9 ms·

I already decided my Ad participation. I block ads, and want the advertising industry to die. This does not seem like a value add to me.

nybble41 7y ago
So don't opt-in. There are other ways to acquire BAT and support the sites you visit in Brave besides watching ads.
- cyborgx7 7y ago
  No. You don't understand. It's not enough for me not to see ads anymore. I want the advertising industry to die. The entire thing. Its existence is harmful to society.
  - nybble41 7y ago
    If people choose to buy BAT from exchanges rather than earn it by watching ads then content will be increasingly funded directly by payments from consumers rather than through advertising. If everyone did this then there would be a closed loop of BAT exchange between viewers and content creators (mediated by exchanges) without any ads in sight. This is an effective strategy to employ against the advertising industry if that's really your goal.
    - cyborgx7 7y ago
      No, in making provisions for the advertising industry in their business model, they are aiding its survival. I will always recommend a proper adblocker over this.
      - nybble41 7y ago
        You are of course free to do as you wish, but since you're applying "guilty by association" logic to Brave—regardless of the fact that using it without enabling the ads does absolutely nothing to help the advertising industry—I really hope that you also refuse to have anything to do with any sites that receive any of their funding through advertising. Enabling an adblocker doesn't reduce that contamination in any sense: The site is still "making provisions for the advertising industry" and "aiding its survival", far more so than Brave. Funding the site with Brave and BAT would at least offer a practical alternative to reliance on advertising. Unless, perhaps, your goal is not to destroy advertising, but rather to destroy all sites which depend on external funding and yet aren't a big enough draw to justify a dedicated subscription?
        cyborgx7 7y ago
        >but since you're applying "guilty by association" logic to Brave That's a misunderstanding. It's not a guilty by association thing. It's that there is already a thing more in line with accomplishing my goals, since uBlock Origin has no provisions for ad companies to still make money.
  - Smokey28 7y ago
    This just isn't true though. Or at least I don't see where you're coming from. You might see ads as intrusive, or getting you to spend money on something you don't want to spend money on... but that's not how many advertisers see ads. Ideally, they would only be at your attention when you want them there. If I'm looking to buy a washing machine, and I don't know where to start, advertising is one of the primary ways I get introduced to the options out there. Furthermore, ads have driven most major media from newspapers to radio to tv... and what has made them so financially accessible to most people. Maybe you can afford to pay money to every single patreon out there, but not everyone can. And imagining a world where everyone uses an ad-blocker and advertising dies means that every content creator is just going to put up a paywall, which means information will be exclusively restricted to people with money. That sounds like a fantastic future. Frankly the notion that advertising is objectively bad, or good, for that matter is reductive. You might say certain practices are good or bad, and certainly the ones we are seeing online right now are not good, but that seems to me the problem Brave is trying to solve - building an ad model for the web that actually works.
    - cyborgx7 7y ago
      I wrote down some of the many ways in which ads are a societal ill, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21528465 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21528465
      - Smokey28 7y ago
        I just flat out disagree with most of the premises you have shared here. Also I don't understand how something can be wrong or right in an 'academic sense' but fine: >They distort the product market as they favour those players with the highest marketing budget, rather than with the best product. Presumably the companies with the bigger budgets have that money to spend because they have a better product. When people buy your product, you have money to spend, and then you go and spend it on marketing and advertising (which are two separate disciplines, I won't get hung up on that but just know that using those two interchangeably betrays a lack of critical understanding). I can think of very few companies that became market leaders solely because of advertising while selling an inferior product. Beer/alcohol springs to mind, but even there I could argue that taste is subjective and that image is a huge part of what