Some/Many HN commentators love what one could call the collective helplessness associated with authoritarian scientism and materialism - the idea that we are thrown into a ruthless and cold universe where life has emerged out of random and no easy solutions exist but instead only costly manipulation of small particles like genes and other molecules may safe us, but only in a distant future that we will probably never reach. Only persons of authority associated with the institutions in power may guide us to the holy land.
Due to that philosophy there are many comments discrediting possible solutions.
The decision by Apple is either based solely on making more money short-term/mid-term while ignoring a part of their customer base, or waiting for the right entry point with introduing a new bigger full screen but overall smaller model.
Many things Apple did in the early days weren't making sense from a market standpoint, like giving away software for free. At least that's what MS would have told you at that time.
That's why it's hard even for Apple to really price in the economic long-term cost of not supporting high-income and higly influental niche groups - there isn't only monocausality to consider when calculating ROI.
A lot of iphone SE users just bought it because it was cheap though. That's the "niche of a niche" comment above.
I like smaller phones, so we'll see how much people care about them now that the iphone 8 is the smallest good phone apple sells. Am hoping they do make a smaller iphone X style phone, but....we'll see.
Btw, for anyone reading this, popsockets go a long way to making larger phones more comfortable.
I will probably start using or at least trying it again when they publish version 1. For now, it's just not remotely comparable to Firefox et al. when it comes to customization, control and stability.
It's basically a chrome copy plus future abilities (for now). So Chrome is a better choice until now for me.
The fundamental question is who decides. Ideally the browser is the product, but not the user. For that, the browser needs to solve the question of the flow of money.
Using Firefox makes you the product, because Mozilla monetizes you with selling you to Google. That is not a browser that "puts you first" or promotes the "open culture of the internet".
Giving people the ability to chose whether they want to participate in the monetization makes Brave more of a browser that puts "you first".
Besides that, Mozilla is basically a company, and their non-profit organization is basically a fig leaf. Even if you don't agree with this assumption, the browser is as commercialiced as any other project, as proven by Pocket, Google search partnership and Amazon affiliate links.
The Brave browser also doesn't claim this is "what the internet is about". On the contrary, the default settings in Brave make the Web essentially non-commercial and ad-free.
Finally and philosophically, there is no collective "we" you talk about, only users who are free to chose from a variety of browsers and products.
Other than that, there is definitely some form of irony in the fact that the people on brave.com wear a cap with a corporate logo, but are implied as being free from corporate influence. The message would be more consistent if there were no logo on the cap, and one could argue this implies that Brave is at best a transition towards a better state.
> Firefox makes you the product, because Mozilla monetizes you with selling you to Google
That's hyperbole.
Firefox was the first browser that made switching search engines or dealing with multiple search engines easy. Firefox was also the first to have usable add-ons for blocking invasive ads and trackers, always promoted as the best add-ons in their addons.mozilla.org. The pro-privacy culture has basically grown on top of Firefox.
I'm using DuckDuckGo on Firefox and I installed it on iOS too, because it makes it easier than Safari to deal with multiple search engines.
As for Google Search, people forget that Google Search is first and foremost the best search engine and most people expect nothing less. And when they tried switching that default to others, people bitched and moaned about it. Google is so far ahead of everybody that for the general population it has no competition. The same reason for why Apple cannot replace Google's Search and cannot build their own search engine, so might as well make some money off of Google.
This is not selling the users to Google, this is simply providing a good user experience by default. If anybody wants to help and fight this, then the first step would be to provide a better search engine. Don't get me wrong, I like DuckDuckGo and will keep using it due to privacy concerns, but for many searches, especially local ones, the difference is night and day. Not to mention that DDG is also dependent on Microsoft's Bing and it will be a sad day when Microsoft closes access to its APIs. Because apparently it's pretty expensive to have your own web crawler ;-)
What would Google do if Mozilla blocks all ads browser wide by default? (Which they can't do adhoc because it is probably explitically forbidden in their contract with Google)
The answer will give you a clue about the question who is the product.
Irregardless of semantics, Mozilla is entirely dependent on the privacy invading ad system.
Everyone knows that default settings matter, as around 80% of users never change much in their browsers, and it is this majority user base which forms the foundation for the contracts between browser makers and search engines.
If Mozilla blocks ads by default, the question isn't what Google would do, the far better question is what will the publishers do.
