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Can we not work with the Brave browser? Technologists like us and archive.org should be boycotting it. Cryptocurrency nonsense, swapping ads with their own, sol

Can we not work with the Brave browser? Technologists like us and archive.org should be boycotting it. Cryptocurrency nonsense, swapping ads with their own, soliciting donations for creators without their permission... Brave is a known bad actor in the browser market.

gojomo 7y ago
Huh? Brave is fast, open-source, & protects privacy as well or better than any other option. Brave's business-model experiments to support a tracker-free internet – like the crypto-tokens & user-agent-controlled ad-replacement – are opt-in. And further: who's better for users? Boycott Google & Microsoft, sure. But boycott tiny Brave? As Brave pushes the envelope on both privacy technology & privacy-respecting business models? That's a peculiarly self-defeating kind of righteousness.
- craftyguy 7y ago
  > Brave's business-model experiments to support a tracker-free internet – like the crypto-tokens & user-agent-controlled ad-replacement – are opt-in. Shitcoins require public, and trackable, ledgers, so you literally cannot say 'uses shitcoin' and 'tracker-free internet' in the same sentence.
  - rezic 7y ago
    Was it really necessary to use the word "shitcoins"? I'm not the one to say whether your argument is otherwise correct, but resorting to such childish naming only ends up hurting your point. Chances are people just roll their eyes and scroll on to the next comment before they even finish the sentence.
    - craftyguy 7y ago
      > Was it really necessary to use the word "shitcoins"? Yes. > but resorting to such childish naming only ends up hurting your point. Well, I'm not wrong.
      - rezic 7y ago
        Not saying you're wrong, but if your reason for commenting was to convince someone you're right, you probably ended up failing that. If you just wanted an excuse to shit on crypto then... ok.
  - gojomo 7y ago
    Each individual assertion in your comment, & your intended implication, is false. Bitcoin, & close relatives, require a public ledger, but some altcoins use other technologies to prevent a publicly-readable ledger. But, Brave uses an off-blockchain technology ('ANONIZE': https://tech.cornell.edu/built/anonize/ https://tech.cornell.edu/built/anonize/) to tally attention without per-browser/per-user tracking. So, the use of their BAT tokens to net-out rewards, even though on the public Ethereum ledger, has no contradiction with the "tracker-free internet" goal.
MacsHeadroom 7y ago
Do you really browse the web without an ad blocker? uBlock, Adblock, Ghostery etc. don't even try to compensate content creators. Calling Brave a bad actor is absurd.
- Sephr 7y ago
  Your browser vendor doesn't deserve a cut of the value of your attention/privacy, especially for an 'open source' browser. Brave's cryptocurrency scheme gives the Brave owners a 30% cut of all profits.
  - jshevek 7y ago
    Of course you are welcome to not use Brave, but who are you to decide whether I think my browser vender deserves my money (or attention-based money) for the services they provide? You literally said "Your browser vendor doesn't deserve a cut of the value of your attention/privacy". I am not 100% in favor of Brave's monetization strategy, though I'm very glad they are trying something less common. If their overall execution was more to my liking, I would gladly pay them for the service. You have no business presuming to decide for other people what they find worthy of compensation.
  - cabalamat 7y ago
    I'll decide what deserves a cut of my value, thank you very much.
    - brettz 7y ago
      Curious why you think a browser company should be acting as a middle man and taking a cut of revenue from the publisher or content creator?
      - fastball 7y ago
        Because the browser is what allows me to view that published content easily / securely / etc?
      - 7y ago
seibelj 7y ago
“Known bad actor” Jesus Christ. Didn’t know they were on the HN browser blacklist! HNers should be rooting for crypto to succeed - decentralized networks have the most promise for protecting privacy. Federated networks like email result in centralized entities - decentralized protocols like BitTorrent remain much harder to shutdown.
- Sephr 7y ago
  Crypto doesn't mean decentralized, and Brave BAT is definitely not decentralized. Edit: not exactly decentralized in practice.
  - lostmsu 7y ago
    Is not it just a token on decentralized Ethereum network? o-O
  - Karunamon 7y ago
    It absolutely is decentralized. The worst thing Brave could do if they were feeling evil is to mint a bunch of new tokens and devalue the currency, but that's it. The smart contract is in the ether blockchain forevermore and has no self-destruct function.
    - theamk 7y ago
      All Brave code comes from a single source and is controlled by a single entity. As a hypothetical example, imagine that Brave is sold, and new owners changed the code so that 50% of the tokens go to the PRESIDENT RE-ELECTION FUND, instead of the website user looks at.
      - Karunamon 7y ago
        There is no "changing the code". That's not how smart contracts work. The code[1] as it was written and deployed is on the ether blockchain and will remain on the ether blockchain in its current form so long as the blockchain remains existent. It is set in stone. Brave could make a new BAT token and point their browser to use it, but they don't get to do anything with the original code controlling the tokens everyone is already using. It cannot be disabled, modified, or deleted, by Brave Inc or by any person. [1]: https://etherscan.io/address/0x0d8775f648430679a709e98d2b0cb6250d2887ef#code https://etherscan.io/address/0x0d8775f648430679a709e98d2b0cb...
batmansmk 7y ago
If Brave is a bad actor, I cannot imagine what you think about Google.
- jshevek 7y ago
  Yes. I can see an argument favoring Firefox, but it strikes me as absurd hyperbole to frame Brave as worse than Google, Apple, or Microsoft.
  - fastball 7y ago
    Apple is a good actor when it comes to user privacy.
  - DarthGhandi 7y ago
    I block all ads and js with Firefox right now, how is that any different if not worse? No one is being compensated there at all and the site itself often can't even gather 1st party analytics.
