I think Brave's potentially most important (and least certain) contribution to the world is its automatic micro-payments system. It's genuinely innovative and the only viable alternative that anyone has proposed to ads-based funding for smaller sites. It's also, by nature, incredibly hard to bootstrap. But I really hope it gets real traction and ends up standardized and/or copied by other browsers.
IMO it misses the point. I don't want ads. Pay me for seeing ads may be better than just see ads but what I really want is no ads. For now I block them. This way I get to see nearly no ads. I can't get my head around why I would let some ads trough to earn some bucks. It totally missing the point.
What we really need is a way to pay for content so content creators can survive without ad revenue. The internet must transit to a market where people pay for goods and services just like on literally every other market. There is money and goods/serviced and they get exchanged. That's how it should be. Now we have ads and a third-party in between which severs itself plus another party the advertisers. Brave removes the third-party (kinda) but leaves the advertiser in the game. Why? No one needs them to be part of a goods/service <> money exchange.
There is an open W3C standard that can be used for micro-payments it's called ILP. Not bound to a currency. No token. No scaling problems because it tires to run everything "on the blockchain". It's just a protocol it can be used with any token or currency.And Payment providers must compete against each-other just like it should be in a healthy economy. (At time of writing there seem to be only one payment provider (Coil.com) but that's just because someone has to start.)
No it's not the first or only attempt at this. Time (or other metric) based funding of content has been tried several times. We spent 6-figures on experimenting ourselves with a autopayments browser extension.
The hard problem is getting people to actually pay in the first place, not how to divide up the money after. Since Brave is basically a higher-level ad network with a free browser, it's paying the users first and then taking it from them in a secondary loop. It's a combination of nice marketing and forceful control over typical ad experience.
if this kind of model works, the biggest contribution will be security. potentially , cross-site scripting could be disabled altogether if it is no longer needed to fund the web
Pro-tip: Brave has built in torrent support. You can visit any .torrent or magnet link and it will load up directly in the browser, no external program needed!
One of the serious criticisms against Brave was that they were collecting payments for sites and creators that had not signed up and who did not want to sign up. That is they were charging for other people’s content, that they don’t own, under the guise that the money went to those creators when it didn’t and wouldn’t. Seemed a pretty serious criticism to me. Has this changed?
I have been using Brave on macOS for more than 3 years now. I used Brave on Android for a while and I am currently using Brave on iOS as my daily driver. I don't use their BAT system or anything associated with that. I like their default vanilla experience and the fact that I can install Chrome plugins on Brave. I still use uBlock origin on top of their default blockers. I use the built-in Tor experience time-to-time as well.
To me, Brave is what Firefox should have been. Good UI, good defaults, fast enough, support for Chrome plugins, etc. I am slightly concerned about their future direction though (if they enforce the BAT system down users' throats).
Given there's very clear monetary incentive for the company to hype their own product, and that these stats can't be externally verified [1], this is essentially just snake oil. Personally, if anything, I find the constant forced hype across media and social media to be a red flag. If your product was really both good and honest, you wouldn't need to try to force it down people's throats.
This is the most unintentionally hilarious comment ever posted on HN. “Any good product would never need to post about themselves.” Welcome to tech startups? I guess?
I've been using it for a bit and really enjoying it. Mobile version anyways. Only downside is it doesn't seem to be able to autofill all my information for forms, so I switch back to chrome when I'm making a purchase on my phone or something like that.
Any details from verified creators or Brave directly regarding revenue? Even if it's tiny right now, it would be great to hear some data from anyone giving it a real go.
As one datapoint over last ~3 weeks or so I've accumulated 20ish BAT (~$5) from a combination of 1) ads shown to me, 2) tips from people to my twitter, 3) automatic monthly contributions from other users, presumably based on them spending time on the pages I've registered for rewards. In turn my auto-contribute settings (left at defaults) are to distribute up to 20BAT/month on sites I visit the most (e.g. DDG, HN, Github, Twitter, ...), which will happen automatically on Dec 15.
Agree with some of the other users that the tooling around the rewards is still a bit hard to navigate. There's the separate Uphold account, from which I seem to have to manually move BATs around to my browser wallet (?), I'm getting BATs from sources I don't fully understand, I don't think there is a page that just shows the timestamped deltas (debit/credit) etc.
They did an AMA recently on Reddit where they go into the payment positives in detail, of course they skipped the negatives like they are playing ads on your desktop outside of the page.
I've started accepting BAT since January, and so far has received about ~35 BAT ($9.00) on my ~1 million pageview website. I have not done anything to promote Brave on the site (basically verify the website with Brave and that's it) so actually getting paid is quite surprising.
From my previous: "We've still got BAT enabled on PortableApps.com with the standard custom Brave browser header and donation ask you setup via their program. We got 31.35 BAT (about $8.08) for around 2.7 million page views in the last month. We also got a single 0.95 BAT (about 24 cent) donation."
just a couple of bucks. you can earn from both visitors and from referral link downloads. system is kind of fun and it incentivizes you to promote browser downloads
I have it set up on Tildes (https://tildes.net) so that I can receive BAT from Brave users, but haven't really put any particular emphasis on it.