If big publishers start to block Firefox's User-Agent, it's game over for Firefox. And yes, publishers are increasingly more aggressive in blocking users with ad-blockers installed.
Or did you think that the content producers will simply stand by while their revenue vanishes?
Nope, not going to happen and it will be getting worse, before it gets better. Ad-block users have been ignored only because they were a minority.
Want to bet that they'll try extending the DRM support to the HTML content itself and thus make it illegal to block ads? It's going to be fun.
> What would Google do if Mozilla blocks all ads browser wide by default? (Which they can't do adhoc because it is probably explitically forbidden in their contract with Google)
Just a few things:
1. Mozilla did explore this a number of years ago, concluded that
a. if you block all ads, you break the revenue of pretty much the entire web, so that's probably not something you want;
b. if you block all ads, you break loading of many websites, and that's not something an established browser can afford to do;
c. if you do either, websites are just going to block your browser;
2. Mozilla actually came up with ideas for blocking all ads without breaking the web, decided that there were too many variables, too many ways to break everything by accident, and did not pursue this plan – however, as far as I can tell, Brave either reinvented the same ideas or picked up that plan.
Also, to answer your specific question, Google pre-emptively reacted against any attempt of Mozilla by launching Chrome. If you recall, they launched Chrome pretty much because they could not buy Mozilla.
> Irregardless of semantics, Mozilla is entirely dependent on the privacy invading ad system.
While we live in a world where ads = privacy invasion, this doesn't have to be the case. If you look at recent versions of Firefox and ongoing projects, Mozilla has stepped up on privacy protection and keeps doing so.
Again, it's hard to do without breaking the web. But some can be done, one step at a time, and Mozilla is working on it.
> Everyone knows that default settings matter, as around 80% of users never change much in their browsers, and it is this majority user base which forms the foundation for the contracts between browser makers and search engines.
> Besides that, solving technical problems is possible if there is the will to do it.
Right now, the problem is that it breaks either the web or the browser.
The alternative currently being pursued by Mozilla (and the W3C) is WebPayments, which should pave the way for websites paid for by micropayments, rather than ads.
I disagree. I don't have anything against paid software but it's not the only possibility, a lot of the software I use are open source projects maintained by volunteers, not products. I ideologically refuse to consider that every piece of software is a product.
Now regarding Firefox things are not really clear cut, Mozilla is effectively non-profit but clearly their well being (and the salaries of the people working for it) clearly revolves around their browser having a decent market share. The whole "selling you to Google" stems from that.
> I ideologically refuse to consider that every piece of software is a product.
1. Who pays for the hosting? How do they pay for it?
2. Who pays for the site development? How do they pay for it?
3. Who pays for the site content? How do they pay for it?
The vast majority of sites out there are commercial products, in some forms or another. Even Wikipedia is, they're periodically begging for money.
Since we have this problem that running websites costs money, how are they going to pay for it? The ad model is quite reviled by techies. What's the alternative? How do websites make money to keep running?
I don't understand, are you talking about code hosting or simply just considering web services?
Regardless, hosting is a separate issue. You have open source projects who provide a piece of software that you're free to host yourself or pay somebody else to host for you. See for instance the Roundcube webmail.
It's similar to how I need to buy a computer to be able to run Emacs, that doesn't mean that Emacs itself is a product. Of course many web services are actual products and you pay for both the development and the hosting.
Here we're talking about a web browser though so the point is moot anyway.
Software is not only web sites/applications.
In that very same application domain there are pieces of software like the Apache http server. AFAIK the Apache Foundation is founded by donations.
Is httpd a product? They're not selling it and apparently they don't sell data about its users.
Ok, but my questions haven't been answered: how do we pay for websites?
There's the ad model, which people don't like, the subscription model, which almost no one uses (it's used successfully for webapps, but not by websites, there's maybe 10 or 20 successful subscription based sites in the billions of sites out there).
What else is there that doesn't involve somehow turning the browser into a product?
Putting ads in your websites doesn't turn your browser into a product any more than putting ad into a PDF turns your PDF reader into a product or getting robocall turn your phone into (more of) a product. That's completely orthogonal.
Well in the case of Brave that might not be completely true because they have this whole agenda regarding ads but that's specific to this particular browser, not a fundamental aspect of web browsing technology. ELinks is not a product because you can use it to view ads for instance.
