "we" you talk about, only users who are free to chose from a variety of browsers and products. Other than that, there is definitely some form of irony in the fact that the people on brave.com wear a cap with a corporate logo, but are implied as being free from corporate influence. The message would be more consistent if there were no logo on the cap, and one could argue this implies that Brave is at best a transition towards a better state.
- simias 8y ago
  >Ideally the browser is the product I disagree. I don't have anything against paid software but it's not the only possibility, a lot of the software I use are open source projects maintained by volunteers, not products. I ideologically refuse to consider that every piece of software is a product. Now regarding Firefox things are not really clear cut, Mozilla is effectively non-profit but clearly their well being (and the salaries of the people working for it) clearly revolves around their browser having a decent market share. The whole "selling you to Google" stems from that.
  - oblio 8y ago
    > I ideologically refuse to consider that every piece of software is a product. 1. Who pays for the hosting? How do they pay for it? 2. Who pays for the site development? How do they pay for it? 3. Who pays for the site content? How do they pay for it? The vast majority of sites out there are commercial products, in some forms or another. Even Wikipedia is, they're periodically begging for money. Since we have this problem that running websites costs money, how are they going to pay for it? The ad model is quite reviled by techies. What's the alternative? How do websites make money to keep running?
vladdanilov 8y ago
I find the irony in more prosaic details like a 2.1MB image [1] to show the new UI of "Secure, Fast & Private Web Browser" (for comparison optimized PNG8 is 351KB [2] and JPEG is 398KB [3]). [1] https://brave.com/new-brave-browser-release-available-for-general-download/images/a25he_image1.png https://brave.com/new-brave-browser-release-available-for-ge... [2] https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/3129436/47203976-b6c34c00-d38a-11e8-9980-f840e843c48b.png https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/3129436/47203976-b... [3] https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/3129436/47203978-b75be280-d38a-11e8-9993-37ef9de7484e.jpg https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/3129436/47203978-b...
drb91 8y ago
Firefox isn’t doing much to stem the online dependency on ads. We really need an alternative monetization system. The internet is only half functioning if we still require massive corporations to intermediate between us and content providers.
- Vinnl 8y ago
  It is doing a lot to stem the online dependency on tracking, however, which I think is far more important. DuckDuckGo monetises through as, and I have absolutely no problem with that.
  - drb91 8y ago
    Tracking doesn’t really impact my life, I’ve gotta say. Ads do. Does ddg offer a paid option?
    - Vinnl 8y ago
      Your specific tracking, perhaps not. Once it gets to a point where it influences election results in your country, or prevents you from getting insurance, etc., it does. But no, DDG doesn't offer a paid option, as far as I know. (I also doubt there would be a sufficient market for that.)
- jhabdas 8y ago
  That monetization system already exists and you'll know it when you see it referred to as 'cryptojacking' by the MSM. Just like Bitcoin was smeared as a tool for crime webmining will have an equally hard time gaining footing until public consciousness comes to its senses once they realize the most dangerous superstition.
trwx1 8y ago
The level of irony is even deeper. Brave is supposed to protect the privacy but in reality, their business model is about ads. It's like pedophiles giving advices on how to protect your kids from danger. Of course they know about it, and I wouldn't give my kids to them. Brave is essentially trying to become a mix between a pay-to-surf and an rogue ad replacement software. They have dozens of millions of dollars raised (= in debt), this is very big money to pay back at least 5 times. By definition, since they are an ad company, they are ok to block the trackers, just not the ones that affects them. For example, Brave doesn't block Yahoo & Bing ads and trackers, why ? Advertiser pays Microsoft Bing, who pays Yahoo, who pays DuckDuckGo, who pays Brave. To verify it, you can make a search on DuckDuckGo using Brave and check where the ads link point to by copy-pasting it ;) Of course technically they could block these trackers but they are never going to do it. The is the main revenue source of Brave, and this is one of the big reasons why DuckDuckGo is growing fast. Monetize your search history like the old school toolbars. Looks like they forgot to disclose this little conflict of interest. If you check the commit history, there are really funny discoveries (woops adobe.com is whitelisted) https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/issues/10020 https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/issues/10020 Almost all their commits in some other repos: https://github.com/brave/browser-android-tabs/commits/master https://github.com/brave/browser-android-tabs/commits/master are around analytics and tracking installs. Good marketing speech, shady business.
- Vinnl 8y ago
  Sorry, are you saying that Brave is the main impetus behind DuckDuckGo growth? I find that hard to believe, given the minimal market share of Brave...
  - trwx1 8y ago
    What I say is that these Yahoo ads are certainly the biggest revenue they have now before they start randomly replacing all competitors
_Understated_ 8y ago
Maybe it's just me but why do we have to make the web about other people making money? In the 90s there were plenty of websites ran by hobbyists and amateurs and even professionals who did it for the joy of their craft and even today there are loads. Maybe I am being overly harsh but are we saying that a browser like Brave is required these days? I don't think the web would be worse-off if all commercial sites disappeared: There will still be enough hobbyists, amateurs and pro's with $10-a-month blogs to provide whatever information I need. For those that have more in depth content, videos, films and so on we already have subscription models for those and I can pick and choose what I want (I don't subscribe to anything other than Pluralsight tbh). Why do we have to assume that every site on the web is a commercial entity with staff and overheads and that the web will collapse if we don't allow adverts? The web worked perfectly well without all this tracking and abuse and by using browsers like Brave we are saying that we are ok with it.
- user812 8y ago
  Who is this "we" you are talking about? It's not like the web/society consists of one collectivist "blob" that speaks in unison.
  - _Understated_ 8y ago
    "We" is merely a term to denote "users" in general: I'm not saying we all think alike but I do believe that "we" as web users have a choice to make. Do we want a web where everything is gated and requires micropayments or would we rather use the web without tracking and micropayments?
- tomhoward 8y ago
  There's a pretty hard limit to the volume and style of content that can be produced by amateurs and hobbyists. For a start, it's limited to people who are already rich enough to have the time to spare. But certain types of content - deep investigative journalism for example - should always cost significant amounts of money. You want the best people in the world at that craft to be able to spend as long as takes, and travel to wherever they need to go, to uncover the truth in a story. This kind of work plays a crucial role in society, by keeping a watch on the political, legal and corporate worlds and helping to expose corruption and abuses of power. It's likely already the case that too little good investigative journalism is being done these days. We should be looking for ways to have more of it, not less.
LiterallyDoge 8y ago
It seems like giving you the ability to decide people to support when you want to (if you ever do) is fair game. I don't think I see any inconsistency here.