people are drinking regardless so much like fashion, customers are buying the label as much as the utility. > They distort the media market as getting people to look in your direction is the only thing that has value. Clickbait and fake-news are a direct result of advertising, and wouldn't exist without it. This is also wrong-ish. People didn't tune into a TV show because of the advertisements that aired between commercials, they tuned in because of good TV. The better the TV show, the more money they could command from advertisers because of the audience size. They wouldn't invest that money into more advertisements, they would invest it into making better TV. Now, with clickbait you have a bit of a point - but that's more of a systemic issue. When people started giving content away for free, newspapers crashed as content moved online. Desperate for an audience, advertisers used yesterday's model (look for the place with the most eyeballs) and started migrating over there. There was a period of time where buzzfeed and clickbait reigned supreme for that reason, but that's starting to change as advertisers get wiser about where they are positioning their company. Respectable products tend to dominate respectable sites and clickbaity sites get filled with less respectable companies. It's far from perfect, but again - this is about the method, not really advertising as a practice. I don't see the connection with fake-news at all. Fake news happened because people were glued to their newsfeeds. If anything advertisers are terrified of fake news because it hurts their credibility to show up next to it. > They are an attempt at manipulation. People have to constantly expend the energy to counteract that manipulation. I also believe this to be a big factor in the decrease in trust in media. Since the stuff that is meant to inform you is always surrounded by stuff trying to manipulate you, how could you ever build trust to it? Are reviews an attempt at manipulation? Maybe you think they are better because they are a third party... but at the end of the day they are just trying to tell you one product is better than another. If "attempts at manipulation" are bad, then we should get rid of all review sites. If your issue is that the company is saying their thing is best, when maybe it isn't, what company in their right mind would say "hey, our product sucks". Do you have an issue with sales or selling in general? Is the very act of getting someone to try and buy your thing a cause for societal ill? As for people constantly expending energy to counteract this manipulation, this is my least favorite line of argument around advertising. It disrespects people and treats them as weak minded simpletons who have no thoughts other than what they are told to think. At a certain point you have to respect people and their ability to make decisions for themselves.
  - romellem 7y ago
    It seems obvious to me that this is an extreme stance and greatly oversimplifies things, but a couple things to note: * the global advertising industry is upwards of a $500 billion market [1] * that industry employs close to 200k people in the U.S. alone [2] I think it is safe to say that people who earn their living via the advertising industry and thus positively contribute to the economy would be a benefit to society. Of course one could still make the argument that the net impact is harmful, but I don’t think it is controversial to say that is a bold claim with many complicating factors. 1. https://www.statista.com/topics/990/global-advertising-market/ https://www.statista.com/topics/990/global-advertising-marke... 2. https://www.statista.com/statistics/186066/employment-in-us-advertising-and-related-services-2008/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/186066/employment-in-us-...
    - prewett 7y ago
      The size of an industry and the number of people that it employs is hardly a measure of how it benefits society. People are employed in the global spam, fraud, and mafia markets, and they spend their income on such wholesome things as housing, groceries, computers, expensive wine/cars/vacations, art. Doesn't mean that the industry contributes positively to society.
  - tuesdayrain 7y ago
    Old man yells at clouds
    - cyborgx7 7y ago
      How old do you think I am?
asdkhadsj 7y ago
Yea, I'd be happier if there was some notion of an inherent value in my eyeballs - and then I could just put that money into the system. Eg, I pay $5/m or $15/m, whatever, and that gets split up by the number of pages I view and content I consume. I'm a firm believer that FOSS and (Internet) Content needs funding. Yet, I loathe ads. They promote (but are not solely to blame for) behavior that is a brain drain on society. Ads always seem to boil down to 90s style child cereal commercials. Loud noises and flashy attention grabbing tactics to pull you towards it within a tiny, limited window of bought attention. I'm not convinced society is better because of ads. The dystopian movies with neons signs everywhere seem shockingly accurate (and I believe are already like that in many eastern cities). I like some of Brave's attempt. At least their doing something. But Ads still seem wrong to me.
