26 ms·

Wikipedia Is Now a Brave Verified Publisher

281 points by yagodragon 7y ago

seren 7y ago
I had never read the Brave ad model before. They want to display ads while respecting user privacy, which is nice from a user point of view, but do advertisers actually want that rather than being able to target 35-40 years old in Ohio that are using shaving products twice a week ?
- dx87 7y ago
  They'd probably prefer targeted advertising, but if they have to choose between too many or too few people seeing their ad, they'd probably pick too many.
  - jonathansampson 7y ago
    Generally speaking, Advertisers aim to get better value for their buck, so to speak. In the early days of online advertising, it was not uncommon to pay for impressions that may or may not be set before the eyes of a relevant audience. Around 2009 the process of Real-Time Bidding was created, and advertisers began to get better value, but at the expense of an unethical auction process that took place for each ad-slot on a page. With Brave Ads, advertisers know that they're reaching a party that is interested (Brave Ads are opt-in). Advertisers know that attrition of value due to fraud and middle-men is reduced in our model. Users know that they don't have to sacrifice privacy or security to participate, and that on-device machine-learning progressively delivers a better experience over time.
- sigmar 7y ago
  Brave ads are targeted through on-device matching. I'm not sure how well this will scale tho. Described in "Relevance" here: https://brave.com/brave-ads-launch/ https://brave.com/brave-ads-launch/
  - jonathansampson 7y ago
    Correct. Once a user opts-in, machine-learning bits on the user's device take over and begin to study browsing habits and interests. These ML bits then decide what types of ads are likely to be of interest to the user. What are your scaling concerns? I'd love to hear more!
    - hobofan 7y ago
      I would assume that once a lot of advertisers are on the platform the ad catalogue can quickly grow to the size of GBs, which would be unfeasible to hold on smartphones.
      - jonathansampson 7y ago
        Catalogs are regional, and reflect only active campaigns. So far, the file hovers around 3 MB when compressed. We are able to optimize size even further, as needed. It will always remain small enough to be downloaded easily.
      - lukemulks 7y ago
        The catalog contains edge-cached URLs and metadata for the ads. The size remains small, as we're not compressing down images, rich media, video or other assets in the catalog. (I work at Brave, and am on the team bringing the ad platform to market)
        jammygit 7y ago
        Could you clarify a tiny bit? I’m not sure I follow. If you are not including images or video in the ads, does that mean that you are downloading them at view time from somewhere, or that the ads have no images or video? Also, what are edge cached urls?
        jonathansampson 7y ago
        Ads first appear as OS notifications on your desktop. This notification displays plain-text content from the regional ad catalog. You get 70% of the ad revenue at this point. If you click the notification, Brave opens a tab in the Brave browser and navigates to the advertisement location. At this point, the ad can load images, video, etc. Important to note, however, that ad pages are not given any special treatment in the Brave browser. They are subject to the same privacy/security restrictions on all other pages. Third parties are severely limited, if not entirely prevented from engaging in the session.
- jonathansampson 7y ago
  Brave developer here. Great question! Brave Ads are entirely opt-in, and work via on-device machine-learning. The machine-learning bits study your browsing habits in a private, non-leaky manner. Once a day, your device downloads an aggregate catalog of many ad options to be studied locally. If/when an ad is found that fits your interests (as inferred by your browsing habits), the ad is displayed as an OS notification and 70% of the ad revenue is deposited into your in-situ wallet. So on the topic of targeting, Brave is able to deliver a better experience for Advertisers and Users, without the need to leak user information across the Web. The on-device ML bits learn about their user over time, delivering a better experience with maturity. I hope that helps!
  - seren 7y ago
    Thanks for chiming in. So from the FAQ : https://brave.com/faq/#all-ads-blocked https://brave.com/faq/#all-ads-blocked > Each ad request is anonymous, and exposes only a small subset of the user’s preferences and intent signals to prevent “fingerprinting” the user by a possibly unique set of tags. It means that advertisers still get some feedback on the "intent signals" of the users that have seen their ads ? So it is private in the sense you cannot be uniquely identified but some of your intents are somewhat leaky ?
    - jonathansampson 7y ago
      Not quite, I think that FAQ item needs to be updated. The model works like this: The user opts-in to Brave Rewards/Ads. This kicks off a machine-learning model that begins to study the user's habits and interests. On a daily basis, the user downloads a regional ad catalog (as to other Brave users in their region). This catalog contains numerous ad options, which your device studies for relevance. If/when your device identifies an ad within the catalog that might be of interest to you, it displays the ad as an OS notification. At this time, 70% of the ad revenue is deposited into your in-situ wallet. At this point, the user has made absolutely no contact with an advertiser. If the user chooses to click on the ad, it is opened in its own tab in the Brave Browser. This tab, like all others, is subject to Brave's default security/privacy settings. No third party trackers, etc. The advertiser will know that you are interested in their product/service, because you clicked the ad. But no other information about you is given to them; only what can be inferred from standard first-party browsing online. Brave aims to keep your data private, and on-device. It is never leaked to us, or anybody else. You are sovereign over your data, and you decide with whom it is shared. That's our goal, always.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- barnabee 7y ago
  There are two acceptable ad models for me: Paying, if it goes [almost] entirely to the publisher, not to see them Not paying anything to anyone, and still not seeing them (ad blocking)
msla 7y ago
This apparently just means that Brave users can now donate BATs (Brave Attention Tokes) to Wikipedia using an icon in their address bar. What the exchange rate is between BATs and USDs is left artfully unstated.
- eganist 7y ago
  For what it's worth: https://www.coinbase.com/price/basic-attention-token https://www.coinbase.com/price/basic-attention-token
  - nexuist 7y ago
    Wait, that's actually kind of really good!? Out of 50,000 views, if 0.01% donated (500 BATs) that translates to $85! Maybe my expectations are low but that's more than enough to cover server costs for a month. It certainly doesn't pay rent but it's better than not making any money at all.
    - BrendanEich 7y ago
      Wikipedia relies on donations, this adds another method of donating, automatically and regularly, plus tips on top. In the nonprofit space you don’t turn down more and easier ways to donate.
intopieces 7y ago
I don’t want BATs and I don’t want ads. I want to be able to donate to content creators through Apple Pay instantly.
- mayneack 7y ago
  I don't see why it would matter what form you're paying the creator in. I suppose in the absence of an apple pay direct link, you'd have to just use apple pay to pay for BAT. I think there's some sort of "re-fill $X/month" feature, but I can't seem to find it. https://brave.com/funding-your-brave-wallet/ https://brave.com/funding-your-brave-wallet/
  - vorpalhex 7y ago
    ...Why not skip the middleman and just fund websites with, you know, USD? Obviously in the case of Wikipedia, we can donate (and please do so!) but I'd gladly throw $0.20 at a website to not get ads for a day or something.
    - mayneack 7y ago
      Is there a different way to automatically pay based on how long I actually spend on a site?
      - jonathansampson 7y ago
        That's the default behavior, known as Auto Contribute in Brave. If 10% of your time is spent on Wikipedia, they'll get 10% of your monthly budget. You can contribute in this manner, or/also via tips (which are one-off contributions). You can also set a fixed percentage for the property, and set it as a recurring contribution each month.
        mayneack 7y ago
        Yeah, that's one reason I use brave. The parent was suggesting that they wanted to do something like this without Brave, but I don't know of a real competitor.
JustFinishedBSG 7y ago
Wikipedia joins Brave "Protection Scheme" you mean.
- admax88q 7y ago
  It could only be considered a protection scheme if you were already relying on ads which Brave blocked. Wikipedia does not run ads.
  - RandomBacon 7y ago
    > Wikipedia does not run ads. Most other websites do. Replacing their ads and running different ads to make money with is unethical. Toolbars in the early 2000s that did that were considered malware.
- lern_too_spel 7y ago
  Not even that. Wikipedia doesn't show ads, so this announcement isn't saying that Wikipedia will automatically get BATs from Brave using visitors. It's saying Wikipedia has a verified BAT wallet that a tiny fraction of users of a browser with almost no users can donate their worthless tokens to. I'd be surprised if Wikipedia can buy a USB cable with the amount of money they get from this. This is just a worthless PR post from a slimy company.
  - ashleshbiradar 7y ago
    well brave has like 6 million users as of now, so its not "almost no users"
zargon 7y ago
