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I will not use Brave because I disagree with the legitimacy it gives to ads on the web. I want an ad-free web, or at least an ads-in-anything-like-their-current

I will not use Brave because I disagree with the legitimacy it gives to ads on the web. I want an ad-free web, or at least an ads-in-anything-like-their-current-form web. If that means the web is 1000x smaller than it currently is, then fine - most of the web today is total garbage anyway. I don't care about jobs supported by ads, because they're another form of 21st century bullshit job and we can invent some other forms of bullshit job to replace those lost to an ad-free web.

fastball 7y ago
Do you believe ads should not exist in the world period? How do you justify such a broad-spanning assertion?
- sleavey 7y ago
  I did not say they should not necessarily exist, I said they should not exist in their current form. I also want to go back to the days where websites were a labour of love from individuals, not always for-profit enterprises. Ads right now are attention stealing, privacy invading monsters as a result of an arms race for users' notice. They actively harm users for profit. There are ways to advertise without harming users, and hence there is a way to make business work on the web. I will continue to block every ad I see and refuse to use websites that find ways to circumvent ad blockers until providers significantly change their behaviours.
  - jshevek 7y ago
    > Ads right now are attention stealing, privacy invading monsters as a result of an arms race for users' notice All true, and this is why I use Brave. Brave punishes privacy invading ads. If you opt in to BAT, Brave values attention and gives users control over how the attention value is spent.
    - sleavey 7y ago
      Don't get me wrong, I am not being a contrarian for the sake of it, and I'm willing to be proved wrong and would be happy to find out someone has solved this. I just can't see how - related to your point about Brave punishing privacy invading ads - forcing advertisers to behave can be done effectively. Do Brave hire an army of ad referees to check if they meet Brave's criteria for privacy invasion (I doubt it)? Does it only let through same-origin, static ads that are part of the HTML source of the site? That'd be great but I also doubt it. Do I have to trust Brave to curate the ads I am allowed to see? Because they're also profit driven and have investors to please and I would not give them my trust lightly either. I'd be interested to find out how Brave actually achieve privacy respecting and non-attention invading ads.
      - jshevek 7y ago
        Brave is open source, so their ad blocking mechanisms are transparent: https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust Here is an excerpt of the read.me: It uses a tokenisation approach for quickly reducing the potentially matching rule search space against a URL. The algorithm is inspired by, and closely follows the algorithm of uBlock Origin and Cliqz.
  - fastball 7y ago
    How do Brave's ads actively harm users?
    - jshevek 7y ago
      I would also like further explanation, since it appears the parent is criticizing Brave because it has "ads", without differentiating between the implication of different methods of delivering ads. Since Brave ads respect user privacy, it seems that this specific criticism against ads is an argument in favor of Brave.
    - anoncake 7y ago
      That's kinda the point of ads.
      - fastball 7y ago
        The purpose of ads is to harm users?
  - edjrage 7y ago
    Do you even have any idea what Brave is? It was literally made to address everything you said.
jshevek 7y ago
Do you believe that we will achieve an ad free web? I agree with your goal, but I think we should not reject improvement in the name of perfection.
BrendanEich 7y ago
Brave ads are off by default, enabled per user. It gives no legitimacy to "ads on the web". Perhaps you heard some false claim we "replace ads" on pages -- this is usually asserted without skepticism. We've never done this, we talked about doing it again only with both user and publisher opt-in, via private matching and anonymous confirmation so no remote tracking at all. Anyway, if you don't like ads on the Web, use Brave. If you want to try Brave Ads to get tokens to give back to your top sites and channels, rather than free-ride, cool. If you'd rather not try Brave Ads but want to give back, you can do that too (you have to sign up with Uphold, though; regulators do not make this easy but it's doable).

fastball 7y ago

Do you believe ads should not exist in the world period? How do you justify such a broad-spanning assertion?

sleavey 7y ago
I did not say they should not necessarily exist, I said they should not exist in their current form. I also want to go back to the days where websites were a labour of love from individuals, not always for-profit enterprises. Ads right now are attention stealing, privacy invading monsters as a result of an arms race for users' notice. They actively harm users for profit. There are ways to advertise without harming users, and hence there is a way to make business work on the web. I will continue to block every ad I see and refuse to use websites that find ways to circumvent ad blockers until providers significantly change their behaviours.
- jshevek 7y ago
  > Ads right now are attention stealing, privacy invading monsters as a result of an arms race for users' notice All true, and this is why I use Brave. Brave punishes privacy invading ads. If you opt in to BAT, Brave values attention and gives users control over how the attention value is spent.
  - sleavey 7y ago
    Don't get me wrong, I am not being a contrarian for the sake of it, and I'm willing to be proved wrong and would be happy to find out someone has solved this. I just can't see how - related to your point about Brave punishing privacy invading ads - forcing advertisers to behave can be done effectively. Do Brave hire an army of ad referees to check if they meet Brave's criteria for privacy invasion (I doubt it)? Does it only let through same-origin, static ads that are part of the HTML source of the site? That'd be great but I also doubt it. Do I have to trust Brave to curate the ads I am allowed to see? Because they're also profit driven and have investors to please and I would not give them my trust lightly either. I'd be interested to find out how Brave actually achieve privacy respecting and non-attention invading ads.
    - jshevek 7y ago
      Brave is open source, so their ad blocking mechanisms are transparent: https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust Here is an excerpt of the read.me: It uses a tokenisation approach for quickly reducing the potentially matching rule search space against a URL. The algorithm is inspired by, and closely follows the algorithm of uBlock Origin and Cliqz.
- fastball 7y ago
  How do Brave's ads actively harm users?
  - jshevek 7y ago
    I would also like further explanation, since it appears the parent is criticizing Brave because it has "ads", without differentiating between the implication of different methods of delivering ads. Since Brave ads respect user privacy, it seems that this specific criticism against ads is an argument in favor of Brave.
  - anoncake 7y ago
    That's kinda the point of ads.
    - fastball 7y ago
      The purpose of ads is to harm users?
- edjrage 7y ago
  Do you even have any idea what Brave is? It was literally made to address everything you said.

jshevek 7y ago

Do you believe that we will achieve an ad free web? I agree with your goal, but I think we should not reject improvement in the name of perfection.

BrendanEich 7y ago

Brave ads are off by default, enabled per user. It gives no legitimacy to "ads on the web". Perhaps you heard some false claim we "replace ads" on pages -- this is usually asserted without skepticism. We've never done this, we talked about doing it again only with both user and publisher opt-in, via private matching and anonymous confirmation so no remote tracking at all. Anyway, if you don't like ads on the Web, use Brave. If you want to try Brave Ads to get tokens to give back to your top sites and channels, rather than free-ride, cool. If you'd rather not try Brave Ads but want to give back, you can do that too (you have to sign up with Uphold, though; regulators do not make this easy but it's doable).