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The reason why “the internet is broken” is because of ads. Ads incentivize tracking and clickbait. In the end, ad companies, such as Google and Faceboook, act i

The reason why “the internet is broken” is because of ads. Ads incentivize tracking and clickbait. In the end, ad companies, such as Google and Faceboook, act in the interests of advertisers, not users. Brave is an ad company. On the other hand, companies which are supported by user donations act in the best interests of users. This includes websites such as Wikipedia and the Internet Archive. Brave does offer the option to make a “tip” to websites, but it’s hardly necessary to have Brave be the middleman for all user donations.

fastball 7y ago
You, uh, don't need Brave to be the middleman for all user donations. That's exactly why they built the whole thing on top of decentralized cryptocurrency.
- surround 7y ago
  I’m not sure how decentralized BAT is when a single entity, Brave, controls it. Like the blog said, if you donate to a website that isn’t signed up on Brave’a program, Brave keeps the donation for itself.
  - fastball 7y ago
    I can send you BAT right now, which you can then immediately sell for fiat currency, without the involvement of anything related to Brave. Brave does not control BAT – it is an ERC-20 token on the Ethereum blockchain. Do they still own much of the BAT in circulation? Yes. But other than tanking the value of the BAT you own by selling all of theirs at once (a silly thing for them to do), there isn't much power they can exert.
    - surround 7y ago
      I suppose that’s the problem, then. Would another browser use BAT? No, because Brave already owns the majority of the Daddy-O dollars.
      - fastball 7y ago
        Brave does not own the majority of BAT. At least do a modicum of research before arguing about things on the internet.
        surround 7y ago
        Ok, they own a lot of BAT, and have a strong influence on how it’s spent. They created BAT. This is the premise of the parent article.
        leoc 7y ago
        For this to be a major problem, there has to be a large group of website owners, large enough to be enticing to other browsers, who both accept tips in BAT and are reluctant to accept tips in some other, additional cryptocurrency, and Brave's owners have to be able and willing to shut other browsers of BAT tipping, no? It doesn't look likely that all those conditions will be fulfilled, even assuming that that critical mass of BAT-tip-accepting sites is coming or is already here.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
- thekyle 7y ago
  Maybe Brave doesn't technically control BAT, but last time I checked I couldn't even withdraw my BAT from the Brave Browser wallet without verifying my identity to Uphold (a crypto exchange that Brave partnered with). It also appeared to me that Brave Rewards (which uses BAT but is separate) is just a centralized website which people need to register on in order to get the money donated by Brave users.
6510 7y ago
I think FREE is the problem. Anything that is free will either find ways to make you pay for it or has other people pay for it. As a bonus you don't have any complaints either since you officially didn't pay. Is Wikimedia acting in users best interest? It really doesn't need to beg for your money but it cant get enough of your money? haha I don't know what it costs to host 250 billion page views per year but they claim 40% is spend on hosting. They have 180 million to spend so hosting would be72 million? 1 dollar would buy 1400 page views? If you simply use a crappy service, say hostinger's 1 usd per month x 12 you get 1200 GB bandwidth. Average wiki articles are 3.6 kb. That is 27 million page views. 20 000 times 1400? I'm not an expert but I imagine hosting on that scale is much cheaper. It is acting in my interest 1:20000 which is certainly better than selling my personal information to creepy faceless money men. I would much rather buy access to 250 GB worth of wiki articles for 1 euro but no one figured out the payment model. Brave does seem lovely until you see them solicit funds in other peoples name without permission. It much seems like [say] collecting funds for Greenpeace but hey! I keep an administrative chunk for myself. The puzzle is unsolved. Good luck
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- Ayesh 7y ago
  I think LetsEncrypt (ISRG) is one of the best examples when it comes to donations. They have a super small budget and a very small staff, but they single handedly made pretty much every web site today encrypted. One billion certificates issued so far, and the rate if it is only going up. If you have a budget to make some donations, please out LE on the top of the list. They are doing a wonderful job and you are will make a massive change.
- onyva 7y ago
  Free is NOT the problem. Free is the “business model” of the internet. Just because some people want to monetize it doesn’t mean we need to give up and just let them do what they want. Selling ads is not the purpose of the internet. Content created to sell ads is most of the time garbage. No chicken, no egg no puzzle to resolve.
wasdfff 7y ago
I wish there was some mechanism to pay for websites out of your monthly bill. You pay x for internet, and y% is proportionally used to pay for your visits to websites a,b,c. You wouldn’t have to pay to host your site or worry about it bogging down if its been posted on reddit or hn, if it is payed for by visiting users out of their monthly bill to their ISP.
- philwelch 7y ago
  This is called microtransactions and it’s been a dream for a long time. The fact that it wasn’t baked into the web from the outset probably means it’s less likely to ever happen, and even if it did, you’d still have the same clickbait business models so aside from the advertising itself, it wouldn’t improve matters. In fact there wouldn’t be any reason for websites not to double down and have ads anyway! Brave, ironically, is one of the few attempts to solve the microtransaction problem.
  - Beldin 7y ago
    Actually, ads are the only model of microtransactions that has worked in practice. So the good news is that there is a practical method of microtransactions! The minor downside is that is not C2B, but B2B.
    - anoncake 7y ago
      "The only <thing> that has <verb>ed" is not and never will be an argument until the end of time.
    - philwelch 7y ago
      Eh, there are online gaming microtransactions that work, too.
xixixao 7y ago
I'd like to remind everyone that we enjoy this conversation on a FREE forum, which is basically one big AD for a startup incubator company. Which I personally have no gripes with.
- bsanr2 7y ago
  I do. This is one of the few places where a tech outsider can be exposed to some of the topics that are on the minds of insiders. The caveat is that criticism of any of the conceptual bodies orbiting the starry notion of "tech startup" (social ramifications, diversity and discrimination, wealth and income, etc.) are heavily frowned upon. Now, are mods going through and sweeping away every comment that proclaims, "Tech bad."? (Mostly) no. But no one wants to bite the hand that feeds it, particularly when so many have usernames easily tied to their public personas. So it's disappointing but not surprising to see people hostile to or tip-toeing around said criticism. In any case, the basic dynamic is interesting: the less you pay for things directly, the more power you give up to those who do. The abstraction is largely symbolic for ads (consumers pay advertisers in higher product costs), but apparently where and when money exchanges hands matters to who ultimately has influence.
  - ljm 7y ago
    I think HN attracts a certain political/socio-economic bias (for better or worse) but as far as public internet forums go, it is definitely one of the better ones for high quality discussion, whether you agree with what's being said or not. I'm not sure HN would benefit from requiring a paid subscription. I think that aversion to the aforementioned criticism would be avoided even more, or otherwise replaced with sheer entitlement.
    - ohbleek 7y ago
      Are you aware of any other forums with high quality discussion? The quality of discussion here can be found occasionally in a few subreddits but they are even more niche and users have less decorum overall.
onyva 7y ago
It’s actually worse since they’re clearly promoting it claiming it’s open source and it puts privacy first, which are better selling points then the fact that if comes with a Trojan horse in form of an ad network, clearly.