I really like what Brave is doing. I wish it was built on Firefox instead of Chromium. I just don't see myself leaving Firefox without major upheaval in the browser space.
- balaksakrionon 7y ago
  agreed, everytime i am in the settings and elsewhere i realize i'm using chrome and hate myself for a moment
- jchw 7y ago
  IIRC it was actually originally Firefox. I wonder what exactly made them switch?
  - jonathansampson 7y ago
    This is correct. Note that both of our founders are from the Firefox team originally. Our CTO, Brian Bondy, originally built the first Brave prototype on the Gecko engine. Unfortunately, after much testing, it was clear that a modified Chromium would be the better route forward. You can imagine this was not a decision taken lightly, as both of these individuals have lived and breathed Gecko/Mozilla for years prior.
    - orblivion 7y ago
      Would the story be different with Quantum now?
      - BrendanEich 7y ago
        No, the decision was based on a spreadsheet with many items concerned with web compatibility, HTML5 DRM plugin free-as-in-beer, extension support, etc. Chromium without Google tracking is dominant, this is just a fact (it will change some day; not soon). The best way to counter this is not to die on the wrong hill (engine wars) right now -- it is to go a level up and fight for privacy and user sovereignty where Google cannot defend: blocking all tracking, paying users 70% of user private ad revenue.
VChhabra 7y ago
Hey All - Brave BD rep here ... let me know if I can help in any way.
- smsm42 7y ago
  I hope other Wikimedia properties, like Wikidata and Commons, get added too.
trpc 7y ago
1. Build a theme over Chromium 2. Add your ads and tracking system over it 3. Brand it as "X Browser" This is not a browser, this is a skin over Chrome with a business model that's built over a crypto scam. Your army of online shills and your attempts to connect yourselves with reputable online entities such as Wikipedia won't change that fact.
- songshuu 7y ago
  Eye roll on this take. If you have a better business model for content producers on the internet feel free to build it.
  - thefj 7y ago
    How about the business model the content producers choose for themselves, instead of one that is forced on them by a rent seeking company with good PR? If I have ads on my site, I have no interest in someone replacing them and taking a cut.
    - Ajedi32 7y ago
      Would you rather someone remove them and not pay you at all? Because right now that seems to be the direction we're heading in.
    - boring_twenties 7y ago
      How does your site deal with ad blocking users? Do you block them from your website? Isn't it kind of nice that at least some of these users, despite not wanting your ads, still want to find a way to pay you, even going to the point of installing an alternate browser for the opportunity to do so? And in any case, you could always block Brave users from your site if you wanted to. How's anything being forced on you here?
      - thefj 7y ago
        Let's say I put out a cookie jar out with a sign that says "Take a cookie, leave a dollar". You come by and take a cookie and leave a piece of string. You're not improving my business model. The Brave thing is just a weird way to feel better about breaking an implicit social contract.
miguelmota 7y ago
Why doesn't brave adopt a stable coin like DAI for donations? Tokens are pretty volatile and it would suck for the publisher to lose money because they didn't cash out immediately. That won't be a problem though with DAI. https://www.coinbase.com/price/dai https://www.coinbase.com/price/dai
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- lukemulks 7y ago
  (Brave employee) The BAT is used for more than contributions. The token has a distinct use case as the unit of account for attention and services on the platform. https://basicattentiontoken.org/faq/#representation https://basicattentiontoken.org/faq/#representation
  - miguelmota 7y ago
    Thanks. I wished people would explain that instead of downvoting.
    - lukemulks 7y ago
      Glad it was helpful.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
lalaland1125 7y ago
Can anyone explain why Brave uses BAT? As far as I can tell Brave would be much better if they used USD instead.
- miguelmota 7y ago
  Agree, Brave should use DAI instead.
- songshuu 7y ago
  The tldr on that one is banking laws and a whole lotta users that aren't US citizens.
- Kiro 7y ago
  Because they wanted to do an ICO.
- lukemulks 7y ago
  https://basicattentiontoken.org/faq/#why-not-bitcoin https://basicattentiontoken.org/faq/#why-not-bitcoin
  - lalaland1125 7y ago
    That explains why they can't use Bitcoin, but it doesn't explain why they can't use USD + a database.
    - BrendanEich 7y ago
      USD does not work in all regions, believe it or not. Moreover it cannot be sent without an intermediary that is heavily licensed and regulated. Contrary to maximalists, we do aim in our Apollo phase for BAT moving on-blockchain with anonymity and low fees. Current blockchains and USD do neither
  - martindale 7y ago
    This explanation shows a painfully shallow understanding of Bitcoin, if not an intentional bias. Bitcoin is capable of doing everything Brave would need, and they've been shown how to accomplish their goals multiple times by numerous disparate parties. I'm increasingly convinced Brave's leadership is opposed to the idea of self-determination, and is playing politics by making up these kinds of excuses.
bilucy 7y ago
BAT token is tradable on exchanges, and price floats and is unstable. Donation receivers need to worry about exchange rates risk - https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/basic-attention-token https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/basic-attention-token How about USD or USD stable currencies for this?
- Kiro 7y ago
  BAT is Brave's own token that they did an ICO for so I doubt they would move to something else.
- songshuu 7y ago
  Does BAT fluctuate that much? Lately I see one of two things : 1. The market is up, BAT loses value because BTC sucks all the air out of the room with n00b investors. 2. The market is down, BAT loses value because BTC valuation scares off investors. Otherwise, Brave/BAT team can announce features & partnerships all day long and the price literally never budges.
  - bilucy 7y ago
    Exactly it. An ICO was done and it is openly traded, there is going to be fluctuation whether up/down it is still an FX risk for receivers of BAT. Until we see more goods and services payable with BAT, it will a problem
- Tinfoilhat666 7y ago
  Would it be possible to fork Brave and change it to use US Tether, Libra or some other stable coin? Even better: fork it, create your own cryptocurrency like BAT, make ICO and become a millionaire! There is no reason everybody to use BAT.
  - zucker42 7y ago
    Not tether. Tether is super sketchy and potentially a scam.
- buboard 7y ago
snek 7y ago
Does brave still suck up money from people even when the site owner hasn't set up brave payments?
- dymk 7y ago
  And not just that, they’ve moved/are moving to a model of displaying their own ads instead, which are invariably for some scammy crypto-of-the-day which even FB and Google ban from their ad platforms
  - jonathansampson 7y ago
    Sorry, I'm not sure what you're referring to. Brave has 2 ad-models (one still in the works). First, the User Model. In this model, user's must first opt-in to participate. If/when they do, advertisements are shown (at a user-controllable rate) as OS notifications. When a notification is shown, 70% of the revenue is deposited into the user's wallet. The second model is the Publisher Model; this is in the works now. Under this model, Publishers will be able to opt-in the system as well, and have ads displayed on their pages. Under this model, publishers receive 70%, and the user receives 15%. But both models require consent before any ads are displayed.
    - dymk 7y ago
      We'll see how long that lasts once the VC money runs out. Blocking ads and displaying your own certainly is an "ad replacement" model though, and websites that don't want to participate have no choice.
      - jonathansampson 7y ago
        Ads are being blocked, already, on hundreds of millions of devices. Brave users are usually former users of ad-blocking extensions in Chrome and Firefox. As such, these users were beyond the advertising system, far out of reach of Advertisers or Publishers. Brave changes this. Brave brings security and privacy minded folks back into the system by offering a better deal for all parties. Users get paid without giving up data, Advertisers get better value for their spend. And Publishers don't have to weigh their sites down with third-party scripts to monetize content.
JohnTHaller 7y ago
We signed up for Brave's setup at PortableApps.com after a few users asked about it. They hold your last 90 days in escrow, so you can find out how successful it is once you sign up. We were looking at around 10 cents a day for a bit under a million monthly users for that timeframe over the summer. And we can't even access it since Brave only works with one crypto provider and they aren't licensed in New York. The process was also pretty buggy and the magic link email login was clunky/kinda broken. https://portableapps.com/node/60580 https://portableapps.com/node/60580
- jonathansampson 7y ago
  Uphold is working hard to acquire the bitlicense for New York. They shared on Twitter earlier this month that they hope to have this resolved soon. It's worth noting that Creators also have a referral program whereby $5 in BAT can be earned for each user brought to the Brave platform. brave.com/refer Thank you for your incredible patience and participation. We hope to see positive developments on the bitlicense front soon. Please do let us know if there is ever anything we can do for you in the interim.
  - xur17 7y ago
    Are there any plans to get rid of uphold on the publisher side and allow external wallets? It was a huge turn off to me when I signed up.