by onyva 8y ago

akerro 8y ago

Because Mozilla is totally not a corporation. Brave makes usage of BAT and their ads optional and disabled by default.

onyva 8y ago
We've discussed this Mozilla is a "corporation" many times before, here and elsewhere. https://blog.mozilla.org/press/2005/08/mozilla-foundation-forms-new-organization-to-further-the-creation-of-free-open-source-internet-software-including-the-award-winning-mozilla-firefox-browser/ https://blog.mozilla.org/press/2005/08/mozilla-foundation-fo...
- akerro 8y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation
  - ngokevin 8y ago
    I agree Mozilla is a corporation, despite its marketing and brand efforts, everything else is very corporate. It started out as a foundation with corporation-as-necessity, but no longer the case. They are able to distance themselves from ad money through Google, but it's the same. If they could make more profit and growth, they would choose to do so. A small example has twice been ads in the browser (now using local targeting), and if it was 100% a non-profit foundation goodie-goodie, would probably go with a default search engine like Duck Duck Go, but survival as a corporation prohibits otherwise. And I think that's totally okay, but I don't think we can pretend they aren't a corporation.
    - Yoric 8y ago
      Well, even foundations need to survive. Going Duck Duck Go by default would mean firing pretty much all the developers and letting Google win. Do you think it would be a good strategy?
      - ngokevin 8y ago
        No. I mentioned "I think that's totally okay" and natural. My main point was only that Mozilla Corporation behaves as a corporation, internally and externally, not a non-profit foundation. They do have an external-facing mission / angle, but so does every other company.
jhabdas 8y ago
What makes you believe the guise of privacy as a right is anything more than a trick to gain network effect? If the rewards system doesn't make it out of beta, or worse, does and leads to adtech having an easier time profiling you, what we may end up with is more centralization around data collection—it just won't be as obvious. And with the move to Chromium It's time for me to bail on Brave. Because if Muon doesn't compete with Chromium we've simply inched closer to a closed loop system. Orfox here I come!

lgbr 8y ago

> not a middleman that tries to profit Brave doesn't profit directly from advertising revenue. BAT is completely separate. The point is, specifically, to remove the incentive for the current trend of stealing your privacy by offering an incentive to directly pay content creators.