- jaywalk 7y ago
  You can buy BAT with a credit card and participate in Brave's system without ever seeing an ad.
  - TurkishPoptart 7y ago
    I don't understand, why would I spend money on something I don't want or care about?
    - jaywalk 7y ago
      The comment I replied to said: > Eg, I pay $5/m or $15/m, whatever, and that gets split up by the number of pages I view and content I consume. That's 100% possible to do with Brave's system.
      - kxrm 7y ago
        My only issue with this, if I understand correctly, is that I must use BAT currency.
        naasking 7y ago
arghwhat 7y ago
Yes, this is a perfectly sensible stance, which of course requires you to actively pay for content instead, either through brave or some other program. I'm sure you're not just expecting content creators to make stuff for you full-time entirely for free. Ads should die, but it requires consumers to realize that they need to pay for content one way or another.
- cyborgx7 7y ago
  I do pay several patreon, have automatic transfer set up for two projects, and a long standing subscription to a website I'm a fan of. But people don't need to realize anything for ads to die. All they need to realize is that they should all be using ad blockers and never ever turning it off again. Being able to make people look in your direction long enough to show them something else they might spend money on is not valuable. It doesn't need to exist.
  - anchpop 7y ago
    > But people don't need to realize anything for ads to die. All they need to realize is that they should all be using ad blockers and never ever turning it off again. That isn't true at all. What about when I play a youtube video on my chromecast and it shows an ad on my TV? What happens when websites draw all their content using the canvas instead of the DOM, and adblockers don't work anymore, or websites like Hulu which already make it difficult to enjoy the content while avoiding the ads.
    - cyborgx7 7y ago
      Then getting rid of ads has to stop being a technical process but a legislative instead.
    - tssva 7y ago
      Hulu makes it very easy to enjoy the content while avoiding ads. Just pay them the ad free rate to offset their lost ad revenue.
  - arghwhat 7y ago
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
deanCommie 7y ago
That is just peeing in the pool. It's fine if only some of us do it (and I do as well) but it just leads to the death of free internet, and subscription models for all news sites. That might be fine for you, but don't think for a second that's not a privileged position, and if the internet moves behind a paywall that is a significant detriment to a massive class of people. Sure, your system works for you, but don't pretend like your solution scales.
alwillis 7y ago
By default, you don’t see ads; you have to opt-in. And even if you decide to never see an ad, you’ll still receive grants in BAT from time to time, which you can use to tip content creators.
ryandvm 7y ago
What happens when everyone makes the same choice in this prisoner's dilemma as you? Are you ready to lose all of the content that is supported by advertising (regardless of whether you view ads or not)?
- gridlockd 7y ago
  Content adapts to users that pay. Advertising is not all that lucrative, especially if you are not that big.
- cyborgx7 7y ago
  Yes. It would be a net gain if we got rid of advertising in the process.
dimino 7y ago
So you also want the media industry to die as well? Too bad, but most of us don't.
- cyborgx7 7y ago
  If the only value of media is to make you look in its direction for long enough to show you something else that you might actually spend money on, it actually has no value at all.
  - dimino 7y ago
    And I suppose adding, "...while keeping you informed about what's happening in the world" or "...while entertaining you" wouldn't matter to you, would it?
    - cyborgx7 7y ago
      If it has significant value to people, it can find a way of getting money from the people it provides value to.
ssss11 7y ago
That’s why it’s opt in.
vmurthy 7y ago
I’m somewhat in your camp. Why I’d like the ad industry to die is because they’ve collectively decided that privacy is a relic of the past. I’d rather they work with the likes of DuckDuckGo and share context based ads. Context does NOT include my personal details :)