    - BrendanEich 7y ago
      We need a regulated entity to do directed (tips, recurring), user-anonymous, off-chain transactions, and to comply with OFAC and other hard regulations. We can't do it ourselves. Wallet is the least of the issue, even if the publisher were willing to take BAT. Our future phase (Apollo) blockchain work will move more txns on-chain but not solve all regulatory problems. No blockchain can do that unless you are using p2p directly, and then on the current big chains you don't have anonymity or low fees. This may change, we're working on it.
solarkraft 7y ago
So finally Brave doesn't just take the money people thought they gave Wikipedia?
jammygit 7y ago
How come more websites do not accept brave payments? If I had a website, what is the process required to begin accepting them? Edit: typo
- Ayesh 7y ago
  You have to be a verified publisher. There was a whole story about Tom Scott (English YouTuber) rightfully tweeting about it. Brave changed themselves after to not collect donations for unverified publishers.
- BrendanEich 7y ago
  Sign up at https://publishers.basicattentiontoken.org/ https://publishers.basicattentiontoken.org/.
xacky 7y ago
Wikipedia hates cryptocurrencies they constantly delete their articles even Bitcoin was denied an article at one point. I feel Wikipedia is violating their own conflict of interest policies with this.
- the_duke 7y ago
  Please back that up with some references. It should be easy by linking to the respective edits.
  - xacky 7y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:General_sanctions/Blockchain_and_cryptocurrencies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:General_sanctions/Bl... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=cryptocurrency&prefix=Wikipedia%3AArticles+for+deletion%2F&fulltext=Search+archives&fulltext=Search&ns0=1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=cryptocu... Major cryptocurrencies deleted include Cardano, Chainlink, IOTA and Lisk. Also the Wikipedia admin David Gerard runs an anti cryptocurrency blog.
    - BrendanEich 7y ago
      David is quite a character. I did not know he was a wp admin. Brave has tons of verified publishers, see https://batgrowth.com/ https://batgrowth.com/. Our verifying a site or channel does not thereby endorse all or any of its content. As noted elsewhere here, we aim to distribute if not decentralize verification so it is even more censorship resistant.
buboard 7y ago
- do you plan to have a simple password instead of email link? - are there any brave banners i can use to promote brave? - will u provide a command line tool to verify websites? - why are referrals tied to channels instead of account? - will you expand to micropayments? - will brave always block ads everywhere or will you switch to blocking only on verified sites? Some form if instant payment is sorely needed. I hope regulators can catch up with reality , or else maybe brave should move to another country ( it s also comical to witness the hostility of HN towards brave. Are we full of google shills here? )
- _corym 7y ago
  (disclaimer engineer @ brave on creators team) > do you plan to have a simple password instead of email link? security gave the A-okay to give users an option to be able to stay signed in for 30 days. soon you will be able to check a box to stay signed in. > are there any brave banners i can use to promote brave? https://brave.com/assets-for-creators/ https://brave.com/assets-for-creators/ > will u provide a command line tool to verify websites? not in the foreseeable future. we have had some discussions allowing keybase as a trusted connection and mark any properties they have verified as verified in brave as well. we might have more news on that front in the future. > why are referrals tied to channels instead of account? very good question, this is a symptom of tech debt. we're hoping to move it over to the account very soon > will you expand to micropayments? we're discussing more ways to spend your BAT and that's all I'll say about that :) > will brave always block ads everywhere or will you switch to blocking only on verified sites? brave will block 3rd party ads, in the future we will be introducing publisher ads which will allow websites to define sections of their site to for Brave to insert local privacy-preserving advertisements. the publishers get 70% of the revenue and users receive 30%.
  - true_religion 7y ago
    Why do users receive 30% of revenue? They are the ones being advertised to.
- eduren 7y ago
  I think the hostility seems focused in two areas. * Brave browser still being chromium under the hood. It's not the worst thing in the world, but there's plenty of sound technical/ideological reasons to be against a browser engine monoculture * A (healthy IMO) skepticism of cryptocurrency backed projects Do you think those concerns are irrelevant? I find it funny that you accuse HN commenters of being Google shills (my experience is quite the opposite). Brave skepticism is not automatically pro-Google.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
kylehotchkiss 7y ago
I switched from Chrome to Brave this week after getting overwhelmed with some of Google's recent design decisions on Chrome. The web inspector and yubikey support in Brave made the transition super easy. The adblocking works about the same as ublock did for me in Chrome so the browsing experience feels similar. Great work Brave team on giving Chrome users a privacy-friendly option to easily switch to.
- TremendousJudge 7y ago
  If you are still using chromium you're still part of the problem
  - BrendanEich 7y ago
    Same for oxygen breathed by bad and good alike. Or tools, where the details and how the tool is used make problems or solutions, depending.
RonaldSchleifer 7y ago
That's interesting and also essentially nullifies Brave's credibility as some kind of privacy browser. Either they are ignorantly unaware or they are complicit in supporting wikipedia, one of the many digital organizations that have in the last years gone full on dystopian censorship thought police, even if it is not apparent to the casual observer. Case in point beyond just their close relationship and integration into censorious and authoritarian Google and Youtube, look for a link to the official government report on the definitely not muslim Bataclan attack in Paris, which details the gruesome slaughter, torture, disfigurement, dismemberment, and torment the attackers perpetrated upon their victims; which was all of course withheld from the public until it was forced into the light by the court case. You will not find a link to the report in spite of it being out for many months now, and you will be unsuccessful at adding a link to the report, let alone highlighting the brutal descriptions from the several hundred pages long report, somewhere in the wikipedia page. It's full on censorship, and the most pernicious and nefarious and sick part of this digital censorship is that deletion, shadow banning, banning, or simply colluding across organizations to erase someone's digital personality and identity goes basically unnoticed by the general public that is none the wiser that someone was ushered off to the digital gulag or digital mass grave ... pooof ... that comment, information, person is gone, with not trace and no accountability or transparency.
RandomBacon 7y ago
I understan Wikipedia does not have ads, but other websites do. In the early 2000s, toolbars that replaced a website's ads with different ads were considered malware. Instead of the website that bears the cost of delivering content getting the money, the browser is now getting the money. How is Brave Browser different in this regard than those malware toolbars?
- cameronbrown 7y ago
  The only difference is that consumers have agreed to let the browser do this.
  - RandomBacon 7y ago
    How do we know that all the consumers realize the browser is doing this? How do we know all consumers with those toolbars didn't know? I imagine those consumers also "agree" to website Terms of Service that don't allow this. I wonder if websites will fight back, closing accounts or doing more to stop people who use adblockers or Brave.
    - anderber 7y ago
      In Brave a user has to actively go to their settings and turn on ads. It's turned off by default.
      - RandomBacon 7y ago
        I hope the default never flips.
    - cameronbrown 7y ago
      > I wonder if websites will fight back, closing accounts or doing more to stop people who use adblockers or Brave. My personal belief is that websites are free to track users as much as they want, but users are free to respond however they want. If it becomes an arms race, so be it, but I think in the end the result will be adtech finally having to fix itself which is a very good thing.
woodandsteel 7y ago
Lots of specific comments here about Brave, pro and con. I would like to explain where I think it fits in the larger scheme of things. There is broad agreement that the web is deeply broken, with all sorts of bad consequences, because of how web sites get their money from advertisements and selling data. Now the only way this is going to get fixed, as far as I can tell, is for someone to come up with an alternative financial model that publishers will actually adopt. There are many projects working on coming up with this. Brave seems to be a lot further along than anyone else, and so I hope it succeeds. Either that or that someone else does.
- Ruthalas 7y ago
  If you are familiar with other projects in this space, would you mind sharing? I'd be interested in following their progress.
kerkeslager 7y ago