Putting ads in my websites turns me into a product.
We need to turn this whole ecosystem on its head. How do we do that? I'd rather have the browser manage payments to the sites I use based on some usage statistics, but in this case, we still need some sort of payment system, probably centralized. It might not be turning the actual browser into a product, but it does make it put it awfully close to one.
Firefox seems like they respect the user to me. Putting Google, the most popular search engine, as the clearly visible and easily changeable default makes the most sense, in my head.
> Using Firefox makes you the product, because Mozilla monetizes you with selling you to Google. That is not a browser that "puts you first" or promotes the "open culture of the internet".
Why not? The idea of being targeted with more effective ads based on what I look at is microscopic when compared to the things that got me excited about the internet originally, and it doesn't even seem to contradict them.
Without rejecting ads outright (which is IMO a valid position), it's hard to argue against ads based on site content, anonymous user statistics, or terms of the current search.
The most objectionable thing is tracking specific users, which results in a lot of data that can be abused, and further power imbalance of companies and states vs. citizens. The latter clearly does contradict early internet ideals.
Physics is wrong on many fundamental levels, but everytime physicists find fundamental errors, they propose another entirely theoretical layer of complexity, with the "benfit" that no one is able to practically refute it.
It's not adding a layer of complexity, it's peeling off a layer of abstraction. With the "benefit" that it describes better what we observe and that it allows to successfully make new predictions.
What's your alternative to the scientific method exactly?
Physics, when practiced according to the principles of the scientific method, is never wrong (or right). Physical laws try to explain the world around us using mathematical models. Those models can be tested over a certain domain of experimental parameters D. A physicist, when speaking accurately, would never say that a physical law L is correct. They would say that L correctly describes our experiments on domain D. New or more accurate measurements can expand or shrink D, and in the worst case D can become empty. This constant refining is the essence of physics and the scientific method.
Arguing that physics is wrong implies a lack of understanding of what physics actually is.
It was "disproven" based upon a different philosophy.
You can't disprove a philosophy though, you can only try to understand different philosophical models next to each other.
The Einsteinian philosophy represents materialism and a world without meaning. It was problematic right from the start when mental gymnastics was needed to explain how energy can move through nothing, or how nothing (space) can have properties.
Funny that you mention experimental evidence, as most of physics is basically theoretical nowadays. (That's why it's called theoretical physics, dark matter included)
> It was "disproven" based upon a different philosophy.
It was disproven based on experimentation[0], no "philosophy" involved.
>The Einsteinian philosophy represents materialism and a world without meaning
There is no "Einsteinian philosophy," nor does anything in Einstein's theories relate to "meaning" or any lack thereof, in a philosophical sense. Whether you want to believe in aether, or God, or that the Machine Empire built the universe as a VR simulation, E=MC^2 remains true. It can be tested, has been tested has been proven true.
And its probably worth mentioning that the same is true for aether theory, because it also was not a philosophy, but a scientific theory (which was, as mentioned earlier, disproved by experimentation.) The universe is no more or less meaningful or materialistic either way.
>It was problematic right from the start when mental gymnastics was needed to explain how energy can move through nothing.
On the contrary, the mental gymnastics were needed to continue supporting aether theory after experiments and observations continually failed to produce any evidence of it, and the properties aether would need to have to conform to the current cutting edge of science started to become ludicrous.
>Things that don't appear logical, probably aren't.
At the time that Galileo proved that objects fall at the same rate regardless of their mass[0], the prevailing and more intuitive theory was that heavier objects fell faster. Miasma theory[0] was far more intuitive and "logical" to people than "tiny invisible monsters."[1] Newton's theories of gravitation alone couldn't account for the orbit of Mercury... but the illogical theory of relativity could[2].
Tesla was an uncontested genius, but genius isn't omniscience. Empty space does have properties (notwithstanding that the aether would have been one of them) like warping under gravity and vacuum energy[0]. Relativity, quantum mechanics, dark matter and dark energy are counterintuitive, sometimes profoundly so, but the universe isn't obliged to conform to human intuition.
All that we can say is that, as far as we know, based on observation and experimentation, the universe is not only stranger than we suppose, but still stranger than we can suppose. And that the luminiferous aether isn't a thing (although the Higgs field is probably close enough...)
The media is no longer reporting things. You can't make money with reporting. The media is actively creating narratives, and one of the narratives that people are fed nowadays is that women are victims.