justsee 7y ago
As a privacy-minded, ethically-motivated technologist I support Brave for their strong position on privacy - a position in which they are peerless amongst other browser vendors. I am always open to changing my mind, yet when I see the same untruths mustered to poison-the-well ('swapping ads with their own' - not true) I wonder why the same dishonest and distorted talking points come up instead of any valid criticisms. What you call 'cryptocurrency nonsense' is a model that potentially threatens to overturn Google's ad model, and with it the current ad-tech ecosystem. That obviously means there's a huge number of high-stakes players who are very keen for this particular model not to 'take' in the online world, and so we see the same untruths constantly amplified. Brave must be doing something right, and even if there's a purist's position which says their model is not the holy grail, I'd prefer innovation and disrupted business models over a continuation of the current ad-tech status quo.
- andreareina 7y ago
  > 'swapping ads with their own' - not true Only by the strictest definition of swap. They block ads and show ads from their own ad network, which they collect revenue on. That the Brave ads don't appear in the same place as the blocked ads doesn't impact the ethics of it.
  - jshevek 7y ago
    In what way is it unethical for a company who is providing me a valuable service to also give me the opportunity to opt-in to seeing ads to support that service? And in what way is it unethical for that same company to provide the service, which I desire, of blocking ads that I've already decided I don't want to see, because the people serving me those ads are violating my privacy? Many people seem fixated on trying to frame this in the most disparaging way possible, which distracts from the reality of what is actually happening here.
  - sfj 7y ago
    That's just half the story, though. They share the revenue with you which you can either keep for yourself or, manually or automatically, tip the sites you visit in the form of a cryptocurrency token.
101404 7y ago
I use Brave. No ads. No crypto. No solicitations. Here, you dropped your tin foil hat...
- jwbwater 7y ago
  That made me laugh.
lalaland1125 7y ago
I just want to point out that the cryptocurrency nonsense is particularly unethical. BAT is somewhere inbetween a Ponzi scheme and illegal security offering and serves no technical purpose other than scamming the less well informed into giving Brave money. Anyone who thinks BAT is legitimate should explain why it needs to exist and why it should be worth more than $0.
- im3w1l 7y ago
  Cryptos are the most reliable way of sending money over the internet. Traditional payment processors will sometimes seek to avoid controversy.
- SuoDuanDao 7y ago
  Because I'd like to support websites I visit without having to view ads.
onyva 7y ago
Totally agree. Plus this feature is just an “extension” in Firefox, and you don’t need to sacrifice “the future of the web” for yet another gimmick. PS the only place I hear about Brave now that their clickbait articles on tech sites all but disappeared is here. Yes. The verY sites their revenue we are suppose to want to protect so they can sell us infomercials pretending to be content. It’s obvious we can’t leave the web in the hands of corporations, neither Microsoft, or google and definitely not brave? which is ran by a morally questionable and compromised Brenden Eich to begin with.
- leshenka 7y ago
  The only "morally questionable" things he's done (that I'm aware of) are his personal beliefs, which have nothing to do with product development.
  - onyva 7y ago
    It’s not an opinion. Giving money to take away peoples human rights is not an opinion. And I’m not talking about things he said, just what he did.
- BrendanEich 7y ago
  Still growing: https://bat.watch/ https://bat.watch/. I know this grinds your gears because of an irrational animus against me, but Brave is much bigger than me now. Get over it.
  - onyva 7y ago
    Good for you. I’m perfectly rational in my insistence not to support bigots or bigotry.
buboard 7y ago
i was gonna ask who are the good actors who are helping webmasters monetize their content while being honest with their audience, and vice-versa, and without having to be a slave to google / paypal. Direct instant payments to websites is the killer feature of brave imho
samdoidge 7y ago
What is your suggestion? It is far better than Chrome from a privacy point of view, while still being useable.
naasking 7y ago
> Technologists like us and archive.org should be boycotting it. Cryptocurrency nonsense, swapping ads with their own, soliciting donations for creators without their permission... Brave is a known bad actor in the browser market. I disagree. Existing browsers are "good actors" in an online wasteland devoid of privacy [1], and Brave is a "bad actor" in this context because they're trying to disrupt this awful status quo. Per Krishnamurti, "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." So it is with the browser landscape. No doubt they will make some missteps, that's typical of any novel approach to finding a balance of privacy vs. viability of free content. The ad model is perfectly sensible in this context. [1] https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf
BrendanEich 7y ago
We've never done anything like "swapping ads with their own". Stop repeating falsehoods you should know are false by now. The tipping UX that used unverified subscribers' favicons was a mistake we fixed quickly. Your comment here looks bad-actor to me more than anything we ever did.
- eh78ssxv2f 7y ago
  > We've never done anything like "swapping ads with their own". If I use the Brave in its intended mode, then EFFECTIVELY it does swap ads. By intended mode, I mean the way Brave is supposed to be used. From [1], here are the main selling points of Brave: 1. "Block data-grabbing ads and trackers" 2. "Tip and contribute to websites directly through Brave Rewards" Turning both those options EFFECTIVELY swaps developer ads with your own ads. The web developer who spent tons of resources in creating the content is effectively at the mercy of the Brave who makes tons of money. [1] https://brave.com/ https://brave.com/

