A lot of people on the internet seem to be advocating it but reading the Wikipedia article they seem to have a business model of replacing website adverts with their own. Which doesn't seem all that ethical.
The benefit would be to early investors, and they get to be in the dirty world of adtech while engaging in some ethical duck and cover. It’s nice that the default blocks ads, but we all know how easy it is to flip that switch down the line. At its core, it presents itself as a kind of profit-sharing alt-ads cum adblocker, which is supposed to be a compromise between supporing the ad model of the internet and personal privacy. In practice it seems like an ethical black hole, but one with some big names invested in it, and loads of hype.
Personally I think compromises with the ad industry only end one way, and the addition of cryptocurrency into the mix should set of alarm bells.
Maybe, but that’s not even orthogonal to my point, and unrelated to my post or this topic. I’m not going to engage in a trite debate over well-worn ideological ground in which you scream “freeloaders” and I talk about the right to fast forward through ads, or turn down the volume on the radio during ads. Instead I’ll just say that a majority of users believe that their computers are their property, and have the right to control what runs on them. This is especially true when advertisers have shown contempt for user privacy and even whether or not they deliver malware.
Beyond that, I hope that you can start responding to things I’ve actually said, instead of just responding with “pithy” and tangential one-liners. I’m not interested in an intellectually bankrupt form of posturing in place of real debate.
Sorry for nitpicking, but I just couldn't get this to leave my mind. I understand that you were going for a wordplay with "not even wrong", but I'm still trying to imagine whether there's a geometric interpretation to make sense of this.
Would this imply that the angle between the two things cannot be defined? If so, what would be a possible situation here?
I have to admit that it was just a play on words, and except for dragonwriter’s formulation I have nothing to offer on this one. On the other hand I enjoyed your comment, and didn’t find it nitpicky at all.
> but I'm still trying to imagine whether there's a geometric interpretation to make sense of this.
Well, I suppose there's a framework in which orthogonal could imply coplanar and so skew lines would.be “not even orthogonal”; particularly they'd have no contact at all irrespective of relative alignment.
Whether people who block ads on advertiser-supported websites are "freeloaders" is a worthwhile question, but "we live in a consumer-driven society buying products from companies that use part of their revenue to advertise more products to us, ergo you should not object to me blocking ads on your website" strikes me as a bit of a shaky argument.
> I’m not going to engage in a trite debate over well-worn ideological ground in which you scream “freeloaders”
You must have me mistaken for another commenter. I never said the word "freeloaders." Perhaps are you projecting?
Turning down the volume on the radio doesn't involve hijacking any DRM or ad tech. It's built into the hardware. To wit: The analogy is bogus.
Do you have the right to control what runs on your computer when you don't own the copyright? The answer to that is no. The copyright owner decides that. You can opt out by not visiting your favorite sites in the future. Please take a stand and do not visit them.
> Beyond that, I hope that you can start responding to things I’ve actually said, instead of just responding with “pithy” and tangential one-liners. I’m not interested in an intellectually bankrupt form of posturing in place of real debate.
Do you have the right to control what runs on your computer when you don't own the copyright? The answer to that is no.
This is factually incorrect, as has been pointed out elsewhere in this thread. You can do whatever you like with what’s runs on your computer, assuming that you legally acquired it. Feel free to levy a moral objection if you like, but don’t pretend that your personal hangups are reflected in law. Your right to play with something on your computer is the same as your right to remix music you own; it only ends if you try to distribute it.
I think this may be a little dismissive. I use adblockers, but it has nothing to do with revenue streams or philosophical reasons. Ad companies have time and again shown they cannot be trusted with my machine. Whether it's sticking me in a redirect loops, telling me I have a virus, redirecting and disabling the back button, vibrating my phone, making loud noises, etc etc. I'm done giving them chances until I know these problems have been solved. I understand this may harm the good actors, which is why I'm surprised these issues still exist.
You perform like fifty redirects in a row, and when you try to go ”back” it just redirects you forward to where you were. Eventually the browser hangs as you mash the back button, and the redirect chain fires off again. It’s a fucking shitty practice.
tl;dr: you can insert whatever page into the browser's history so when you click the back button the browser navigates to that specific page.
Google is working on preventing it in Chromium [1]
Internet users are entitled to all resources returned to their user agent by a request.
I know businesses want to pretend the web works like television, or radio, or newspapers, but it doesn't.
Whatever a site sends me as a response to a request is mine. It's mine. The transaction is completed, the response belongs to me and I can do whatever I want with it. I can not run the javascript. I can run my own javascript. I can mess with the HTML and CSS. I can choose not to view the ads. Hell, Brave is based on and works on this premise, it injects its own ads. They can do that. I can do that. I have no reason to do that, but I could.
