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Elaborate, please? The blockchain enables everybody to participate, earn, and support content creators in an low-friction, anonymous manner. Advertisements serv

Elaborate, please? The blockchain enables everybody to participate, earn, and support content creators in an low-friction, anonymous manner. Advertisements serve as a great way to introduce revenue into the system (by way of advertisers who wish to reach an audience). Brave pulls it all together into a single, OPTIONAL component, which guards the user's privacy and security by conducting its operation locally, on the user's device with client-side machine-learning. No red flags here.

someperson 5y ago
Brave blocks webpage's existing ads then replace the ads with their own ad network that earns the website owner Brave-money that the website owner then has to redeem. That tactic is definitely a red flag.
- jonathansampson 5y ago
  That's not how it works. Brave blocks third-party ads and trackers (which are known to be dangerous) on behalf of its users (the same users who were installing uBlock Origin in Chrome and Firefox before coming to Brave). This is a security and privacy necessity on the Web today. Users are then able to opt-in, if they like, to a novel advertising platform within the Brave ecosystem. These users can earn rewards for their attention (70% of the associated ad-revenue). Ads are displayed within Brave and on the user's desktop; ads are not displayed in any publisher-owned space (e.g. a website or YouTube channel). With these rewards, users are able to contribute to [verified] sites, channels, etc. The publisher/content-creator must already be verified to receive any rewards from users. If a user attempts to contribute to a non-verified site, the tokens remain on the user's device for up to 90 days. This isn't much different from how PayPal allows you to send money to an arbitrary email address, regardless if it is associated with a verified PayPal account or not. This model simply addresses the problem of blocking harmful ads and trackers, while offering no alternative means of supporting those same content creators.
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    We don't care what it does with the previous ad data, what's disturbing is that there is even a setting to opt-in to more ads in the first place. Many people (myself included) will be completely turned away because of that option. That's just the cost of doing business.
    - mapgrep 5y ago
      Person 1: Brave replaces existing ads, that’s bad Someone from Brave: actually we don’t replace existing ads at all, here’s why Person 2: no one cares what you do or don’t do with existing ads! I don’t have any connection to Brave but I find it odd they’ve become some kind of hate figure here on HN. Their iOS client IMO is quite good. Their privacy is miles ahead of the other options. But merely by trying to be privacy first they get crap for not always being perfect. See also: Signal, OpenPGP, Firefox.
      - smoldesu 5y ago
        > Their privacy is miles ahead of the other options. If by "other options" you're purely referring to "the 5 most popular browsers", you're mostly right. Brave still uses much more telemetry than UnGoogled Chromium and Vivaldi, so make of that what you will.
        jonathansampson 5y ago
        I reviewed Vivaldi back in 2019 on Twitter (see https://twitter.com/jonathansampson/status/1165358155922059266 https://twitter.com/jonathansampson/status/11653581559220592...), and later again for an official blog post (see https://brave.com/brave-tops-browser-first-run-network-traffic-results/ https://brave.com/brave-tops-browser-first-run-network-traff...). It was indeed much better than many of the other top browsers. Brave does, however, still come out on top when you consider Vivaldi proxies few, if any, requests to Google. On the topic of telemetry, I just updated it and launched a new window to find an immediate call to vialdi.com/rep/rep passing along 25 distinct pieces of information, including what appears to be a distinct 16-character ID (key: _id). Another 6-character ID (key: pv_id) was also passed along for the ride. I'd have to take a closer look into the traffic to determine how sticky these are to the user, device, or browser instance. Anybody interested can download Telerik Fiddler (or the HTTP Toolkit) and conduct a cursory review of the network activity as well. Vivaldi does still come out near the top of the list of browsers though. For example, they don't send keystrokes to Google or Bing behind the scenes as you type. That's a unique restraint not commonly observed in browsers today.
- huntermeyer 5y ago
  No they didn't. This is misinformation. They didn't replace ads in a webpage. They displayed ads via desktop notifications or push-notifications. The end user opts in for this.
  - jay_kyburz 5y ago
    They are just moving the ads from one place to another. Its the same thing.
    - Bantros 5y ago
      It isn't
- gr3pls 5y ago
  This is such a blatant lie. No wonder why fake news is widespread
Aaronn 5y ago
> in an low-friction, anonymous manner Ah yes completely anonymous, unless you want to withdraw https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360032158891-What-is-KYC- https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360032158891-Wha...
- gr3pls 5y ago
  It's crypto, cashing out requires identification according to government laws unless you're a money launderer.