Looking into this only briefly, it didn't take long to find a lot of very questionable decisions made by Brave: 1. They're positioning themselves as both an advertiser and a privacy advocate[1], which strikes me as more of a strategy for bootstrapping revenue than a trustworthy moral position. The entire point of crypto micropayments is to pay for content with crypto rather than attention/privacy. Why should I view Brave's ads rather than the other ads on the internet from advertisers who also claim their ads respect privacy? The fact that Brave has decided to get into bed with advertisers at all shows they're committed to profit, not to users: micropayments are just a way to diversify for Brave, which will quickly fall to the wayside if it fails to provide the revenue they want. 2. The entire concept of a Brave Verified Publisher stinks. It positions Brave as a censor. If this system takes off, then suddenly Brave has control over who gets paid for content on the internet, and can censor content they don't like. And this isn't hypothetical, they plan to do this: their TOS[2] explicitly contains a code of conduct which contains a long list of things they will terminate your account for: they promise to use their power as censors to enforce of US copyright/patent law and also a wide variety of subjective social norms. This also shows their commitment to being an advertiser rather than an application that serves users: if you're serving users then you let them pay for the content they want to pay for, but if you're serving advertisers, then you can't let advertisers brands be seen as supporting questionable content. 3. BAT based in Ethereum seems to be basically a way to ride the wave of cryptocurrency hype while still positioning themselves as a central authority/middleman. If they weren't trying to position themselves as a middleman, they would just make the micropayments in Ether directly, or better yet, in a cryptocurrency that doesn't have a history of forking the blockchain to fix an bug in a major users' contract[3]. If they weren't trying to ride cryptocurrency hype, they'd just allow micropayments via a much-simpler-and-more-reliable REST API or similar since they're already the central authority anyway. I don't think we can trust Brave with our privacy or attention. I don't think we can trust Brave with the decision of who gets paid for content. I don't think we need Brave as a middleman to pay content publishers. I don't like the state of how content is paid for on the internet, but I don't think Brave is the solution. It's disappointing to me that Wikipedia has decided to associate their name with Brave's. A big part of why I respect Wikipedia is their long-standing policy of keeping independent from advertisers, and it seems naive of them to have not realized that Brave is an advertiser. I can understand why Wikipedia has made this decision, but I still think it is a compromise of Wikipedia's values, and I hope they'll reverse their decision in the future. [1] https://brave.com/brave-ads-waitlist/ https://brave.com/brave-ads-waitlist/ [2] https://brave.com/terms-of-use/ https://brave.com/terms-of-use/ [3] https://www.coindesk.com/ethereum-executes-blockchain-hard-fork-return-dao-investor-funds https://www.coindesk.com/ethereum-executes-blockchain-hard-f...
martindale 7y ago
Brave is a scam, with user funds being seized and converted into other currencies against their will. By issuing their own token instead of just using Bitcoin, they re-implement the same central banking system which the technology is designed to replace.
randiantech 7y ago
Since Brave is usually roasted around here, I just want to say thanks to the devs. I'm a Brave user and the experience is fantastic. Two things: I was a Chrome user for many years, so switching to Brave was not traumatic at all (same user experience, plugin's compatibility) and also ad blockers work as expected. I've never pay attention to the included ad solution. Im not interested on it. Im strictly speaking as an end user.
- sedatk 7y ago
  Did they fix the issue of pocketing the money on behalf of content creators who are not registered to Brave?
  - randiantech 7y ago
    I have no idea, as I mentioned im not familiar with that, and I've never signed up on the ad platform / solution / whatever offered during the installation. I just decline to join that program during the setup, and never ever popped up again. If I could hide the red triangle on the right of the nav bar, i'd do that as well.
  - colordrops 7y ago
    Do you have evidence of this? Or is this just an unfounded accusation?
  - BrendanEich 7y ago
    We never pocketed the money. In past years we gave out grants to users, who could send their tokens to unverified creators, and we would hold tokens in settlement awaiting those creators sooner or later signing up. We are still holding. We switched over the end of last year to have your browser hold for 90 days, retrying each month to reconcile anonymously in case the creator verified. After that the tokens go back into the browser wallet, or if you have signed up with Uphold to put in or take out your tokens, into your BAT card at Uphold.
- 43920 7y ago
  Just curious: if you're not interested in the ads part, why did you decide to switch, rather than using Chrome/Firefox with an ad blocker?
amelius 7y ago
> The average mobile browser user pays as much as $23 a month in data charges to download ads and trackers — that’s $276 a year. Is that true?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- patrickmcnamara 7y ago
  That seems absurd to me. I don't even pay that much for all of my unlimited data, calls and texts in Ireland.
  - xtracto 7y ago
    Here un Mexico we pay $1.00Mxn per MB. Thats about $0.05 usd. If you use 2000mb per month and 20% is ads, you'll pay 400x0.05 = $20 usd a month for ads. Which is around $240 usd a year. Edit: And apparently ad traffic is between 25% an 45%(https://venturebeat.com/2015/07/08/blocking-ads-can-cut-network-traffic-25-to-40-study-shows/ https://venturebeat.com/2015/07/08/blocking-ads-can-cut-netw...) So my estimate is quite conservative.
- mkl 7y ago
  "as much as" just means one or more people have really expensive mobile internet and visit ad-heavy sites. It's not really saying much. My entire phone bill is ~half that.
  - amelius 7y ago
    They say "the average user".
    - mkl 7y ago
      True. It doesn't make sense. "Average" is in aggregate, but "as much as" is a single maximum.
- Ayesh 7y ago
Ayesh 7y ago
I'm a publisher relying on ad revenue, and I hate Brave. It's not because it blocks my ads (I also contribute to an ad blocker list myself), but because Brave can swap my ads with its own. This is theft! Brave is similar to Opera. It's not a mainstream browser, and they also want to make money. Dipping into publisher revenue and using some broken BAT crypto currency to reward publishers is not the way to do it. The currency itself is mostly useless and unstable, plus you will be making peanuts compared to even the lowest CPM country in AdSense. What we need is an ad provider that provides a meaningful experience to advertisers and non-invasive ads to publishers. An entirely context-based, tracking-less, controlled (iframed and sandboxed). A browser is a user-agent and it should stay that way. I like certain things Brave is doing (such as proxying Google Safe Browsing API requests), but for all this BAT nonsense, I would still stick with Mozilla.
- echelon 7y ago
  > Brave can swap my ads with its own. This is theft! If true, this should be at the top. Brave should be sued into the ground for doing this. I'm fine with ad blocking, but this is outright larceny.
- codezero 7y ago
  I don't want to be uncivil and call you a liar, but can you explain why what you are saying about the ad replacement is true? Brendan Eich has repeatedly said that they do not replace ads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20831627 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20831627 For what it's worth, I find Brendan's position on homosexuality to be on the wrong side of history and on the wrong side of faithfulness (I do not intend to put words in his mouth, but this comment feels like a strong acceptance that he has feelings or opinions about gay people that are hard to rationally, and intelligently defend) [0] I want to make it clear I have no stake in protecting Brendan or Brave (I work for an analytics company!), but parroting bullshit you heard, or misrepresenting a company that affects your business is not taking the high ground even when the thing you are shitting on is led by a person whose position many people find despicable. [0] Brendan Eich says, "As for homophobe, I reject your definition. Call me what you want there" // https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20792783 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20792783
RyanAF7 7y ago
Been using Brave for about 2 years now and here's the deal with BAT, Advertisers and Privacy. As soon as you offer quid-pro-quo exhanges involving digital assets you open the door to the SEC/IRS. With even a modicum of success in market share Brave risks opening the door to the two most openly privacy smashing bureaucracies in financial history. Brave can lament all they want but in the end digital assets will come to heel and SOX/Dodd Frank still stand.
scarejunba 7y ago
Brave is such a clever concept. I'm just mad I didn't think of it. But then again, they've got some heavy technical firepower behind it. I think they're genuinely doing all the right things: * Opt-in advertising * Client-side advertising * Using a cryptocoin to avoid the microtransaction payment processor problem They will probably do fine having had a very successful ICO but I can't imagine anyone actually donating meaningful amounts of money to any site. After all, you can just get it for free.
kexx 7y ago
Please stop promoting brave either you do it in good faith or paid or you are a shill. everything with "Acceptable ads program" is a cancer
- BrendanEich 7y ago
  We don't do "Acceptable ads program". Are you willing to look at what we do more closely, in order to understand it? /be