That's the way the web works, has always worked, and will always work. And it's the reason ads on the internet were doomed from the start. The only reason they worked, at all, to begin with is that the public wasn't aware that ad blocking was possible, and browsers weren't capable of it, but the underlying capability was always there, it was always implicit to the way the request/response model of the web worked.
The only group acting entitled are businesses. They feel entitled to more control over the end user's experience than they have. If they want that kind of control, they can put up a paywall. Or go back to old media. Or accept the true nature of the field they're playing on, that they cannot have complete control over the end state of their content on the web. They cannot force the end user to endure their advertising if they don't want to.
> Internet users are entitled to all resources returned to their user agent by a request.
This is legally false. If a digital artist creates a painting and puts it up on their website, and you go view it, it does not become yours. The artist retains the copyright to the work, and not only is it illegal for you to then sell prints of it, but a violation of ethics, to boot.
>If a digital artist creates a painting and puts it up on their website, and you go view it, it does not become yours.
Of course the image is mine, just as an image of the painting in a newspaper or brochure would be mine, it's a copy freely distributed by the copyright owner. I'm perfectly within my legal rights to do whatever I want with it, within the confines of the browser.
I'm not claiming i have the right to sell it or anything, but I absolutely do have the right to decide whether or not it shows up.
Actually you have a lot more rights than that. Your rights stop when you want to distribute unmodified or derivative works without authorization. Nothing is stopping you from remixing ANYTHING* if you have no intent to distribute it.
*if it was legally acquired. Remixing illegal stuff would still be possession of illegal stuff.
Please stop abusing "ethics" to force your own moral framework on other people. This isn't what it is, and on top of that (given that it's different for everyone) if you need to say it the reader already knows you are wrong.
When did I mention "ethics" or any moral framework?
It's simply a matter of common sense, legal precedent and the way HTTP works.
To claim otherwise would mean companies have the right to force me not to alter the content of their responses in my browser, in order to guarantee their ads are viewed. If this were true, all browsers and many plugins would already be illegal, as would ad blockers, whose legality has been confirmed in multiple court cases.
Ethics and morality don't enter into the discussion. If I want to support a site by viewing their ads, I can. If I don't, I don't have to. The choice is mine to make. Sites depending on ad revenue, meanwhile, can try as hard as they want to convince me to choose to view their ads, but they have no legal right, nor technical ability to make me, as long as we're talking about content that can be filtered out of an HTTP response by a browser I control.
Information is free. The person using it has the obligation to be a good steward of humanity and it's use. We're getting better at it, but throwing up walled gardens is not the answer.
For me, it offers a faster browsing experience than Chrome, and privacy at least as good as Firefox.
I used to use both of these popular browsers, and now I'm all-in on Brave. Chrome is fast but has well-documented privacy issues. But even running various tracker blockers and a Pi-Hole, Chrome wasn't nearly as fast as Brave (without additional blockers or the Pi-Hole).
I like to support Mozilla/Firefox, and Firefox has been my daily driver for most of the last two decades. But it just isn't as fast as Chrome (let alone Brave). It has better privacy than Chrome, and the inimitable Tree Style Tabs, but it takes noticeably longer to open new tabs and load pages.
I moved over to Brave once they started supporting Chrome extensions. I have found that my MBP's fan kicks on much less often than before on Chrome/Firefox, and the battery lasts longer as well. While I miss the TST that I enjoyed on FF, I'm getting by with Sidewise. The inconvenience of having the tabs loaded in a separate window is massively outweighed by the speed/privacy benefits of Brave.
As for the ethics of ad-replacement, this is a bigger question. If the baseline were "everyone has ads everywhere", this could be seen as an unethical alternative. But the baseline is "many people (and presumably nearly everyone who is savvy enough to install Brave) use adblockers". So it's not like they're going from seeing ads to not seeing ads. They're going from blocking them with one system to blocking and replacing them with another system. And they can send the revenue from the replacement ads to the websites they spend time on.
The problem isn't Firefox. The problem is chrome. Since it has a biggest market share and most of the web developers use it. Websites tend to be more optimized for Chromium engine than Firefox. I moved to Firefox and Gmail and other google apps work terribly slow. I'm trying to find a new email provider now . Does anyone have recommendations?
Yeah supports all of the Chrome extensions I use, including Sidewise, Hacker News Enhancement Suite, and BeeLine Reader. I think some extensions may not work yet, but I’ve not come across any problems so far.
