We signed up for Brave's setup at PortableApps.com after a few users asked about it. They hold your last 90 days in escrow, so you can find out how successful it is once you sign up. We were looking at around 10 cents a day for a bit under a million monthly users for that timeframe over the summer. And we can't even access it since Brave only works with one crypto provider and they aren't licensed in New York. The process was also pretty buggy and the magic link email login was clunky/kinda broken.<p><a href="https://portableapps.com/node/60580" rel="nofollow">https://portableapps.com/node/60580</a>
I really like what Brave is doing. I wish it was built on Firefox instead of Chromium. I just don't see myself leaving Firefox without major upheaval in the browser space.
I'm a publisher relying on ad revenue, and I hate Brave. It's not because it blocks my ads (I also contribute to an ad blocker list myself), but because Brave can swap my ads with its own. This is theft!<p>Brave is similar to Opera. It's not a mainstream browser, and they also want to make money. Dipping into publisher revenue and using some broken BAT crypto currency to reward publishers is not the way to do it. The currency itself is mostly useless and unstable, plus you will be making peanuts compared to even the lowest CPM country in AdSense.<p>What we need is an ad provider that provides a meaningful experience to advertisers and non-invasive ads to publishers. An entirely context-based, tracking-less, controlled (iframed and sandboxed).<p>A browser is a user-agent and it should stay that way. I like certain things Brave is doing (such as proxying Google Safe Browsing API requests), but for all this BAT nonsense, I would still stick with Mozilla.
I had never read the Brave ad model before.<p>They want to display ads while respecting user privacy, which is nice from a user point of view, but do advertisers actually want that rather than being able to target 35-40 years old in Ohio that are using shaving products twice a week ?
BAT token is tradable on exchanges, and price floats and is unstable. Donation receivers need to worry about exchange rates risk - <a href="https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/basic-attention-token" rel="nofollow">https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/basic-attention-token</a><p>How about USD or USD stable currencies for this?
I understan Wikipedia does not have ads, but other websites do.<p>In the early 2000s, toolbars that replaced a website's ads with different ads were considered malware. Instead of the website that bears the cost of delivering content getting the money, the browser is now getting the money.<p>How is Brave Browser different in this regard than those malware toolbars?
Since Brave is usually roasted around here, I just want to say thanks to the devs. I'm a Brave user and the experience is fantastic. Two things: I was a Chrome user for many years, so switching to Brave was not traumatic at all (same user experience, plugin's compatibility) and also ad blockers work as expected.
I've never pay attention to the included ad solution. Im not interested on it.
Im strictly speaking as an end user.
This apparently just means that Brave users can now donate BATs (Brave Attention Tokes) to Wikipedia using an icon in their address bar. What the exchange rate is between BATs and USDs is left artfully unstated.
- do you plan to have a simple password instead of email link?<p>- are there any brave banners i can use to promote brave?<p>- will u provide a command line tool to verify websites?<p>- why are referrals tied to channels instead of account?<p>- will you expand to micropayments?<p>- will brave always block ads everywhere or will you switch to blocking only on verified sites?<p>Some form if instant payment is sorely needed. I hope regulators can catch up with reality , or else maybe brave should move to another country<p>( it s also comical to witness the hostility of HN towards brave. Are we full of google shills here? )
Lots of specific comments here about Brave, pro and con.<p>I would like to explain where I think it fits in the larger scheme of things. There is broad agreement that the web is deeply broken, with all sorts of bad consequences, because of how web sites get their money from advertisements and selling data.<p>Now the only way this is going to get fixed, as far as I can tell, is for someone to come up with an alternative financial model that publishers will actually adopt.<p>There are many projects working on coming up with this. Brave seems to be a lot further along than anyone else, and so I hope it succeeds. Either that or that someone else does.
I switched from Chrome to Brave this week after getting overwhelmed with some of Google's recent design decisions on Chrome. The web inspector and yubikey support in Brave made the transition super easy. The adblocking works about the same as ublock did for me in Chrome so the browsing experience feels similar. Great work Brave team on giving Chrome users a privacy-friendly option to easily switch to.