281 points by yagodragon 7y ago

I had never read the Brave ad model before. They want to display ads while respecting user privacy, which is nice from a user point of view, but do advertisers actually want that rather than being able to target 35-40 years old in Ohio that are using shaving products twice a week ?

dx87 7y ago
They'd probably prefer targeted advertising, but if they have to choose between too many or too few people seeing their ad, they'd probably pick too many.
- jonathansampson 7y ago
  Generally speaking, Advertisers aim to get better value for their buck, so to speak. In the early days of online advertising, it was not uncommon to pay for impressions that may or may not be set before the eyes of a relevant audience. Around 2009 the process of Real-Time Bidding was created, and advertisers began to get better value, but at the expense of an unethical auction process that took place for each ad-slot on a page. With Brave Ads, advertisers know that they're reaching a party that is interested (Brave Ads are opt-in). Advertisers know that attrition of value due to fraud and middle-men is reduced in our model. Users know that they don't have to sacrifice privacy or security to participate, and that on-device machine-learning progressively delivers a better experience over time.
sigmar 7y ago
Brave ads are targeted through on-device matching. I'm not sure how well this will scale tho. Described in "Relevance" here: https://brave.com/brave-ads-launch/ https://brave.com/brave-ads-launch/
- jonathansampson 7y ago
  Correct. Once a user opts-in, machine-learning bits on the user's device take over and begin to study browsing habits and interests. These ML bits then decide what types of ads are likely to be of interest to the user. What are your scaling concerns? I'd love to hear more!
  - hobofan 7y ago
    I would assume that once a lot of advertisers are on the platform the ad catalogue can quickly grow to the size of GBs, which would be unfeasible to hold on smartphones.
    - jonathansampson 7y ago
      Catalogs are regional, and reflect only active campaigns. So far, the file hovers around 3 MB when compressed. We are able to optimize size even further, as needed. It will always remain small enough to be downloaded easily.
    - lukemulks 7y ago
      The catalog contains edge-cached URLs and metadata for the ads. The size remains small, as we're not compressing down images, rich media, video or other assets in the catalog. (I work at Brave, and am on the team bringing the ad platform to market)
      - jammygit 7y ago
        Could you clarify a tiny bit? I’m not sure I follow. If you are not including images or video in the ads, does that mean that you are downloading them at view time from somewhere, or that the ads have no images or video? Also, what are edge cached urls?
        jonathansampson 7y ago
        Ads first appear as OS notifications on your desktop. This notification displays plain-text content from the regional ad catalog. You get 70% of the ad revenue at this point. If you click the notification, Brave opens a tab in the Brave browser and navigates to the advertisement location. At this point, the ad can load images, video, etc. Important to note, however, that ad pages are not given any special treatment in the Brave browser. They are subject to the same privacy/security restrictions on all other pages. Third parties are severely limited, if not entirely prevented from engaging in the session.
jonathansampson 7y ago
Brave developer here. Great question! Brave Ads are entirely opt-in, and work via on-device machine-learning. The machine-learning bits study your browsing habits in a private, non-leaky manner. Once a day, your device downloads an aggregate catalog of many ad options to be studied locally. If/when an ad is found that fits your interests (as inferred by your browsing habits), the ad is displayed as an OS notification and 70% of the ad revenue is deposited into your in-situ wallet. So on the topic of targeting, Brave is able to deliver a better experience for Advertisers and Users, without the need to leak user information across the Web. The on-device ML bits learn about their user over time, delivering a better experience with maturity. I hope that helps!
- seren 7y ago
  Thanks for chiming in. So from the FAQ : https://brave.com/faq/#all-ads-blocked https://brave.com/faq/#all-ads-blocked > Each ad request is anonymous, and exposes only a small subset of the user’s preferences and intent signals to prevent “fingerprinting” the user by a possibly unique set of tags. It means that advertisers still get some feedback on the "intent signals" of the users that have seen their ads ? So it is private in the sense you cannot be uniquely identified but some of your intents are somewhat leaky ?
  - jonathansampson 7y ago
    Not quite, I think that FAQ item needs to be updated. The model works like this: The user opts-in to Brave Rewards/Ads. This kicks off a machine-learning model that begins to study the user's habits and interests. On a daily basis, the user downloads a regional ad catalog (as to other Brave users in their region). This catalog contains numerous ad options, which your device studies for relevance. If/when your device identifies an ad within the catalog that might be of interest to you, it displays the ad as an OS notification. At this time, 70% of the ad revenue is deposited into your in-situ wallet. At this point, the user has made absolutely no contact with an advertiser. If the user chooses to click on the ad, it is opened in its own tab in the Brave Browser. This tab, like all others, is subject to Brave's default security/privacy settings. No third party trackers, etc. The advertiser will know that you are interested in their product/service, because you clicked the ad. But no other information about you is given to them; only what can be inferred from standard first-party browsing online. Brave aims to keep your data private, and on-device. It is never leaked to us, or anybody else. You are sovereign over your data, and you decide with whom it is shared. That's our goal, always.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
barnabee 7y ago
There are two acceptable ad models for me: Paying, if it goes [almost] entirely to the publisher, not to see them Not paying anything to anyone, and still not seeing them (ad blocking)

msla 7y ago

This apparently just means that Brave users can now donate BATs (Brave Attention Tokes) to Wikipedia using an icon in their address bar. What the exchange rate is between BATs and USDs is left artfully unstated.

eganist 7y ago
For what it's worth: https://www.coinbase.com/price/basic-attention-token https://www.coinbase.com/price/basic-attention-token
- nexuist 7y ago
  Wait, that's actually kind of really good!? Out of 50,000 views, if 0.01% donated (500 BATs) that translates to $85! Maybe my expectations are low but that's more than enough to cover server costs for a month. It certainly doesn't pay rent but it's better than not making any money at all.
  - BrendanEich 7y ago
    Wikipedia relies on donations, this adds another method of donating, automatically and regularly, plus tips on top. In the nonprofit space you don’t turn down more and easier ways to donate.

intopieces 7y ago

I don’t want BATs and I don’t want ads. I want to be able to donate to content creators through Apple Pay instantly.

mayneack 7y ago
I don't see why it would matter what form you're paying the creator in. I suppose in the absence of an apple pay direct link, you'd have to just use apple pay to pay for BAT. I think there's some sort of "re-fill $X/month" feature, but I can't seem to find it. https://brave.com/funding-your-brave-wallet/ https://brave.com/funding-your-brave-wallet/
- vorpalhex 7y ago
  ...Why not skip the middleman and just fund websites with, you know, USD? Obviously in the case of Wikipedia, we can donate (and please do so!) but I'd gladly throw $0.20 at a website to not get ads for a day or something.
  - mayneack 7y ago
    Is there a different way to automatically pay based on how long I actually spend on a site?
    - jonathansampson 7y ago
      That's the default behavior, known as Auto Contribute in Brave. If 10% of your time is spent on Wikipedia, they'll get 10% of your monthly budget. You can contribute in this manner, or/also via tips (which are one-off contributions). You can also set a fixed percentage for the property, and set it as a recurring contribution each month.
      - mayneack 7y ago
        Yeah, that's one reason I use brave. The parent was suggesting that they wanted to do something like this without Brave, but I don't know of a real competitor.