fastball 7y ago

You, uh, don't need Brave to be the middleman for all user donations. That's exactly why they built the whole thing on top of decentralized cryptocurrency.

surround 7y ago
I’m not sure how decentralized BAT is when a single entity, Brave, controls it. Like the blog said, if you donate to a website that isn’t signed up on Brave’a program, Brave keeps the donation for itself.
- fastball 7y ago
  I can send you BAT right now, which you can then immediately sell for fiat currency, without the involvement of anything related to Brave. Brave does not control BAT – it is an ERC-20 token on the Ethereum blockchain. Do they still own much of the BAT in circulation? Yes. But other than tanking the value of the BAT you own by selling all of theirs at once (a silly thing for them to do), there isn't much power they can exert.
  - surround 7y ago
    I suppose that’s the problem, then. Would another browser use BAT? No, because Brave already owns the majority of the Daddy-O dollars.
    - fastball 7y ago
      Brave does not own the majority of BAT. At least do a modicum of research before arguing about things on the internet.
      - surround 7y ago
        Ok, they own a lot of BAT, and have a strong influence on how it’s spent. They created BAT. This is the premise of the parent article.
        leoc 7y ago
        For this to be a major problem, there has to be a large group of website owners, large enough to be enticing to other browsers, who both accept tips in BAT and are reluctant to accept tips in some other, additional cryptocurrency, and Brave's owners have to be able and willing to shut other browsers of BAT tipping, no? It doesn't look likely that all those conditions will be fulfilled, even assuming that that critical mass of BAT-tip-accepting sites is coming or is already here.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
thekyle 7y ago
Maybe Brave doesn't technically control BAT, but last time I checked I couldn't even withdraw my BAT from the Brave Browser wallet without verifying my identity to Uphold (a crypto exchange that Brave partnered with). It also appeared to me that Brave Rewards (which uses BAT but is separate) is just a centralized website which people need to register on in order to get the money donated by Brave users.