Men and women are pitted against each other.
Due to the way the media has evolved people consume their own biases and most often just read the headlines.
I mean, yeah you're not wrong. I try not to be too cynical about the whole thing even if I think the narrative is suspect. Yes women and minority representation in tech is a potential issue but I really want to know more about the AI recommendation system for potential hires. Especially if it was giving out spurious recommendations.
It's amazon, I can't imagine how many millions went into something like that. We'll almost certainly not get a postmortem but it's definitely intriguing.
Brave has multiple layers to actually help content-creators. It is beyond me how anyone can frame it in the opposite direction.
Layer 1: Blocking everything that is not helpful for the user (i.e. being a browser that is a user-agent first and foremost), thus doing essentially the same as content-blocking extensions or other content-blocking browsers (Opera mini, UC)
In this way, there is nothing to be outraged about, since this is a reaction to a complete lack of respect for human dignity and the state of the web on the side of the publishers. The only thing that is parasitic are the ad-networks that pray on vulnerable people. It is easy to overlook that for years browsers have ignored the user so that many gullible people nowadays think that this is how things are supposed to be, but just like ad-tech, users can lobby against the state of things with chosing their software.
Layer 2: Allowing privacy-friendly ads, as opt-in, to help publishers get money and get free from the parasitic ad-networks at the same time
Layer 3: A future-proof patreon like payment network to help publishers survive the ad-backlash, and connect readers and publishers on a new, voluntary, respectful level while also being privacy-friendly.
Honestly I can't see how anything of this is problematic for anyone, except for Brave's rivals (Google, Facebook, Criteo, etc.)
I believe most of the FUD is, in fact, coming from those rivals.
Brave proposes cutting out a bunch of middlemen through the token market and making the browser something like an anticheat system: opt in and it does its best to serve quality ads while preventing click fraud.
There are a lot of details in the execution that matter to make this competitive, but the basic idea resolves many of the current conflicts of interest that make adtech a miserable market.
It's astounding how many willing employees Google has to comment voluntarily, out of their own awe of the mothership, in favor of anything Alphabet does. They're so many, it's like machine learning, Google barely has to try or know what's going on.
I always have to remind myself how poisoned the well of tech commentary has become with behemoths like FB, GOOG, AMZN.
While I "technically" have a conflict of interest, when brave launched I had some concerns about how and when creators were paid, and the responses amounted to brave stealing from them unless they signed up.
Unlike patreon (or Google contributor), if the page doesn't sign up, brave still replaces the ads, but they end up keeping the money.
In those cases, their business model is much closer to a Comcast than an uBlock, and it certainly appears like strong arming creators/sites into joining, or forcing them to forgo revenue and donate it to the browser. If you can't see why that would be upsetting to content creators, idk.
I think there are some subtle, but important, differences though.
Brave users by default block all ads. So those users won't see the ads on content creators sites anyway. Content creators shouldn't feel outraged towards those more than they can feel outraged about any other ad-blocking users.
Some of those Brave users might opt-in for ads that are promised not to compromise their privacy.
So I totally understand that some creators might feel strong-armed if they already use ads. But they shouldn't feel any worse than when faced with ad-blocking users. They do have the chance to opt-in and rely on privacy-respecting ads and get some revenue that they otherwise wouldn't get.
I guess if there was an alternative ad model that was less intrusive, and content creators relied on it, they might have a much stronger reason to be upset. I'm not aware of many creators that use privacy-friendly ads, and it seems like Brave is at least attempting to create this model?
No affiliation with Brave whatsoever. Only found out about it a couple of weeks ago.
Assuming I'm a creator, the ussue is that brave is monetizing my content and I get nothing unless I opt in to brave, instead of the system that I already have set up to monetize myself.
Ad blockers don't make money by replacing the ads. Brave does. That's why it's more similar to an isp hijacking ads than ad blocking, it's just happening in the browser instead of in the network.
Brave isn't making money if its users choose to block ads.
Users now have the choice to make money from opting-in to ads. But only ads that protect their privacy. Brave enables this, and takes a smaller cut than the user.
Sites choosing to monetize themselves are doing so at the expense of the user, whose privacy is compromised in the process.
I don't think Brave or the User is hijacking things here more than you can say that monetizing sites are hijacking user privacy.