JustFinishedBSG 7y ago

Wikipedia joins Brave "Protection Scheme" you mean.

admax88q 7y ago
It could only be considered a protection scheme if you were already relying on ads which Brave blocked. Wikipedia does not run ads.
- RandomBacon 7y ago
  > Wikipedia does not run ads. Most other websites do. Replacing their ads and running different ads to make money with is unethical. Toolbars in the early 2000s that did that were considered malware.
lern_too_spel 7y ago
Not even that. Wikipedia doesn't show ads, so this announcement isn't saying that Wikipedia will automatically get BATs from Brave using visitors. It's saying Wikipedia has a verified BAT wallet that a tiny fraction of users of a browser with almost no users can donate their worthless tokens to. I'd be surprised if Wikipedia can buy a USB cable with the amount of money they get from this. This is just a worthless PR post from a slimy company.
- ashleshbiradar 7y ago
  well brave has like 6 million users as of now, so its not "almost no users"

zargon 7y ago

I really like what Brave is doing. I wish it was built on Firefox instead of Chromium. I just don't see myself leaving Firefox without major upheaval in the browser space.

balaksakrionon 7y ago
agreed, everytime i am in the settings and elsewhere i realize i'm using chrome and hate myself for a moment
jchw 7y ago
IIRC it was actually originally Firefox. I wonder what exactly made them switch?
- jonathansampson 7y ago
  This is correct. Note that both of our founders are from the Firefox team originally. Our CTO, Brian Bondy, originally built the first Brave prototype on the Gecko engine. Unfortunately, after much testing, it was clear that a modified Chromium would be the better route forward. You can imagine this was not a decision taken lightly, as both of these individuals have lived and breathed Gecko/Mozilla for years prior.
  - orblivion 7y ago
    Would the story be different with Quantum now?
    - BrendanEich 7y ago
      No, the decision was based on a spreadsheet with many items concerned with web compatibility, HTML5 DRM plugin free-as-in-beer, extension support, etc. Chromium without Google tracking is dominant, this is just a fact (it will change some day; not soon). The best way to counter this is not to die on the wrong hill (engine wars) right now -- it is to go a level up and fight for privacy and user sovereignty where Google cannot defend: blocking all tracking, paying users 70% of user private ad revenue.

VChhabra 7y ago

Hey All - Brave BD rep here ... let me know if I can help in any way.

smsm42 7y ago
I hope other Wikimedia properties, like Wikidata and Commons, get added too.

trpc 7y ago

1. Build a theme over Chromium 2. Add your ads and tracking system over it 3. Brand it as "X Browser" This is not a browser, this is a skin over Chrome with a business model that's built over a crypto scam. Your army of online shills and your attempts to connect yourselves with reputable online entities such as Wikipedia won't change that fact.

songshuu 7y ago
Eye roll on this take. If you have a better business model for content producers on the internet feel free to build it.
- thefj 7y ago
  How about the business model the content producers choose for themselves, instead of one that is forced on them by a rent seeking company with good PR? If I have ads on my site, I have no interest in someone replacing them and taking a cut.
  - Ajedi32 7y ago
    Would you rather someone remove them and not pay you at all? Because right now that seems to be the direction we're heading in.
  - boring_twenties 7y ago
    How does your site deal with ad blocking users? Do you block them from your website? Isn't it kind of nice that at least some of these users, despite not wanting your ads, still want to find a way to pay you, even going to the point of installing an alternate browser for the opportunity to do so? And in any case, you could always block Brave users from your site if you wanted to. How's anything being forced on you here?
    - thefj 7y ago
      Let's say I put out a cookie jar out with a sign that says "Take a cookie, leave a dollar". You come by and take a cookie and leave a piece of string. You're not improving my business model. The Brave thing is just a weird way to feel better about breaking an implicit social contract.

miguelmota 7y ago

Why doesn't brave adopt a stable coin like DAI for donations? Tokens are pretty volatile and it would suck for the publisher to lose money because they didn't cash out immediately. That won't be a problem though with DAI. https://www.coinbase.com/price/dai https://www.coinbase.com/price/dai

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
lukemulks 7y ago
(Brave employee) The BAT is used for more than contributions. The token has a distinct use case as the unit of account for attention and services on the platform. https://basicattentiontoken.org/faq/#representation https://basicattentiontoken.org/faq/#representation
- miguelmota 7y ago
  Thanks. I wished people would explain that instead of downvoting.
  - lukemulks 7y ago
    Glad it was helpful.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

lalaland1125 7y ago

Can anyone explain why Brave uses BAT? As far as I can tell Brave would be much better if they used USD instead.

miguelmota 7y ago
Agree, Brave should use DAI instead.
songshuu 7y ago
The tldr on that one is banking laws and a whole lotta users that aren't US citizens.
Kiro 7y ago
Because they wanted to do an ICO.
lukemulks 7y ago
https://basicattentiontoken.org/faq/#why-not-bitcoin https://basicattentiontoken.org/faq/#why-not-bitcoin
- lalaland1125 7y ago
  That explains why they can't use Bitcoin, but it doesn't explain why they can't use USD + a database.
  - BrendanEich 7y ago
    USD does not work in all regions, believe it or not. Moreover it cannot be sent without an intermediary that is heavily licensed and regulated. Contrary to maximalists, we do aim in our Apollo phase for BAT moving on-blockchain with anonymity and low fees. Current blockchains and USD do neither
- martindale 7y ago
  This explanation shows a painfully shallow understanding of Bitcoin, if not an intentional bias. Bitcoin is capable of doing everything Brave would need, and they've been shown how to accomplish their goals multiple times by numerous disparate parties. I'm increasingly convinced Brave's leadership is opposed to the idea of self-determination, and is playing politics by making up these kinds of excuses.

bilucy 7y ago

BAT token is tradable on exchanges, and price floats and is unstable. Donation receivers need to worry about exchange rates risk - https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/basic-attention-token https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/basic-attention-token How about USD or USD stable currencies for this?

Kiro 7y ago
BAT is Brave's own token that they did an ICO for so I doubt they would move to something else.
songshuu 7y ago
Does BAT fluctuate that much? Lately I see one of two things : 1. The market is up, BAT loses value because BTC sucks all the air out of the room with n00b investors. 2. The market is down, BAT loses value because BTC valuation scares off investors. Otherwise, Brave/BAT team can announce features & partnerships all day long and the price literally never budges.
- bilucy 7y ago
  Exactly it. An ICO was done and it is openly traded, there is going to be fluctuation whether up/down it is still an FX risk for receivers of BAT. Until we see more goods and services payable with BAT, it will a problem
Tinfoilhat666 7y ago
Would it be possible to fork Brave and change it to use US Tether, Libra or some other stable coin? Even better: fork it, create your own cryptocurrency like BAT, make ICO and become a millionaire! There is no reason everybody to use BAT.
- zucker42 7y ago
  Not tether. Tether is super sketchy and potentially a scam.
buboard 7y ago

snek 7y ago

Does brave still suck up money from people even when the site owner hasn't set up brave payments?

dymk 7y ago
And not just that, they’ve moved/are moving to a model of displaying their own ads instead, which are invariably for some scammy crypto-of-the-day which even FB and Google ban from their ad platforms
- jonathansampson 7y ago
  Sorry, I'm not sure what you're referring to. Brave has 2 ad-models (one still in the works). First, the User Model. In this model, user's must first opt-in to participate. If/when they do, advertisements are shown (at a user-controllable rate) as OS notifications. When a notification is shown, 70% of the revenue is deposited into the user's wallet. The second model is the Publisher Model; this is in the works now. Under this model, Publishers will be able to opt-in the system as well, and have ads displayed on their pages. Under this model, publishers receive 70%, and the user receives 15%. But both models require consent before any ads are displayed.
  - dymk 7y ago
    We'll see how long that lasts once the VC money runs out. Blocking ads and displaying your own certainly is an "ad replacement" model though, and websites that don't want to participate have no choice.
    - jonathansampson 7y ago
      Ads are being blocked, already, on hundreds of millions of devices. Brave users are usually former users of ad-blocking extensions in Chrome and Firefox. As such, these users were beyond the advertising system, far out of reach of Advertisers or Publishers. Brave changes this. Brave brings security and privacy minded folks back into the system by offering a better deal for all parties. Users get paid without giving up data, Advertisers get better value for their spend. And Publishers don't have to weigh their sites down with third-party scripts to monetize content.