gojomo 7y ago

Huh? Brave is fast, open-source, & protects privacy as well or better than any other option. Brave's business-model experiments to support a tracker-free internet – like the crypto-tokens & user-agent-controlled ad-replacement – are opt-in. And further: who's better for users? Boycott Google & Microsoft, sure. But boycott tiny Brave? As Brave pushes the envelope on both privacy technology & privacy-respecting business models? That's a peculiarly self-defeating kind of righteousness.

craftyguy 7y ago
> Brave's business-model experiments to support a tracker-free internet – like the crypto-tokens & user-agent-controlled ad-replacement – are opt-in. Shitcoins require public, and trackable, ledgers, so you literally cannot say 'uses shitcoin' and 'tracker-free internet' in the same sentence.
- rezic 7y ago
  Was it really necessary to use the word "shitcoins"? I'm not the one to say whether your argument is otherwise correct, but resorting to such childish naming only ends up hurting your point. Chances are people just roll their eyes and scroll on to the next comment before they even finish the sentence.
  - craftyguy 7y ago
    > Was it really necessary to use the word "shitcoins"? Yes. > but resorting to such childish naming only ends up hurting your point. Well, I'm not wrong.
    - rezic 7y ago
      Not saying you're wrong, but if your reason for commenting was to convince someone you're right, you probably ended up failing that. If you just wanted an excuse to shit on crypto then... ok.
- gojomo 7y ago
  Each individual assertion in your comment, & your intended implication, is false. Bitcoin, & close relatives, require a public ledger, but some altcoins use other technologies to prevent a publicly-readable ledger. But, Brave uses an off-blockchain technology ('ANONIZE': https://tech.cornell.edu/built/anonize/ https://tech.cornell.edu/built/anonize/) to tally attention without per-browser/per-user tracking. So, the use of their BAT tokens to net-out rewards, even though on the public Ethereum ledger, has no contradiction with the "tracker-free internet" goal.