nybble41 7y ago

So don't opt-in. There are other ways to acquire BAT and support the sites you visit in Brave besides watching ads.

cyborgx7 7y ago
No. You don't understand. It's not enough for me not to see ads anymore. I want the advertising industry to die. The entire thing. Its existence is harmful to society.
- nybble41 7y ago
  If people choose to buy BAT from exchanges rather than earn it by watching ads then content will be increasingly funded directly by payments from consumers rather than through advertising. If everyone did this then there would be a closed loop of BAT exchange between viewers and content creators (mediated by exchanges) without any ads in sight. This is an effective strategy to employ against the advertising industry if that's really your goal.
  - cyborgx7 7y ago
    No, in making provisions for the advertising industry in their business model, they are aiding its survival. I will always recommend a proper adblocker over this.
    - nybble41 7y ago
      You are of course free to do as you wish, but since you're applying "guilty by association" logic to Brave—regardless of the fact that using it without enabling the ads does absolutely nothing to help the advertising industry—I really hope that you also refuse to have anything to do with any sites that receive any of their funding through advertising. Enabling an adblocker doesn't reduce that contamination in any sense: The site is still "making provisions for the advertising industry" and "aiding its survival", far more so than Brave. Funding the site with Brave and BAT would at least offer a practical alternative to reliance on advertising. Unless, perhaps, your goal is not to destroy advertising, but rather to destroy all sites which depend on external funding and yet aren't a big enough draw to justify a dedicated subscription?
      - cyborgx7 7y ago
        >but since you're applying "guilty by association" logic to Brave That's a misunderstanding. It's not a guilty by association thing. It's that there is already a thing more in line with accomplishing my goals, since uBlock Origin has no provisions for ad companies to still make money.
- Smokey28 7y ago
  This just isn't true though. Or at least I don't see where you're coming from. You might see ads as intrusive, or getting you to spend money on something you don't want to spend money on... but that's not how many advertisers see ads. Ideally, they would only be at your attention when you want them there. If I'm looking to buy a washing machine, and I don't know where to start, advertising is one of the primary ways I get introduced to the options out there. Furthermore, ads have driven most major media from newspapers to radio to tv... and what has made them so financially accessible to most people. Maybe you can afford to pay money to every single patreon out there, but not everyone can. And imagining a world where everyone uses an ad-blocker and advertising dies means that every content creator is just going to put up a paywall, which means information will be exclusively restricted to people with money. That sounds like a fantastic future. Frankly the notion that advertising is objectively bad, or good, for that matter is reductive. You might say certain practices are good or bad, and certainly the ones we are seeing online right now are not good, but that seems to me the problem Brave is trying to solve - building an ad model for the web that actually works.
  - cyborgx7 7y ago
    I wrote down some of the many ways in which ads are a societal ill, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21528465 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21528465
    - Smokey28 7y ago
      I just flat out disagree with most of the premises you have shared here. Also I don't understand how something can be wrong or right in an 'academic sense' but fine: >They distort the product market as they favour those players with the highest marketing budget, rather than with the best product. Presumably the companies with the bigger budgets have that money to spend because they have a better product. When people buy your product, you have money to spend, and then you go and spend it on marketing and advertising (which are two separate disciplines, I won't get hung up on that but just know that using those two interchangeably betrays a lack of critical understanding). I can think of very few companies that became market leaders solely because of advertising while selling an inferior product. Beer/alcohol springs to mind, but even there I could argue that taste is subjective and that image is a huge part of what people are drinking regardless so much like fashion, customers are buying the label as much as the utility. > They distort the media market as getting people to look in your direction is the only thing that has value. Clickbait and fake-news are a direct result of advertising, and wouldn't exist without it. This is also wrong-ish. People didn't tune into a TV show because of the advertisements that aired between commercials, they tuned in because of good TV. The better the TV show, the more money they could command from advertisers because of the audience size. They wouldn't invest that money into more advertisements, they would invest it into making better TV. Now, with clickbait you have a bit of a point - but that's more of a systemic issue. When people started giving content away for free, newspapers crashed as content moved online. Desperate for an audience, advertisers used yesterday's model (look for the place with the most eyeballs) and started migrating over there. There was a period of time where buzzfeed and clickbait reigned supreme for that reason, but that's starting to change as advertisers get wiser about where they are positioning their company. Respectable products tend to dominate respectable sites and clickbaity sites get filled with less respectable companies. It's far from perfect, but again - this is about the method, not really advertising as a practice. I don't see the connection with fake-news at all. Fake news happened because people were glued to their newsfeeds. If anything advertisers are terrified of fake news because it hurts their credibility to show up next to it. > They are an attempt at manipulation. People have to constantly expend the energy to counteract that manipulation. I also believe this to be a big factor in the decrease in trust in media. Since the stuff that is meant to inform you is always surrounded by stuff trying to manipulate you, how could you ever build trust to it? Are reviews an attempt at manipulation? Maybe you think they are better because they are a third party... but at the end of the day they are just trying to tell you one product is better than another. If "attempts at manipulation" are bad, then we should get rid of all review sites. If your issue is that the company is saying their thing is best, when maybe it isn't, what company in their right mind would say "hey, our product sucks". Do you have an issue with sales or selling in general? Is the very act of getting someone to try and buy your thing a cause for societal ill? As for people constantly expending energy to counteract this manipulation, this is my least favorite line of argument around advertising. It disrespects people and treats them as weak minded simpletons who have no thoughts other than what they are told to think. At a certain point you have to respect people and their ability to make decisions for themselves.
- romellem 7y ago
  It seems obvious to me that this is an extreme stance and greatly oversimplifies things, but a couple things to note: * the global advertising industry is upwards of a $500 billion market [1] * that industry employs close to 200k people in the U.S. alone [2] I think it is safe to say that people who earn their living via the advertising industry and thus positively contribute to the economy would be a benefit to society. Of course one could still make the argument that the net impact is harmful, but I don’t think it is controversial to say that is a bold claim with many complicating factors. 1. https://www.statista.com/topics/990/global-advertising-market/ https://www.statista.com/topics/990/global-advertising-marke... 2. https://www.statista.com/statistics/186066/employment-in-us-advertising-and-related-services-2008/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/186066/employment-in-us-...
  - prewett 7y ago
    The size of an industry and the number of people that it employs is hardly a measure of how it benefits society. People are employed in the global spam, fraud, and mafia markets, and they spend their income on such wholesome things as housing, groceries, computers, expensive wine/cars/vacations, art. Doesn't mean that the industry contributes positively to society.
- tuesdayrain 7y ago
  Old man yells at clouds
  - cyborgx7 7y ago
    How old do you think I am?