eksemplar 8y ago

I think it’s worse than that, I mean, it’s anecdotal but I think their premise is flawed. Because I don’t think enough people are going to enable adds for it to ever be viable option for advertisers. I mean, their business case evolves around advertisers paying users to watch adds instead of paying Facebook or google. But Facebook only earns a few dollars per user per year, who in their right mind would turn off their adblocker for a few dollars? Probably not people that have an income which is attractive to advertisers... Then there is the part where they want users to pay for content, but that already exists with superior tech, lower middleman fees and better consumer safety. I know, I know, crypto will get there or whatever, but when is the last time an inferior option ever disrupted anything? One the other hand, if they didn’t put their premise/vision of a revolutionised web ahead of their users, then they might as well be working on Firefox.

adwhit 8y ago
> But Facebook only earns a few dollars per user per year, who in their right mind would turn off their adblocker for a few dollars? This is a good point and it is interesting to think about the economic logic of advertising. It seems to me the burden it places on it's viewers is far greater than the (often questionable) value it brings to the advertiser. A huge unaccounted-for externality. In fact, when you consider the huge psychological weight that a consumerist society places on it's citizens, and the attendant healthcare costs, you could easily make the case that even strictly in economic terms, advertising is a huge net negative, before even considering the social costs. How much does my city make from all the billboards everywhere? It can't be more than a few dollars per person. I'd happily pay that much more in tax to have them all removed.
- proofbygazing 8y ago
  > A huge unaccounted-for externality. Not even close to the definition of an externality. Everybody involved in the transaction is there voluntarily.
  - drb91 8y ago
    Voluntarily implies some kind of consumer choice beyond “accept my terms or get the fuck off my site”. Not to mention... ads affect us all. You’re delusional if you think it can be neatly packaged into a transaction.

user812 8y ago

The fundamental question is who decides. Ideally the browser is the product, but not the user. For that, the browser needs to solve the question of the flow of money. Using Firefox makes you the product, because Mozilla monetizes you with selling you to Google. That is not a browser that "puts you first" or promotes the "open culture of the internet". Giving people the ability to chose whether they want to participate in the monetization makes Brave more of a browser that puts "you first". Besides that, Mozilla is basically a company, and their non-profit organization is basically a fig leaf. Even if you don't agree with this assumption, the browser is as commercialiced as any other project, as proven by Pocket, Google search partnership and Amazon affiliate links. The Brave browser also doesn't claim this is "what the internet is about". On the contrary, the default settings in Brave make the Web essentially non-commercial and ad-free. Finally and philosophically, there is no collective "we" you talk about, only users who are free to chose from a variety of browsers and products. Other than that, there is definitely some form of irony in the fact that the people on brave.com wear a cap with a corporate logo, but are implied as being free from corporate influence. The message would be more consistent if there were no logo on the cap, and one could argue this implies that Brave is at best a transition towards a better state.

simias 8y ago
>Ideally the browser is the product I disagree. I don't have anything against paid software but it's not the only possibility, a lot of the software I use are open source projects maintained by volunteers, not products. I ideologically refuse to consider that every piece of software is a product. Now regarding Firefox things are not really clear cut, Mozilla is effectively non-profit but clearly their well being (and the salaries of the people working for it) clearly revolves around their browser having a decent market share. The whole "selling you to Google" stems from that.
- oblio 8y ago
  > I ideologically refuse to consider that every piece of software is a product. 1. Who pays for the hosting? How do they pay for it? 2. Who pays for the site development? How do they pay for it? 3. Who pays for the site content? How do they pay for it? The vast majority of sites out there are commercial products, in some forms or another. Even Wikipedia is, they're periodically begging for money. Since we have this problem that running websites costs money, how are they going to pay for it? The ad model is quite reviled by techies. What's the alternative? How do websites make money to keep running?

vladdanilov 8y ago

I find the irony in more prosaic details like a 2.1MB image [1] to show the new UI of "Secure, Fast & Private Web Browser" (for comparison optimized PNG8 is 351KB [2] and JPEG is 398KB [3]). [1] https://brave.com/new-brave-browser-release-available-for-general-download/images/a25he_image1.png https://brave.com/new-brave-browser-release-available-for-ge... [2] https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/3129436/47203976-b6c34c00-d38a-11e8-9980-f840e843c48b.png https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/3129436/47203976-b... [3] https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/3129436/47203978-b75be280-d38a-11e8-9993-37ef9de7484e.jpg https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/3129436/47203978-b...

drb91 8y ago

Firefox isn’t doing much to stem the online dependency on ads. We really need an alternative monetization system. The internet is only half functioning if we still require massive corporations to intermediate between us and content providers.