MacsHeadroom 7y ago

Do you really browse the web without an ad blocker? uBlock, Adblock, Ghostery etc. don't even try to compensate content creators. Calling Brave a bad actor is absurd.

Sephr 7y ago
Your browser vendor doesn't deserve a cut of the value of your attention/privacy, especially for an 'open source' browser. Brave's cryptocurrency scheme gives the Brave owners a 30% cut of all profits.
- jshevek 7y ago
  Of course you are welcome to not use Brave, but who are you to decide whether I think my browser vender deserves my money (or attention-based money) for the services they provide? You literally said "Your browser vendor doesn't deserve a cut of the value of your attention/privacy". I am not 100% in favor of Brave's monetization strategy, though I'm very glad they are trying something less common. If their overall execution was more to my liking, I would gladly pay them for the service. You have no business presuming to decide for other people what they find worthy of compensation.
- cabalamat 7y ago
  I'll decide what deserves a cut of my value, thank you very much.
  - brettz 7y ago
    Curious why you think a browser company should be acting as a middle man and taking a cut of revenue from the publisher or content creator?
    - fastball 7y ago
      Because the browser is what allows me to view that published content easily / securely / etc?
    - 7y ago

seibelj 7y ago

“Known bad actor” Jesus Christ. Didn’t know they were on the HN browser blacklist! HNers should be rooting for crypto to succeed - decentralized networks have the most promise for protecting privacy. Federated networks like email result in centralized entities - decentralized protocols like BitTorrent remain much harder to shutdown.

Sephr 7y ago
Crypto doesn't mean decentralized, and Brave BAT is definitely not decentralized. Edit: not exactly decentralized in practice.
- lostmsu 7y ago
  Is not it just a token on decentralized Ethereum network? o-O
- Karunamon 7y ago
  It absolutely is decentralized. The worst thing Brave could do if they were feeling evil is to mint a bunch of new tokens and devalue the currency, but that's it. The smart contract is in the ether blockchain forevermore and has no self-destruct function.
  - theamk 7y ago
    All Brave code comes from a single source and is controlled by a single entity. As a hypothetical example, imagine that Brave is sold, and new owners changed the code so that 50% of the tokens go to the PRESIDENT RE-ELECTION FUND, instead of the website user looks at.
    - Karunamon 7y ago
      There is no "changing the code". That's not how smart contracts work. The code[1] as it was written and deployed is on the ether blockchain and will remain on the ether blockchain in its current form so long as the blockchain remains existent. It is set in stone. Brave could make a new BAT token and point their browser to use it, but they don't get to do anything with the original code controlling the tokens everyone is already using. It cannot be disabled, modified, or deleted, by Brave Inc or by any person. [1]: https://etherscan.io/address/0x0d8775f648430679a709e98d2b0cb6250d2887ef#code https://etherscan.io/address/0x0d8775f648430679a709e98d2b0cb...

batmansmk 7y ago

If Brave is a bad actor, I cannot imagine what you think about Google.

jshevek 7y ago
Yes. I can see an argument favoring Firefox, but it strikes me as absurd hyperbole to frame Brave as worse than Google, Apple, or Microsoft.
- fastball 7y ago
  Apple is a good actor when it comes to user privacy.
- DarthGhandi 7y ago
  I block all ads and js with Firefox right now, how is that any different if not worse? No one is being compensated there at all and the site itself often can't even gather 1st party analytics.

justsee 7y ago

As a privacy-minded, ethically-motivated technologist I support Brave for their strong position on privacy - a position in which they are peerless amongst other browser vendors. I am always open to changing my mind, yet when I see the same untruths mustered to poison-the-well ('swapping ads with their own' - not true) I wonder why the same dishonest and distorted talking points come up instead of any valid criticisms. What you call 'cryptocurrency nonsense' is a model that potentially threatens to overturn Google's ad model, and with it the current ad-tech ecosystem. That obviously means there's a huge number of high-stakes players who are very keen for this particular model not to 'take' in the online world, and so we see the same untruths constantly amplified. Brave must be doing something right, and even if there's a purist's position which says their model is not the holy grail, I'd prefer innovation and disrupted business models over a continuation of the current ad-tech status quo.