One interesting aspect is that they intend to integrate the ad matching & serving engine right into the browser. Thus (at least in theory) the browser can still serve "relevant" ads without exposing your clickstream to anyone. According to their materials, you'd have full control over what's collected and how it's used. It's opt-in.
IMHO The model hits the sweet spot for those who don't mind ads in principle but don't trust the ad industry.
It adds a new potential way monetize the web. Currently, the prevailing model is to offer a “free” product, where user data is being collected and sold to whoever is willing to pay.
Brave introduces the ability to pay per use and if you want to, you can opt-in to ads that are targeted based on anonymized data for targeting and you can earn BAT for doing so.
It basically changes the incentive model the ad industry and arguably a lot of the internet.
I don't like Brave's business model, but I like the browser itself. Firefox Mobile just didn't cut it to me. All I wanted was Chromium without Google, and all the privacy features[1] built-in. I'm glad such a browser exists.
I've switched from Brave to Bromite [0]. All of the same features, but no "business" involvement behind it -- just a clean Chromium with sane patches for privacy and security.
> but reading the Wikipedia article they seem to have a business model of replacing website adverts with their own. Which doesn't seem all that ethical.
It seems blindingly obvious that Brave/BAT is in seriously dangerous legal territory. I would be that very close to 0% of the money transferred by BATs has made it to the "rightful" owners, where rightful is "where people paying BATs thought they were going".
If this scheme ever gets any serious attention, positive or negative, it's going to be a spectacular implosion.
Twitter on Firefox android keeps giving me an error saying I have been rate limited and other Firefox users have reported the same. With how horrible twitter is I assume this is a problem on their side.
The “rate limited” error occurs for me on MobileSafari on iOS, so it’s not Firefox related. Reloading the page works fine. It seems to have to do with which referrer took you to Twitter.
Firefox blocks third party trackers by default. In some rate limiting implementation, this often signals a bot that don't often retain tracker cookies.
Does that happen on chrome? I wonder what would happen if you swap out the user agent and have that issue.
Edit: It's working now just fine, even if I am not signed in. Like they suggest below, it seems like that is Twitter being actively malicious to web users, and not Firefox.
For now. If the rise of Google has taught us anything it’s to analyze a business in terms of its likely future, not its present spin and PR. If all it takes to make more money is to flip a switch, then it’s reasonable to worry that such a flip is just a matter of wider adoption and time.
This is a thoughtful idea. What is the Brave endgame after they win a new browser war? Their model would encourage users to donate to spread BATs to creators, but it would be a small portion who did it. They could try to add a premium subscription, but again a minority of users would pay. Probably, it ends up with pressure to turn ads back on like the Adblock extension did, or to pay users to watch ads in a gamified way?
The alternative seems to be either ads/tracking (chrome), or directing people towards search engines owned by competitors (Firefox).
Then again, their whole tech stack is built on a competitors work too. All browsers depend so much on Google now its crazy
I’d prefer you responded to what I actually wrote, rather than a straw man I didn’t write. I can only really refer you back to my original comment, which answers the question, “What’s your point” without the unreasonable framing of my answer.
To reiterate If the rise of Google has taught us anything it’s to analyze a business in terms of its likely future, not its present spin and PR. If all it takes to make more money is to flip a switch, then it’s reasonable to worry that such a flip is just a matter of wider adoption and time.
Brave is a combination of adtech undermining other adtech, cryptocurrency, and a lot of verbiage. I feel that’s a reason to be concerned when the line between said verbiage and future profits (assuming widespread adoption rather than withering away) is the flip of a single option from “opt-in” to “opt-out”.
It may not simply take flipping a switch to make more money. As far as we all know, Google's value proposition for throwing as many ads as possible in front of us is that they have tons of personal data about their users.
Brave does not offer such value to advertisers (unless they start having people "Sign Up", which would be an effort significantly more difficult than flipping a switch), so where do you suppose the value in throwing as many ads as possible to as many people possible comes in? What value is there in showing me a browser-based ad for something completely irrelevant to me?
That aside, I responded directly to your comment, which basically says that if Organization X does something undesirable, related Organization Y would likely do it as well. On one level, I get it, it's almost agreeable. On another, it seems like you want to hold Brave accountable for the sins of Google, which is almost absurd to me. But hey, that's your right. Can you go ahead and copy/paste the comment again if you continue to disagree? I like being condescended to.
A lot of people on the internet seem to be advocating it but reading the Wikipedia article they seem to have a business model of replacing website adverts with their own. Which doesn't seem all that ethical.