JohnTHaller 7y ago

We signed up for Brave's setup at PortableApps.com after a few users asked about it. They hold your last 90 days in escrow, so you can find out how successful it is once you sign up. We were looking at around 10 cents a day for a bit under a million monthly users for that timeframe over the summer. And we can't even access it since Brave only works with one crypto provider and they aren't licensed in New York. The process was also pretty buggy and the magic link email login was clunky/kinda broken. https://portableapps.com/node/60580 https://portableapps.com/node/60580

jonathansampson 7y ago
Uphold is working hard to acquire the bitlicense for New York. They shared on Twitter earlier this month that they hope to have this resolved soon. It's worth noting that Creators also have a referral program whereby $5 in BAT can be earned for each user brought to the Brave platform. brave.com/refer Thank you for your incredible patience and participation. We hope to see positive developments on the bitlicense front soon. Please do let us know if there is ever anything we can do for you in the interim.
- xur17 7y ago
  Are there any plans to get rid of uphold on the publisher side and allow external wallets? It was a huge turn off to me when I signed up.
  - BrendanEich 7y ago
    We need a regulated entity to do directed (tips, recurring), user-anonymous, off-chain transactions, and to comply with OFAC and other hard regulations. We can't do it ourselves. Wallet is the least of the issue, even if the publisher were willing to take BAT. Our future phase (Apollo) blockchain work will move more txns on-chain but not solve all regulatory problems. No blockchain can do that unless you are using p2p directly, and then on the current big chains you don't have anonymity or low fees. This may change, we're working on it.

solarkraft 7y ago

So finally Brave doesn't just take the money people thought they gave Wikipedia?

jammygit 7y ago

How come more websites do not accept brave payments? If I had a website, what is the process required to begin accepting them? Edit: typo

Ayesh 7y ago
You have to be a verified publisher. There was a whole story about Tom Scott (English YouTuber) rightfully tweeting about it. Brave changed themselves after to not collect donations for unverified publishers.
BrendanEich 7y ago
Sign up at https://publishers.basicattentiontoken.org/ https://publishers.basicattentiontoken.org/.

xacky 7y ago

Wikipedia hates cryptocurrencies they constantly delete their articles even Bitcoin was denied an article at one point. I feel Wikipedia is violating their own conflict of interest policies with this.

the_duke 7y ago
Please back that up with some references. It should be easy by linking to the respective edits.
- xacky 7y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:General_sanctions/Blockchain_and_cryptocurrencies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:General_sanctions/Bl... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=cryptocurrency&prefix=Wikipedia%3AArticles+for+deletion%2F&fulltext=Search+archives&fulltext=Search&ns0=1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=cryptocu... Major cryptocurrencies deleted include Cardano, Chainlink, IOTA and Lisk. Also the Wikipedia admin David Gerard runs an anti cryptocurrency blog.
  - BrendanEich 7y ago
    David is quite a character. I did not know he was a wp admin. Brave has tons of verified publishers, see https://batgrowth.com/ https://batgrowth.com/. Our verifying a site or channel does not thereby endorse all or any of its content. As noted elsewhere here, we aim to distribute if not decentralize verification so it is even more censorship resistant.

buboard 7y ago

- do you plan to have a simple password instead of email link? - are there any brave banners i can use to promote brave? - will u provide a command line tool to verify websites? - why are referrals tied to channels instead of account? - will you expand to micropayments? - will brave always block ads everywhere or will you switch to blocking only on verified sites? Some form if instant payment is sorely needed. I hope regulators can catch up with reality , or else maybe brave should move to another country ( it s also comical to witness the hostility of HN towards brave. Are we full of google shills here? )

_corym 7y ago
(disclaimer engineer @ brave on creators team) > do you plan to have a simple password instead of email link? security gave the A-okay to give users an option to be able to stay signed in for 30 days. soon you will be able to check a box to stay signed in. > are there any brave banners i can use to promote brave? https://brave.com/assets-for-creators/ https://brave.com/assets-for-creators/ > will u provide a command line tool to verify websites? not in the foreseeable future. we have had some discussions allowing keybase as a trusted connection and mark any properties they have verified as verified in brave as well. we might have more news on that front in the future. > why are referrals tied to channels instead of account? very good question, this is a symptom of tech debt. we're hoping to move it over to the account very soon > will you expand to micropayments? we're discussing more ways to spend your BAT and that's all I'll say about that :) > will brave always block ads everywhere or will you switch to blocking only on verified sites? brave will block 3rd party ads, in the future we will be introducing publisher ads which will allow websites to define sections of their site to for Brave to insert local privacy-preserving advertisements. the publishers get 70% of the revenue and users receive 30%.
- true_religion 7y ago
  Why do users receive 30% of revenue? They are the ones being advertised to.
eduren 7y ago
I think the hostility seems focused in two areas. * Brave browser still being chromium under the hood. It's not the worst thing in the world, but there's plenty of sound technical/ideological reasons to be against a browser engine monoculture * A (healthy IMO) skepticism of cryptocurrency backed projects Do you think those concerns are irrelevant? I find it funny that you accuse HN commenters of being Google shills (my experience is quite the opposite). Brave skepticism is not automatically pro-Google.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

kylehotchkiss 7y ago

I switched from Chrome to Brave this week after getting overwhelmed with some of Google's recent design decisions on Chrome. The web inspector and yubikey support in Brave made the transition super easy. The adblocking works about the same as ublock did for me in Chrome so the browsing experience feels similar. Great work Brave team on giving Chrome users a privacy-friendly option to easily switch to.

TremendousJudge 7y ago
If you are still using chromium you're still part of the problem
- BrendanEich 7y ago
  Same for oxygen breathed by bad and good alike. Or tools, where the details and how the tool is used make problems or solutions, depending.

RonaldSchleifer 7y ago

That's interesting and also essentially nullifies Brave's credibility as some kind of privacy browser. Either they are ignorantly unaware or they are complicit in supporting wikipedia, one of the many digital organizations that have in the last years gone full on dystopian censorship thought police, even if it is not apparent to the casual observer. Case in point beyond just their close relationship and integration into censorious and authoritarian Google and Youtube, look for a link to the official government report on the definitely not muslim Bataclan attack in Paris, which details the gruesome slaughter, torture, disfigurement, dismemberment, and torment the attackers perpetrated upon their victims; which was all of course withheld from the public until it was forced into the light by the court case. You will not find a link to the report in spite of it being out for many months now, and you will be unsuccessful at adding a link to the report, let alone highlighting the brutal descriptions from the several hundred pages long report, somewhere in the wikipedia page. It's full on censorship, and the most pernicious and nefarious and sick part of this digital censorship is that deletion, shadow banning, banning, or simply colluding across organizations to erase someone's digital personality and identity goes basically unnoticed by the general public that is none the wiser that someone was ushered off to the digital gulag or digital mass grave ... pooof ... that comment, information, person is gone, with not trace and no accountability or transparency.

RandomBacon 7y ago

I understan Wikipedia does not have ads, but other websites do. In the early 2000s, toolbars that replaced a website's ads with different ads were considered malware. Instead of the website that bears the cost of delivering content getting the money, the browser is now getting the money. How is Brave Browser different in this regard than those malware toolbars?

cameronbrown 7y ago
The only difference is that consumers have agreed to let the browser do this.
- RandomBacon 7y ago
  How do we know that all the consumers realize the browser is doing this? How do we know all consumers with those toolbars didn't know? I imagine those consumers also "agree" to website Terms of Service that don't allow this. I wonder if websites will fight back, closing accounts or doing more to stop people who use adblockers or Brave.
  - anderber 7y ago
    In Brave a user has to actively go to their settings and turn on ads. It's turned off by default.
    - RandomBacon 7y ago
      I hope the default never flips.
  - cameronbrown 7y ago
    > I wonder if websites will fight back, closing accounts or doing more to stop people who use adblockers or Brave. My personal belief is that websites are free to track users as much as they want, but users are free to respond however they want. If it becomes an arms race, so be it, but I think in the end the result will be adtech finally having to fix itself which is a very good thing.

woodandsteel 7y ago

Lots of specific comments here about Brave, pro and con. I would like to explain where I think it fits in the larger scheme of things. There is broad agreement that the web is deeply broken, with all sorts of bad consequences, because of how web sites get their money from advertisements and selling data. Now the only way this is going to get fixed, as far as I can tell, is for someone to come up with an alternative financial model that publishers will actually adopt. There are many projects working on coming up with this. Brave seems to be a lot further along than anyone else, and so I hope it succeeds. Either that or that someone else does.