Monetizing sites don't give the user the option to pay for content via other means, or ads that protect their privacy (or even the awareness of what transaction takes place). At least Brave and its users are giving sites the option to get revenue here (revenue that otherwise would be lost if users opt for ad-blocking instead).
N.B. Looking at [0], Brendan Eich stated that "We don't replace ads on publisher sites without that publisher as partner; they get 70% of the
gross revenue, user gets 15%.".
>Brave isn't making money if its users choose to block ads.
Correct. I don't disagree at all with this statement. In the context of just blocking ads, Brave is doing approximately the same thing as any number of other browsers or ad blockers which aren't really objectionable.
>Sites choosing to monetize themselves are doing so at the expense of the user, whose privacy is compromised in the process.
Sure, ok.
>Sites choosing to monetize themselves are doing so at the expense of the user, whose privacy is compromised in the process.
If as Eich claims, they have permission from all publishers, than this is more ok. But if not, the difference is that in one case, the reader, the ad company, and the publisher all get something of value (an article, money & data, money respectively). But if Brave is actually replacing ads without publisher consent, then the user and brave get something of value, and the publisher gets nothing.
>Monetizing sites don't give the user the option to pay for content via other means, or ads that protect their privacy (or even the awareness of what transaction takes place). At least Brave and its users are giving sites the option to get revenue here (revenue that otherwise would be lost if users opt for ad-blocking instead).
Depends, Brave actually explored an option to monetize in a patreon like fashion [0]. Which sounds great, but there's a huge caveat that makes me less inclined to believe Eich elsewhere. Specifically, The "Payments" tool allows any user to donate to any creator or site. Then Brave sends an email to the webmaster address for that internet site (which often doesn't match the publisher: think subdomains). Then, if people continue donating and the site owner never registers, brave will eventually just keep any money donated to the site[1].
In other words, if I run a popular hosted blog (yes these exist, and are probably some of the best candidates for patreon-like funding), I can't actually get verified because I don't control the DNS records for my site, and I will have to sit back and watch as people unknowingly donate money to Brave instead of me.
They then market this as
>Brave even lets you contribute to your favorite creators automatically
What happens to the small sites that don't track users, but display some ads to keep the servers running? Hope that they get "rewarded with BAT's accordingly to the users attention" ?
Btw, I'm guessing you are a Brave employee, that many Buzzwords in one comment would otherwise be quite astonishing, how does Brave guarantee a users privacy? I assume brave "phones home" in order to replace ads with ads Brave gets compensated for.
Also, I read a lot about a transparent way funds are distributed among publishers, where is the code?
I just see the potential, and want Brave to succeed.
> "What happens to the small sites that don't track users, but display some ads to keep the servers running? Hope that they get "rewarded with BAT's accordingly to the users attention" ?"
What happens to them nowadays, now that most users block ads? They struggle, and they will continue struggling. Brave won't change any of that.
The brilliance of creating a utility token like BAT is so that the creator (Brave) can get rich off speculation, and a horde of people will defend the creator online because they have a couple bucks invested.
It's one of the most insufferable parts of anything to do with cryptocurrency and it's why it's hard to have honest discussion.
I certainly don't think it's necessary nor useful to try and label you as a shill. It's just that BAT is one of the reasons why it's hard to take Brave seriously, and it's why you shouldn't be so dismissive of people who raise issues with Brave much less call them shills of ad-tech or rival browsers (as you did).
Layer 3 implies that there is some system that tracks user to reward content creator according. How is this not a tracking system?
Without knowing the implementation details it looks like Brave is (1) removing all the competition, (2) except the ones that play nice, (3) force content creators to buy into their system.
I think it's good that they are trying to find a solution for content creators to monetize their content. Instead on making suppositions on the OP, why not address those points? Why is using Brave not like building the tracking even further into the browser?
You can assume whatever you want, but arguing that people who disagree with you have ties to the ad-tech business is explicitly prohibited by the site guidelines.
Some/Many HN commentators love what one could call the collective helplessness associated with authoritarian scientism and materialism - the idea that we are thrown into a ruthless and cold universe where life has emerged out of random and no easy solutions exist but instead only costly manipulation of small particles like genes and other molecules may safe us, but only in a distant future that we will probably never reach. Only persons of authority associated with the institutions in power may guide us to the holy land.
Due to that philosophy there are many comments discrediting possible solutions.