[HBlix]

I think given what the advertising industry has been for years, it’s arguable that attempts to sustain them are fairly evil. Being able to opt-in to it is still far less laudable than promoting ad-blocking (but of course that doesn’t allow for you to go ICO and rake it in). It’s not as bad as opt-out, but it’s still wretched, and no amount of “for the content creators” hand-wringing or tokenizing changes that. I do see how blending an ICO with this has the potential to make the people behind Brave richer regardless of long-term success or adherence to current ethics.

[BrendanEich]

Nobody at Brave is getting richer right now, we are a startup. My salary walked back to late 1990s level. The tokens locked up for the team and advisors are nothing compared to years of RSUs at Google or FB.

Anyway, as the last sentence reminds, attacking us based on compensation shows a strange double standard. The huge super-surveillance companies pay people way more than we make, and they do it by raiding user privacy, page load time, radio and so battery life and data plan, and safety from malvertising.

We are out to transplant -- with user consent always, creator too if they are involved -- the necessary minimum viable ads components into a clean ecosystem, to capture some of the huge funding from ad spend ($100B in US on digital this year) and give 70% or 85% to user or user+creator. See other replies on how our ad model preserves privacy.

[HBlix]

Nobody at Brave is getting richer right now, we are a startup.

“Right now” is doing some terribly hard work in that claim.

[BrendanEich]

My Mozilla vow of poverty (look at form 990s to see what top person makes; hardly poverty but more than I ever made) is over. Anyway, the ad hominem with a double standard vs. the huge tracking-dependent businesses is a bad look. Change it.

[nostrademons]

Random Brave annoyance: when I look at the Mozilla form 990 in Brave, it prompts me to download the PDF. When I look at it in Chrome, in views it inline. I'm fairly certain Brave is capable of viewing PDFs inline; I could swear I've had some load. What gives?

https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/2014_Mozilla_Found...

[BrendanEich]

Something throws off our Muon (fork of Electron) browser, but it isn't lack of content-type: or funky content-disposition: or whatever. Good news is it works the way you expect and the way it presents in Chrome (but still via PDF.js, we are not using the 0day factory known as pdfium that Chrome uses) in brave-core. Dev channel: https://brave.com/download-dev, beta channel: https://brave.com/download-beta.

[HBlix]

It’s hard to take image advice from someone who seriously goes from accusations of personal attacks to “Change it” in the same sentence. I’ll file that next to taking conflict de-escalation tips from Linus Torvalds. More topically, I have no problem with you trying to strike it rich down the line, only with the thin veneer of altruism you seem driven to coat those motives with.

[BrendanEich]

You picked up the ad hominem axe. Are you really upset with me for my imperative-mode verb use? Ok, don't do better, if that helps. (Reverse psychology :-P.)

The question you seem to be avoiding by tone-policing in wake of attacking my motives is whether ad spend can be replaced quickly enough to save the "good" content. Perhaps it is time to let the ad-funded world burn, and rebuild afterward. I'm not yet convinced, so excuse me for trying to reform ad-spend rather than just go for baseline blocking + optional voluntary anonymous token contributions, and no other option.

[HBlix]

You picked up the ad hominem axe.

Did I really? Looking back over our brief exchange I’m not seeing it, you just seemed to use my supposed impropriety as a justification to turn this into a fight. It’s a pattern that seems to hold throughout comments on this thread when you’re questioned on the ethics or wisdom of BAT. A more cynical person would suspect that your position is sufficiently untenable that you’re employing a bit of the dead cat strategy.

[mixedCase]

How is offering a completely voluntary option to subject yourself to a more benign version of advertising than the standard, in order to fund the content you use, "wretched"?

[HBlix]

“More benign” yet still cancerous, is the answer to your question. I’ve already explained that the majority of ad-supported content is hot garbage, more clutter than content. I’ve pointed out that the ad industry has decades of questionable-at-best track record, so “wretched” naturally follows. I’ll grant that it’s less wretched than the current state of advertising affairs, yet more wretched than currently available ad blockers.

[mixedCase]

> the majority of ad-supported content is hot garbage

I cannot argue with that, I very much agree. But plenty of people not only like consuming what I deem hot garbage, they're more than comfortable supporting it via ads; something I would never subject myself to if given a chance.

But I don't believe I should be able to dictate how other people experience their content or how they fund it, and there are still mountains of ad-supported content that is actually good and that would likely be non-viable on a patronage/subscription system due to things such as their target demographics.

So, Brave seems to tick our own boxes of "no ads" and provides the option for others to subject themselves to them. Unless we're arguing for going back to the old "pre-mainstream" Internet (to which I say, there are many places for that, and the Tor network is particularly fertile for fostering such a culture) then I say the Brave model improves the situation on every front.