Vinnl 8y ago
It is doing a lot to stem the online dependency on tracking, however, which I think is far more important. DuckDuckGo monetises through as, and I have absolutely no problem with that.
- drb91 8y ago
  Tracking doesn’t really impact my life, I’ve gotta say. Ads do. Does ddg offer a paid option?
  - Vinnl 8y ago
    Your specific tracking, perhaps not. Once it gets to a point where it influences election results in your country, or prevents you from getting insurance, etc., it does. But no, DDG doesn't offer a paid option, as far as I know. (I also doubt there would be a sufficient market for that.)
jhabdas 8y ago
That monetization system already exists and you'll know it when you see it referred to as 'cryptojacking' by the MSM. Just like Bitcoin was smeared as a tool for crime webmining will have an equally hard time gaining footing until public consciousness comes to its senses once they realize the most dangerous superstition.

trwx1 8y ago

The level of irony is even deeper. Brave is supposed to protect the privacy but in reality, their business model is about ads. It's like pedophiles giving advices on how to protect your kids from danger. Of course they know about it, and I wouldn't give my kids to them. Brave is essentially trying to become a mix between a pay-to-surf and an rogue ad replacement software. They have dozens of millions of dollars raised (= in debt), this is very big money to pay back at least 5 times. By definition, since they are an ad company, they are ok to block the trackers, just not the ones that affects them. For example, Brave doesn't block Yahoo & Bing ads and trackers, why ? Advertiser pays Microsoft Bing, who pays Yahoo, who pays DuckDuckGo, who pays Brave. To verify it, you can make a search on DuckDuckGo using Brave and check where the ads link point to by copy-pasting it ;) Of course technically they could block these trackers but they are never going to do it. The is the main revenue source of Brave, and this is one of the big reasons why DuckDuckGo is growing fast. Monetize your search history like the old school toolbars. Looks like they forgot to disclose this little conflict of interest. If you check the commit history, there are really funny discoveries (woops adobe.com is whitelisted) https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/issues/10020 https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/issues/10020 Almost all their commits in some other repos: https://github.com/brave/browser-android-tabs/commits/master https://github.com/brave/browser-android-tabs/commits/master are around analytics and tracking installs. Good marketing speech, shady business.

Vinnl 8y ago
Sorry, are you saying that Brave is the main impetus behind DuckDuckGo growth? I find that hard to believe, given the minimal market share of Brave...
- trwx1 8y ago
  What I say is that these Yahoo ads are certainly the biggest revenue they have now before they start randomly replacing all competitors

_Understated_ 8y ago

Maybe it's just me but why do we have to make the web about other people making money? In the 90s there were plenty of websites ran by hobbyists and amateurs and even professionals who did it for the joy of their craft and even today there are loads. Maybe I am being overly harsh but are we saying that a browser like Brave is required these days? I don't think the web would be worse-off if all commercial sites disappeared: There will still be enough hobbyists, amateurs and pro's with $10-a-month blogs to provide whatever information I need. For those that have more in depth content, videos, films and so on we already have subscription models for those and I can pick and choose what I want (I don't subscribe to anything other than Pluralsight tbh). Why do we have to assume that every site on the web is a commercial entity with staff and overheads and that the web will collapse if we don't allow adverts? The web worked perfectly well without all this tracking and abuse and by using browsers like Brave we are saying that we are ok with it.

user812 8y ago
Who is this "we" you are talking about? It's not like the web/society consists of one collectivist "blob" that speaks in unison.
- _Understated_ 8y ago
  "We" is merely a term to denote "users" in general: I'm not saying we all think alike but I do believe that "we" as web users have a choice to make. Do we want a web where everything is gated and requires micropayments or would we rather use the web without tracking and micropayments?
tomhoward 8y ago
There's a pretty hard limit to the volume and style of content that can be produced by amateurs and hobbyists. For a start, it's limited to people who are already rich enough to have the time to spare. But certain types of content - deep investigative journalism for example - should always cost significant amounts of money. You want the best people in the world at that craft to be able to spend as long as takes, and travel to wherever they need to go, to uncover the truth in a story. This kind of work plays a crucial role in society, by keeping a watch on the political, legal and corporate worlds and helping to expose corruption and abuses of power. It's likely already the case that too little good investigative journalism is being done these days. We should be looking for ways to have more of it, not less.

LiterallyDoge 8y ago

It seems like giving you the ability to decide people to support when you want to (if you ever do) is fair game. I don't think I see any inconsistency here.