andreareina 7y ago
> 'swapping ads with their own' - not true Only by the strictest definition of swap. They block ads and show ads from their own ad network, which they collect revenue on. That the Brave ads don't appear in the same place as the blocked ads doesn't impact the ethics of it.
- jshevek 7y ago
  In what way is it unethical for a company who is providing me a valuable service to also give me the opportunity to opt-in to seeing ads to support that service? And in what way is it unethical for that same company to provide the service, which I desire, of blocking ads that I've already decided I don't want to see, because the people serving me those ads are violating my privacy? Many people seem fixated on trying to frame this in the most disparaging way possible, which distracts from the reality of what is actually happening here.
- sfj 7y ago
  That's just half the story, though. They share the revenue with you which you can either keep for yourself or, manually or automatically, tip the sites you visit in the form of a cryptocurrency token.

101404 7y ago

I use Brave. No ads. No crypto. No solicitations. Here, you dropped your tin foil hat...

jwbwater 7y ago
That made me laugh.

lalaland1125 7y ago

I just want to point out that the cryptocurrency nonsense is particularly unethical. BAT is somewhere inbetween a Ponzi scheme and illegal security offering and serves no technical purpose other than scamming the less well informed into giving Brave money. Anyone who thinks BAT is legitimate should explain why it needs to exist and why it should be worth more than $0.

im3w1l 7y ago
Cryptos are the most reliable way of sending money over the internet. Traditional payment processors will sometimes seek to avoid controversy.
SuoDuanDao 7y ago
Because I'd like to support websites I visit without having to view ads.

onyva 7y ago

Totally agree. Plus this feature is just an “extension” in Firefox, and you don’t need to sacrifice “the future of the web” for yet another gimmick. PS the only place I hear about Brave now that their clickbait articles on tech sites all but disappeared is here. Yes. The verY sites their revenue we are suppose to want to protect so they can sell us infomercials pretending to be content. It’s obvious we can’t leave the web in the hands of corporations, neither Microsoft, or google and definitely not brave? which is ran by a morally questionable and compromised Brenden Eich to begin with.

leshenka 7y ago
The only "morally questionable" things he's done (that I'm aware of) are his personal beliefs, which have nothing to do with product development.
- onyva 7y ago
  It’s not an opinion. Giving money to take away peoples human rights is not an opinion. And I’m not talking about things he said, just what he did.
BrendanEich 7y ago
Still growing: https://bat.watch/ https://bat.watch/. I know this grinds your gears because of an irrational animus against me, but Brave is much bigger than me now. Get over it.
- onyva 7y ago
  Good for you. I’m perfectly rational in my insistence not to support bigots or bigotry.

buboard 7y ago

i was gonna ask who are the good actors who are helping webmasters monetize their content while being honest with their audience, and vice-versa, and without having to be a slave to google / paypal. Direct instant payments to websites is the killer feature of brave imho

samdoidge 7y ago

What is your suggestion? It is far better than Chrome from a privacy point of view, while still being useable.

naasking 7y ago

> Technologists like us and archive.org should be boycotting it. Cryptocurrency nonsense, swapping ads with their own, soliciting donations for creators without their permission... Brave is a known bad actor in the browser market. I disagree. Existing browsers are "good actors" in an online wasteland devoid of privacy [1], and Brave is a "bad actor" in this context because they're trying to disrupt this awful status quo. Per Krishnamurti, "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." So it is with the browser landscape. No doubt they will make some missteps, that's typical of any novel approach to finding a balance of privacy vs. viability of free content. The ad model is perfectly sensible in this context. [1] https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf

BrendanEich 7y ago

We've never done anything like "swapping ads with their own". Stop repeating falsehoods you should know are false by now. The tipping UX that used unverified subscribers' favicons was a mistake we fixed quickly. Your comment here looks bad-actor to me more than anything we ever did.

eh78ssxv2f 7y ago
> We've never done anything like "swapping ads with their own". If I use the Brave in its intended mode, then EFFECTIVELY it does swap ads. By intended mode, I mean the way Brave is supposed to be used. From [1], here are the main selling points of Brave: 1. "Block data-grabbing ads and trackers" 2. "Tip and contribute to websites directly through Brave Rewards" Turning both those options EFFECTIVELY swaps developer ads with your own ads. The web developer who spent tons of resources in creating the content is effectively at the mercy of the Brave who makes tons of money. [1] https://brave.com/ https://brave.com/