asdkhadsj 7y ago

Yea, I'd be happier if there was some notion of an inherent value in my eyeballs - and then I could just put that money into the system. Eg, I pay $5/m or $15/m, whatever, and that gets split up by the number of pages I view and content I consume. I'm a firm believer that FOSS and (Internet) Content needs funding. Yet, I loathe ads. They promote (but are not solely to blame for) behavior that is a brain drain on society. Ads always seem to boil down to 90s style child cereal commercials. Loud noises and flashy attention grabbing tactics to pull you towards it within a tiny, limited window of bought attention. I'm not convinced society is better because of ads. The dystopian movies with neons signs everywhere seem shockingly accurate (and I believe are already like that in many eastern cities). I like some of Brave's attempt. At least their doing something. But Ads still seem wrong to me.

jaywalk 7y ago
You can buy BAT with a credit card and participate in Brave's system without ever seeing an ad.
- TurkishPoptart 7y ago
  I don't understand, why would I spend money on something I don't want or care about?
  - jaywalk 7y ago
    The comment I replied to said: > Eg, I pay $5/m or $15/m, whatever, and that gets split up by the number of pages I view and content I consume. That's 100% possible to do with Brave's system.
    - kxrm 7y ago
      My only issue with this, if I understand correctly, is that I must use BAT currency.
      - naasking 7y ago

arghwhat 7y ago

Yes, this is a perfectly sensible stance, which of course requires you to actively pay for content instead, either through brave or some other program. I'm sure you're not just expecting content creators to make stuff for you full-time entirely for free. Ads should die, but it requires consumers to realize that they need to pay for content one way or another.

cyborgx7 7y ago
I do pay several patreon, have automatic transfer set up for two projects, and a long standing subscription to a website I'm a fan of. But people don't need to realize anything for ads to die. All they need to realize is that they should all be using ad blockers and never ever turning it off again. Being able to make people look in your direction long enough to show them something else they might spend money on is not valuable. It doesn't need to exist.
- anchpop 7y ago
  > But people don't need to realize anything for ads to die. All they need to realize is that they should all be using ad blockers and never ever turning it off again. That isn't true at all. What about when I play a youtube video on my chromecast and it shows an ad on my TV? What happens when websites draw all their content using the canvas instead of the DOM, and adblockers don't work anymore, or websites like Hulu which already make it difficult to enjoy the content while avoiding the ads.
  - cyborgx7 7y ago
    Then getting rid of ads has to stop being a technical process but a legislative instead.
  - tssva 7y ago
    Hulu makes it very easy to enjoy the content while avoiding ads. Just pay them the ad free rate to offset their lost ad revenue.
- arghwhat 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

deanCommie 7y ago

That is just peeing in the pool. It's fine if only some of us do it (and I do as well) but it just leads to the death of free internet, and subscription models for all news sites. That might be fine for you, but don't think for a second that's not a privileged position, and if the internet moves behind a paywall that is a significant detriment to a massive class of people. Sure, your system works for you, but don't pretend like your solution scales.

alwillis 7y ago

By default, you don’t see ads; you have to opt-in. And even if you decide to never see an ad, you’ll still receive grants in BAT from time to time, which you can use to tip content creators.

ryandvm 7y ago

What happens when everyone makes the same choice in this prisoner's dilemma as you? Are you ready to lose all of the content that is supported by advertising (regardless of whether you view ads or not)?

gridlockd 7y ago
Content adapts to users that pay. Advertising is not all that lucrative, especially if you are not that big.
cyborgx7 7y ago
Yes. It would be a net gain if we got rid of advertising in the process.

dimino 7y ago

So you also want the media industry to die as well? Too bad, but most of us don't.

cyborgx7 7y ago
If the only value of media is to make you look in its direction for long enough to show you something else that you might actually spend money on, it actually has no value at all.
- dimino 7y ago
  And I suppose adding, "...while keeping you informed about what's happening in the world" or "...while entertaining you" wouldn't matter to you, would it?
  - cyborgx7 7y ago
    If it has significant value to people, it can find a way of getting money from the people it provides value to.

ssss11 7y ago

That’s why it’s opt in.

vmurthy 7y ago

I’m somewhat in your camp. Why I’d like the ad industry to die is because they’ve collectively decided that privacy is a relic of the past. I’d rather they work with the likes of DuckDuckGo and share context based ads. Context does NOT include my personal details :)