I'm a firm believer that FOSS and (Internet) Content needs funding. Yet, I loathe ads. They promote (but are not solely to blame for) behavior that is a brain drain on society. Ads always seem to boil down to 90s style child cereal commercials. Loud noises and flashy attention grabbing tactics to pull you towards it within a tiny, limited window of bought attention.
I'm not convinced society is better because of ads. The dystopian movies with neons signs everywhere seem shockingly accurate (and I believe are already like that in many eastern cities).
I like some of Brave's attempt. At least their doing something. But Ads still seem wrong to me.
The reward distributed to them is paid by you. Your balance accumulates either through opting into ads (advertisers pay you to intrude), or you can buy Basic Attention Token yourself (like via Coinbase) and top up your wallet.
Brave is doing exactly what it sounds like you want.
The audacity of so many people who feel entitled to get paid makes me so sad. I adblock, strip affiliate links, etc.
Ad revenue drives censorship. Dumbs people down, etc. The whole biz should burn down to the ground.
Your eyeballs only have value if they’re willing to look at things that other people are willing to pay to have you see. Thus ads.
I'm sure you're not just expecting content creators to make stuff for you full-time entirely for free.
Ads should die, but it requires consumers to realize that they need to pay for content one way or another.
But people don't need to realize anything for ads to die. All they need to realize is that they should all be using ad blockers and never ever turning it off again.
Being able to make people look in your direction long enough to show them something else they might spend money on is not valuable. It doesn't need to exist.
I’d rather they work with the likes of DuckDuckGo and share context based ads. Context does NOT include my personal details :)
It's fine if only some of us do it (and I do as well) but it just leads to the death of free internet, and subscription models for all news sites.
That might be fine for you, but don't think for a second that's not a privileged position, and if the internet moves behind a paywall that is a significant detriment to a massive class of people.
Sure, your system works for you, but don't pretend like your solution scales.
And even if you decide to never see an ad, you’ll still receive grants in BAT from time to time, which you can use to tip content creators.
To me the current option is no participation because I see no explicit ads. The web is pull and not push, and my browser renders whatever I want it to. As for the revenue, they can keep it for all I care, why would I want to make money browsing the web? It'd be like making money for talking a walk in the park
Yes and Brave's argument is that if everyone acted like you, the web as we know it would collapse. Perhaps it's an argument worth taking seriously. And I say that as someone who acts like you.
The only thing that would be particularly at risk is stuff funded exclusively with display ads, but where users don't care enough about it to support it. Or, put differently, we'd lose sites that people don't like much, but that survive through manipulating people into buying things. Doesn't sound like much of a loss to me.
When the Tivo was new, it was argued that it would destroy television, because people could now skip ads. 20 years later, TV is doing better than ever as a medium. Why? Because a lot of us are now paying directly for the things we like. I think the same thing would happen with the web.
So blocking ads is an effective way to enact social change? Great!
Maybe the people that rely on the ad supported, user data selling model that primarily destroys the privacy of technologically less advanced users should have thought about that before they started the invasive ad arms race?
So fewer people will make money unethically on the web. If we adopted Brave's point of view then making money from cryptolocker ransomware would be okay because only ignorant users would not have anti-virus and backups in place, so it's really the users fault.
?? I don't understand this logic or analogy even remotely. I would love to make money by doing things I already do for free
It'd be like taking a walk in the park and paying/supporting the park - by having a salesperson walking beside you trying to pitch some product - if you feel the need to.
Hosting costs money. Design costs money. Maintenance costs money.
If the internet is to stay as alive and as open/accessible as it currently is for the public at large (despite increases in censorship), there needs to be more effort put into high availability and accessibility by more people than the enthusiasts who run revenue free sites/businesses that have other revenue streams.
People have been trained not to accept paywalls. But they do tip, as we see with patreon, superchats, etc, and and they do accept some modicum of ads and freemium services.
Brave provides options for all of those things; what I like most about brave is not its ad model, but its site donation model. It’s a very direct form of person to site donations that is built to be extremely convenient. I don’t know how it’s implemented, but if it's sufficiently decentralized (which I think it is, unless the BAT crypto currency is just a distraction from some centralized mechanism required for donations), that’s a potentially very valuable/difficult to censor/easy means of direct value exchange. Plus you don’t have the privacy concerns you do with ads.
My hope is that it becomes so convenient and popular to send money to sites via Brave and potential future competitors that the ad revenue model can be mostly replaced. That might be pie in the sky, but it seems plausible to me.
I also think it’s great that users get a big chunk of ad revenue. That percentage may change in the future, but for low income people who can get a few extra bucks by browsing normally/might be less likely to use ad blockers, something like Brave seems way better than seeing ads and not getting any revenue.
> Hosting costs money. Design costs money. Maintenance costs money.
Then maybe we'll get less blogspam and have a higher signal-to-noise ratio of sites run by people who are passionate about things and know what they're doing, instead of crap trying just get clicks to get paid.
Maybe videos would be 1 minute of quality content rather than 10 minutes of "be sure to click subscribe". Etc.
* Google Chrome: mandatory
* Firefox: opt-out [1]
* Brave: blocked
That's the primary issue.
It's great that Brave is pioneering a new opt-in, privacy-respecting funding model for the web - we need innovation here - but it's a secondary issue.
[1] Thanks to Google $, slowly changing presumably thanks to forcing effects of Apple's increasing privacy defaults in Safari
So if I have a couple of PCs idling, do they show ads? If ads are shown then there is a waste that someone is paying, and publishers will complain.
Can I set 10 raspberry pi to start farming BAT?
At this point Brave should start tracking what the user is doing to see if it is convenient to show an ad and that's is where all the problems start again... user/behavior monitoring.
Is just a bad but noble idea followed by a terrible implementation. Just let it pass by...
Sure, they’ll benefit if BAT goes to the moon because part of the team’s compensation is in BAT, but that’s no different than a startup and their stock.
There are some of us that think the distraction economy is making the world a worse place.
OS notifications have a higher participation rate than side-bar ads because 1) nobody has learned to tune them out, and 2) theoretically speaking, these are the things we opted not to filter out, so we are more inclined to peek.
I know people who will stop mid sentence of an interesting conversation with you to figure out why their phone is chirping at them. I'm sure you do, too. It's painful to watch even when it's not you.
My reaction to "it's opt-in" is a little bit like my reaction to "tobacco is opt-in". It's not reassuring, maybe even a little troubling. The best reaction you can expect is, "And?"
I do, though it's rare. I've done it for comments a few times, but mostly just for low-karma threads that don't have any comments yet, where I want to see what other people have to say.
Still getting quite a few me too responses.
The only opt in part is allowing ads, which you get paid for viewing.
