[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.

[BrendanEich]

Here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18156361

Why is your only recourse, on the question of how to replace ad funding and keep even just the top 10% of the web alive, to attack our motives or ethics? Better to give a plausible version of how our rejecting ads, even skipping tokens for anonymous donations it seems, and just blocking to burn the ad-funded world down a little faster, leads to a better wider world later.

[HBlix]

You seem to be conflating criticism of your actions with criticism of you personally. That’s not a game worth playing. As you said I’m questioning your motives in the context I already laid out, of existing solutions which are superior for the consumer. I’ll leave it to others who have already commented extensively to question the technical means.

It’s also worth pointing out that I’ve explained the core issue I have with your plan have nothing to do with your motives or ethics. I’m not sure how many times I need to repeat the idea that something like uBlock Origin is a superior performer, and “but the ad-supported content!” argument is unmoving for reasons I’ve already stated. It’s not that I’ve failed offered a broader perspective, it’s just that you’ve focused a lot on what you perceive as a personal attack, despite it being nothing of the sort.

[BrendanEich]

"Nothing personal", you attacked the team, not just me. If you want to do that all day long, go for it.

But what I'm asking you to do, as a better course of action, or on top if you prefer, is say what "existing solutions" are superior and why they win. We started with baseline ad blocking and some of our users, who see the ecosystem problem of free-riding (which you still dismiss), asked us to build an option for giving back. So we prototyped with Bitcoin, and when that got expensive and cut off users who could not buy it, we created the Basic Attention Token instead.

Again if you dislike our ethics, no need to rehash. But I'm still interested in how you think pure blocking, AKA "free riding", will result in a superior outcome for anyone in the long run. Publisher revenues have been falling for years, decades if you look at newspapers. How do your top ten sites keep their lights on?