someperson 5y ago

Brave blocks webpage's existing ads then replace the ads with their own ad network that earns the website owner Brave-money that the website owner then has to redeem. That tactic is definitely a red flag.

jonathansampson 5y ago
That's not how it works. Brave blocks third-party ads and trackers (which are known to be dangerous) on behalf of its users (the same users who were installing uBlock Origin in Chrome and Firefox before coming to Brave). This is a security and privacy necessity on the Web today. Users are then able to opt-in, if they like, to a novel advertising platform within the Brave ecosystem. These users can earn rewards for their attention (70% of the associated ad-revenue). Ads are displayed within Brave and on the user's desktop; ads are not displayed in any publisher-owned space (e.g. a website or YouTube channel). With these rewards, users are able to contribute to [verified] sites, channels, etc. The publisher/content-creator must already be verified to receive any rewards from users. If a user attempts to contribute to a non-verified site, the tokens remain on the user's device for up to 90 days. This isn't much different from how PayPal allows you to send money to an arbitrary email address, regardless if it is associated with a verified PayPal account or not. This model simply addresses the problem of blocking harmful ads and trackers, while offering no alternative means of supporting those same content creators.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  We don't care what it does with the previous ad data, what's disturbing is that there is even a setting to opt-in to more ads in the first place. Many people (myself included) will be completely turned away because of that option. That's just the cost of doing business.
  - mapgrep 5y ago
    Person 1: Brave replaces existing ads, that’s bad Someone from Brave: actually we don’t replace existing ads at all, here’s why Person 2: no one cares what you do or don’t do with existing ads! I don’t have any connection to Brave but I find it odd they’ve become some kind of hate figure here on HN. Their iOS client IMO is quite good. Their privacy is miles ahead of the other options. But merely by trying to be privacy first they get crap for not always being perfect. See also: Signal, OpenPGP, Firefox.
    - smoldesu 5y ago
      > Their privacy is miles ahead of the other options. If by "other options" you're purely referring to "the 5 most popular browsers", you're mostly right. Brave still uses much more telemetry than UnGoogled Chromium and Vivaldi, so make of that what you will.
      - jonathansampson 5y ago
        I reviewed Vivaldi back in 2019 on Twitter (see https://twitter.com/jonathansampson/status/1165358155922059266 https://twitter.com/jonathansampson/status/11653581559220592...), and later again for an official blog post (see https://brave.com/brave-tops-browser-first-run-network-traffic-results/ https://brave.com/brave-tops-browser-first-run-network-traff...). It was indeed much better than many of the other top browsers. Brave does, however, still come out on top when you consider Vivaldi proxies few, if any, requests to Google. On the topic of telemetry, I just updated it and launched a new window to find an immediate call to vialdi.com/rep/rep passing along 25 distinct pieces of information, including what appears to be a distinct 16-character ID (key: _id). Another 6-character ID (key: pv_id) was also passed along for the ride. I'd have to take a closer look into the traffic to determine how sticky these are to the user, device, or browser instance. Anybody interested can download Telerik Fiddler (or the HTTP Toolkit) and conduct a cursory review of the network activity as well. Vivaldi does still come out near the top of the list of browsers though. For example, they don't send keystrokes to Google or Bing behind the scenes as you type. That's a unique restraint not commonly observed in browsers today.
huntermeyer 5y ago
No they didn't. This is misinformation. They didn't replace ads in a webpage. They displayed ads via desktop notifications or push-notifications. The end user opts in for this.
- jay_kyburz 5y ago
  They are just moving the ads from one place to another. Its the same thing.
  - Bantros 5y ago
    It isn't
gr3pls 5y ago
This is such a blatant lie. No wonder why fake news is widespread

Aaronn 5y ago

> in an low-friction, anonymous manner Ah yes completely anonymous, unless you want to withdraw https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360032158891-What-is-KYC- https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360032158891-Wha...

gr3pls 5y ago
It's crypto, cashing out requires identification according to government laws unless you're a money launderer.