Ruthalas 7y ago
If you are familiar with other projects in this space, would you mind sharing? I'd be interested in following their progress.

kerkeslager 7y ago

Looking into this only briefly, it didn't take long to find a lot of very questionable decisions made by Brave: 1. They're positioning themselves as both an advertiser and a privacy advocate[1], which strikes me as more of a strategy for bootstrapping revenue than a trustworthy moral position. The entire point of crypto micropayments is to pay for content with crypto rather than attention/privacy. Why should I view Brave's ads rather than the other ads on the internet from advertisers who also claim their ads respect privacy? The fact that Brave has decided to get into bed with advertisers at all shows they're committed to profit, not to users: micropayments are just a way to diversify for Brave, which will quickly fall to the wayside if it fails to provide the revenue they want. 2. The entire concept of a Brave Verified Publisher stinks. It positions Brave as a censor. If this system takes off, then suddenly Brave has control over who gets paid for content on the internet, and can censor content they don't like. And this isn't hypothetical, they plan to do this: their TOS[2] explicitly contains a code of conduct which contains a long list of things they will terminate your account for: they promise to use their power as censors to enforce of US copyright/patent law and also a wide variety of subjective social norms. This also shows their commitment to being an advertiser rather than an application that serves users: if you're serving users then you let them pay for the content they want to pay for, but if you're serving advertisers, then you can't let advertisers brands be seen as supporting questionable content. 3. BAT based in Ethereum seems to be basically a way to ride the wave of cryptocurrency hype while still positioning themselves as a central authority/middleman. If they weren't trying to position themselves as a middleman, they would just make the micropayments in Ether directly, or better yet, in a cryptocurrency that doesn't have a history of forking the blockchain to fix an bug in a major users' contract[3]. If they weren't trying to ride cryptocurrency hype, they'd just allow micropayments via a much-simpler-and-more-reliable REST API or similar since they're already the central authority anyway. I don't think we can trust Brave with our privacy or attention. I don't think we can trust Brave with the decision of who gets paid for content. I don't think we need Brave as a middleman to pay content publishers. I don't like the state of how content is paid for on the internet, but I don't think Brave is the solution. It's disappointing to me that Wikipedia has decided to associate their name with Brave's. A big part of why I respect Wikipedia is their long-standing policy of keeping independent from advertisers, and it seems naive of them to have not realized that Brave is an advertiser. I can understand why Wikipedia has made this decision, but I still think it is a compromise of Wikipedia's values, and I hope they'll reverse their decision in the future. [1] https://brave.com/brave-ads-waitlist/ https://brave.com/brave-ads-waitlist/ [2] https://brave.com/terms-of-use/ https://brave.com/terms-of-use/ [3] https://www.coindesk.com/ethereum-executes-blockchain-hard-fork-return-dao-investor-funds https://www.coindesk.com/ethereum-executes-blockchain-hard-f...

martindale 7y ago

Brave is a scam, with user funds being seized and converted into other currencies against their will. By issuing their own token instead of just using Bitcoin, they re-implement the same central banking system which the technology is designed to replace.

randiantech 7y ago

Since Brave is usually roasted around here, I just want to say thanks to the devs. I'm a Brave user and the experience is fantastic. Two things: I was a Chrome user for many years, so switching to Brave was not traumatic at all (same user experience, plugin's compatibility) and also ad blockers work as expected. I've never pay attention to the included ad solution. Im not interested on it. Im strictly speaking as an end user.

sedatk 7y ago
Did they fix the issue of pocketing the money on behalf of content creators who are not registered to Brave?
- randiantech 7y ago
  I have no idea, as I mentioned im not familiar with that, and I've never signed up on the ad platform / solution / whatever offered during the installation. I just decline to join that program during the setup, and never ever popped up again. If I could hide the red triangle on the right of the nav bar, i'd do that as well.
- colordrops 7y ago
  Do you have evidence of this? Or is this just an unfounded accusation?
- BrendanEich 7y ago
  We never pocketed the money. In past years we gave out grants to users, who could send their tokens to unverified creators, and we would hold tokens in settlement awaiting those creators sooner or later signing up. We are still holding. We switched over the end of last year to have your browser hold for 90 days, retrying each month to reconcile anonymously in case the creator verified. After that the tokens go back into the browser wallet, or if you have signed up with Uphold to put in or take out your tokens, into your BAT card at Uphold.
43920 7y ago
Just curious: if you're not interested in the ads part, why did you decide to switch, rather than using Chrome/Firefox with an ad blocker?

amelius 7y ago

> The average mobile browser user pays as much as $23 a month in data charges to download ads and trackers — that’s $276 a year. Is that true?

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
patrickmcnamara 7y ago
That seems absurd to me. I don't even pay that much for all of my unlimited data, calls and texts in Ireland.
- xtracto 7y ago
  Here un Mexico we pay $1.00Mxn per MB. Thats about $0.05 usd. If you use 2000mb per month and 20% is ads, you'll pay 400x0.05 = $20 usd a month for ads. Which is around $240 usd a year. Edit: And apparently ad traffic is between 25% an 45%(https://venturebeat.com/2015/07/08/blocking-ads-can-cut-network-traffic-25-to-40-study-shows/ https://venturebeat.com/2015/07/08/blocking-ads-can-cut-netw...) So my estimate is quite conservative.
mkl 7y ago
"as much as" just means one or more people have really expensive mobile internet and visit ad-heavy sites. It's not really saying much. My entire phone bill is ~half that.
- amelius 7y ago
  They say "the average user".
  - mkl 7y ago
    True. It doesn't make sense. "Average" is in aggregate, but "as much as" is a single maximum.
Ayesh 7y ago

Ayesh 7y ago

I'm a publisher relying on ad revenue, and I hate Brave. It's not because it blocks my ads (I also contribute to an ad blocker list myself), but because Brave can swap my ads with its own. This is theft! Brave is similar to Opera. It's not a mainstream browser, and they also want to make money. Dipping into publisher revenue and using some broken BAT crypto currency to reward publishers is not the way to do it. The currency itself is mostly useless and unstable, plus you will be making peanuts compared to even the lowest CPM country in AdSense. What we need is an ad provider that provides a meaningful experience to advertisers and non-invasive ads to publishers. An entirely context-based, tracking-less, controlled (iframed and sandboxed). A browser is a user-agent and it should stay that way. I like certain things Brave is doing (such as proxying Google Safe Browsing API requests), but for all this BAT nonsense, I would still stick with Mozilla.

echelon 7y ago
> Brave can swap my ads with its own. This is theft! If true, this should be at the top. Brave should be sued into the ground for doing this. I'm fine with ad blocking, but this is outright larceny.
codezero 7y ago
I don't want to be uncivil and call you a liar, but can you explain why what you are saying about the ad replacement is true? Brendan Eich has repeatedly said that they do not replace ads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20831627 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20831627 For what it's worth, I find Brendan's position on homosexuality to be on the wrong side of history and on the wrong side of faithfulness (I do not intend to put words in his mouth, but this comment feels like a strong acceptance that he has feelings or opinions about gay people that are hard to rationally, and intelligently defend) [0] I want to make it clear I have no stake in protecting Brendan or Brave (I work for an analytics company!), but parroting bullshit you heard, or misrepresenting a company that affects your business is not taking the high ground even when the thing you are shitting on is led by a person whose position many people find despicable. [0] Brendan Eich says, "As for homophobe, I reject your definition. Call me what you want there" // https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20792783 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20792783

RyanAF7 7y ago

Been using Brave for about 2 years now and here's the deal with BAT, Advertisers and Privacy. As soon as you offer quid-pro-quo exhanges involving digital assets you open the door to the SEC/IRS. With even a modicum of success in market share Brave risks opening the door to the two most openly privacy smashing bureaucracies in financial history. Brave can lament all they want but in the end digital assets will come to heel and SOX/Dodd Frank still stand.

scarejunba 7y ago

Brave is such a clever concept. I'm just mad I didn't think of it. But then again, they've got some heavy technical firepower behind it. I think they're genuinely doing all the right things: * Opt-in advertising * Client-side advertising * Using a cryptocoin to avoid the microtransaction payment processor problem They will probably do fine having had a very successful ICO but I can't imagine anyone actually donating meaningful amounts of money to any site. After all, you can just get it for free.

kexx 7y ago

Please stop promoting brave either you do it in good faith or paid or you are a shill. everything with "Acceptable ads program" is a cancer

BrendanEich 7y ago
We don't do "Acceptable ads program". Are you willing to look at what we do more closely, in order to understand it? /be