Looking into this only briefly, it didn't take long to find a lot of very questionable decisions made by Brave:<p>1. They're positioning themselves as both an advertiser and a privacy advocate[1], which strikes me as more of a strategy for bootstrapping revenue than a trustworthy moral position. The <i>entire point</i> of crypto micropayments is to pay for content with crypto rather than attention/privacy. Why should I view Brave's ads rather than the other ads on the internet from advertisers who also claim their ads respect privacy? The fact that Brave has decided to get into bed with advertisers at all shows they're committed to profit, not to users: micropayments are just a way to diversify for Brave, which will quickly fall to the wayside if it fails to provide the revenue they want.<p>2. The entire concept of a Brave Verified Publisher stinks. It positions Brave as a censor. If this system takes off, then suddenly Brave has control over who gets paid for content on the internet, and can censor content they don't like. And this isn't hypothetical, <i>they plan to do this</i>: their TOS[2] explicitly contains a code of conduct which contains a long list of things they will terminate your account for: they <i>promise</i> to use their power as censors to enforce of US copyright/patent law and also a wide variety of subjective social norms. This also shows their commitment to being an advertiser rather than an application that serves users: if you're serving users then you let them pay for the content they want to pay for, but if you're serving advertisers, then you can't let advertisers brands be seen as supporting questionable content.<p>3. BAT based in Ethereum seems to be basically a way to ride the wave of cryptocurrency hype while still positioning themselves as a central authority/middleman. If they weren't trying to position themselves as a middleman, they would just make the micropayments in Ether directly, or better yet, in a cryptocurrency that doesn't have a history of forking the blockchain to fix an bug in a major users' contract[3]. If they weren't trying to ride cryptocurrency hype, they'd just allow micropayments via a much-simpler-and-more-reliable REST API or similar since they're already the central authority anyway.<p>I don't think we can trust Brave with our privacy or attention. I don't think we can trust Brave with the decision of who gets paid for content. I don't think we need Brave as a middleman to pay content publishers. I don't like the state of how content is paid for on the internet, but I don't think Brave is the solution.<p>It's disappointing to me that Wikipedia has decided to associate their name with Brave's. A big part of why I respect Wikipedia is their long-standing policy of keeping independent from advertisers, and it seems naive of them to have not realized that <i>Brave is an advertiser</i>. I can understand why Wikipedia has made this decision, but I still think it is a compromise of Wikipedia's values, and I hope they'll reverse their decision in the future.<p>[1] <a href="https://brave.com/brave-ads-waitlist/" rel="nofollow">https://brave.com/brave-ads-waitlist/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://brave.com/terms-of-use/" rel="nofollow">https://brave.com/terms-of-use/</a><p>[3] <a href="https://www.coindesk.com/ethereum-executes-blockchain-hard-fork-return-dao-investor-funds" rel="nofollow">https://www.coindesk.com/ethereum-executes-blockchain-hard-f...</a>
Brave is such a clever concept. I'm just mad I didn't think of it. But then again, they've got some heavy technical firepower behind it.<p>I think they're genuinely doing all the right things:<p>* Opt-in advertising<p>* Client-side advertising<p>* Using a cryptocoin to avoid the microtransaction payment processor problem<p>They will probably do fine having had a very successful ICO but I can't imagine anyone actually donating meaningful amounts of money to any site. After all, you can just get it for free.
Been using Brave for about 2 years now and here's the deal with BAT, Advertisers and Privacy.<p>As soon as you offer quid-pro-quo exhanges involving digital assets you open the door to the SEC/IRS. With even a modicum of success in market share Brave risks opening the door to the two most openly privacy smashing bureaucracies in financial history.<p>Brave can lament all they want but in the end digital assets will come to heel and SOX/Dodd Frank still stand.
1. Build a theme over Chromium<p>2. Add your ads and tracking system over it<p>3. Brand it as "X Browser"<p>This is not a browser, this is a skin over Chrome with a business model that's built over a crypto scam. Your army of online shills and your attempts to connect yourselves with reputable online entities such as Wikipedia won't change that fact.
Brave is a scam, with user funds being seized and converted into other currencies against their will. By issuing their own token instead of just using Bitcoin, they re-implement the same central banking system which the technology is designed to replace.
Why doesn't brave adopt a stable coin like DAI for donations? Tokens are pretty volatile and it would suck for the publisher to lose money because they didn't cash out immediately. That won't be a problem though with DAI.<p><a href="https://www.coinbase.com/price/dai" rel="nofollow">https://www.coinbase.com/price/dai</a>
Wikipedia hates cryptocurrencies they constantly delete their articles even Bitcoin was denied an article at one point. I feel Wikipedia is violating their own conflict of interest policies with this.
That's interesting and also essentially nullifies Brave's credibility as some kind of privacy browser. Either they are ignorantly unaware or they are complicit in supporting wikipedia, one of the many digital organizations that have in the last years gone full on dystopian censorship thought police, even if it is not apparent to the casual observer.<p>Case in point beyond just their close relationship and integration into censorious and authoritarian Google and Youtube, look for a link to the official government report on the definitely not muslim Bataclan attack in Paris, which details the gruesome slaughter, torture, disfigurement, dismemberment, and torment the attackers perpetrated upon their victims; which was all of course withheld from the public until it was forced into the light by the court case. You will not find a link to the report in spite of it being out for many months now, and you will be unsuccessful at adding a link to the report, let alone highlighting the brutal descriptions from the several hundred pages long report, somewhere in the wikipedia page.<p>It's full on censorship, and the most pernicious and nefarious and sick part of this digital censorship is that deletion, shadow banning, banning, or simply colluding across organizations to erase someone's digital personality and identity goes basically unnoticed by the general public that is none the wiser that someone was ushered off to the digital gulag or digital mass grave ... pooof ... that comment, information, person is gone, with not trace and no accountability or transparency.