6510 7y ago

I think FREE is the problem. Anything that is free will either find ways to make you pay for it or has other people pay for it. As a bonus you don't have any complaints either since you officially didn't pay. Is Wikimedia acting in users best interest? It really doesn't need to beg for your money but it cant get enough of your money? haha I don't know what it costs to host 250 billion page views per year but they claim 40% is spend on hosting. They have 180 million to spend so hosting would be72 million? 1 dollar would buy 1400 page views? If you simply use a crappy service, say hostinger's 1 usd per month x 12 you get 1200 GB bandwidth. Average wiki articles are 3.6 kb. That is 27 million page views. 20 000 times 1400? I'm not an expert but I imagine hosting on that scale is much cheaper. It is acting in my interest 1:20000 which is certainly better than selling my personal information to creepy faceless money men. I would much rather buy access to 250 GB worth of wiki articles for 1 euro but no one figured out the payment model. Brave does seem lovely until you see them solicit funds in other peoples name without permission. It much seems like [say] collecting funds for Greenpeace but hey! I keep an administrative chunk for myself. The puzzle is unsolved. Good luck

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Ayesh 7y ago
I think LetsEncrypt (ISRG) is one of the best examples when it comes to donations. They have a super small budget and a very small staff, but they single handedly made pretty much every web site today encrypted. One billion certificates issued so far, and the rate if it is only going up. If you have a budget to make some donations, please out LE on the top of the list. They are doing a wonderful job and you are will make a massive change.
onyva 7y ago
Free is NOT the problem. Free is the “business model” of the internet. Just because some people want to monetize it doesn’t mean we need to give up and just let them do what they want. Selling ads is not the purpose of the internet. Content created to sell ads is most of the time garbage. No chicken, no egg no puzzle to resolve.

wasdfff 7y ago

I wish there was some mechanism to pay for websites out of your monthly bill. You pay x for internet, and y% is proportionally used to pay for your visits to websites a,b,c. You wouldn’t have to pay to host your site or worry about it bogging down if its been posted on reddit or hn, if it is payed for by visiting users out of their monthly bill to their ISP.

philwelch 7y ago
This is called microtransactions and it’s been a dream for a long time. The fact that it wasn’t baked into the web from the outset probably means it’s less likely to ever happen, and even if it did, you’d still have the same clickbait business models so aside from the advertising itself, it wouldn’t improve matters. In fact there wouldn’t be any reason for websites not to double down and have ads anyway! Brave, ironically, is one of the few attempts to solve the microtransaction problem.
- Beldin 7y ago
  Actually, ads are the only model of microtransactions that has worked in practice. So the good news is that there is a practical method of microtransactions! The minor downside is that is not C2B, but B2B.
  - anoncake 7y ago
    "The only <thing> that has <verb>ed" is not and never will be an argument until the end of time.
  - philwelch 7y ago
    Eh, there are online gaming microtransactions that work, too.

xixixao 7y ago

I'd like to remind everyone that we enjoy this conversation on a FREE forum, which is basically one big AD for a startup incubator company. Which I personally have no gripes with.

bsanr2 7y ago
I do. This is one of the few places where a tech outsider can be exposed to some of the topics that are on the minds of insiders. The caveat is that criticism of any of the conceptual bodies orbiting the starry notion of "tech startup" (social ramifications, diversity and discrimination, wealth and income, etc.) are heavily frowned upon. Now, are mods going through and sweeping away every comment that proclaims, "Tech bad."? (Mostly) no. But no one wants to bite the hand that feeds it, particularly when so many have usernames easily tied to their public personas. So it's disappointing but not surprising to see people hostile to or tip-toeing around said criticism. In any case, the basic dynamic is interesting: the less you pay for things directly, the more power you give up to those who do. The abstraction is largely symbolic for ads (consumers pay advertisers in higher product costs), but apparently where and when money exchanges hands matters to who ultimately has influence.
- ljm 7y ago
  I think HN attracts a certain political/socio-economic bias (for better or worse) but as far as public internet forums go, it is definitely one of the better ones for high quality discussion, whether you agree with what's being said or not. I'm not sure HN would benefit from requiring a paid subscription. I think that aversion to the aforementioned criticism would be avoided even more, or otherwise replaced with sheer entitlement.
  - ohbleek 7y ago
    Are you aware of any other forums with high quality discussion? The quality of discussion here can be found occasionally in a few subreddits but they are even more niche and users have less decorum overall.

onyva 7y ago

It’s actually worse since they’re clearly promoting it claiming it’s open source and it puts privacy first, which are better selling points then the fact that if comes with a Trojan horse in form of an ad network, clearly.