So far the site's account has a balance of 258 BAT, which should be worth about $50 USD right now. The "Brave Creators" interface is so bare-bones that I can't figure out what kind of rate that's come in at though. It says that 60.50 of it is from the "Current Period", but I don't know what that means.
Trying to set up the process to actually be able to withdraw the BAT has been annoying and has gotten hung up at multiple points with no indication of how long it'll take until it moves forward. At this point I don't even really think of it as money that I have, because I have no idea how many more steps I need to go through to be able to convert it to actual money, what that process will involve, or how many more fees will be taken on the way.
Been using it for a month. Have made a little over $2. Loving the BAT stuff.
Also loving profile switching which for some reason I never used in Chrome but now use in brave like mad because I have several clients with separate gsuite / google cloud platform environments.
I installed it on my personal laptop due to constant crashes with chrome that debug logging didn't help to solve. Brave suffered similarly so I stuck with Chrome. I do extension development so when I saw that they used the same store I was pleasantly surprised. I couldn't test my extension behaviour though, because the app it enhances was having issues.
I'll give it a go on the PC I'm using for work(family) until I upgrade. Free BAT!
I recently wanted to play an online game, but hardware acceleration on Firefox on Linux doesn't work very well (Firefox on Windows is fine though - I've used the exact same hardware to play on Windows and it was butter-smooth), so I wanted to get a Chromium-based browser for that usecase. Ended up picking Brave, and it's worked well for that.
I might have been interested, but Chrome-based is out of the question, and I'd prefer to avoid any ties to advertising too - and it's not like other options aren't available...
I've looked at verify a site that I control through Brave to start earning some BAT tokens but I'm really not to keen to have to also give PII (government photo and a selfie) to their only payment processor Upstart.
I'm not familiar at all with this company and I'd really rather not go giving them data just to earn revenue on my site that Brave has taken away by blocking ads.
Could someone who's more familiar with Upstart assuage my concerns? Are they legit, have they got a good track record?
all crypto exchanges require such documentation, or worse. you can keep the BAT there or perhaps transfer it to another exchange to exchange for another crypto. but always, regulatiosn and stuff
> As part of the Brave 1.0 launch, Brave Rewards is now available on Brave for iOS, which contributed to the app’s 27% growth in the past month.
I'm a happy Brave user but the "Rewards" are a gimmick. I've made a dollar a month at best for clicking their amazon/intel/VPN ads. But the actual browser serves its purpose well as a well supported and actively developed de-Google'd chrome with pretty good ad blocker baked in.
I've been using Brave for a while, maybe a couple of years. Its default ad blocking doesn't work 100% of the time, so I've installed uBlock Origin. I don't use the BAT functionality at all, but I think one of the main advantages to Brave (and likely any Chromium-based browser) is that you get all of the same fast, consistent rendering, plus all of the same Chrome extensions will work without any extra effort.
I recently switched to an iPhone from android. Brave seems like the only browser that allows me to block ads without some sort of external plug-in app. I miss having ublock on iOS. But brave seems to do the trick for me and its place.
Only reason I haven't switched to brave on iOS (for that free ad cash) is that using the back gesture seems to always reload the previous page, whereas I don't think that occurs in Safari.
I suppose the other reason is that it's mostly the same thing due to iOS restrictions, but I do like Brave.
Yeah, I enjoy using it but I use 4 different devices throughout the day and not having sync and the clunkiness of its sync (sometimes it doesnt work at all for me on my home network between desktop/laptop) actually pushed me back over to Firefox yesterday when I got a new laptop.
I also finally got sick of the ads popping up as system notifications, which are far more distracting to me than regular ads, so I disabled that.
[+] [-] _bxg1|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noxer|6 years ago|reply
What we really need is a way to pay for content so content creators can survive without ad revenue. The internet must transit to a market where people pay for goods and services just like on literally every other market. There is money and goods/serviced and they get exchanged. That's how it should be. Now we have ads and a third-party in between which severs itself plus another party the advertisers. Brave removes the third-party (kinda) but leaves the advertiser in the game. Why? No one needs them to be part of a goods/service <> money exchange.
There is an open W3C standard that can be used for micro-payments it's called ILP. Not bound to a currency. No token. No scaling problems because it tires to run everything "on the blockchain". It's just a protocol it can be used with any token or currency.And Payment providers must compete against each-other just like it should be in a healthy economy. (At time of writing there seem to be only one payment provider (Coil.com) but that's just because someone has to start.)
[+] [-] manigandham|6 years ago|reply
The hard problem is getting people to actually pay in the first place, not how to divide up the money after. Since Brave is basically a higher-level ad network with a free browser, it's paying the users first and then taking it from them in a secondary loop. It's a combination of nice marketing and forceful control over typical ad experience.
[+] [-] sp332|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BlueTemplar|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] buboard|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marknadal|6 years ago|reply
https://hackernoon.com/wealth-a-new-era-of-economics-ce8acd7...
The gist is that it redefines wealth from "how much people hoard" to "how much people give".
Would enable an ad-free web.
[+] [-] feross|6 years ago|reply
Click this link from Brave: https://webtorrent.io/torrents/big-buck-bunny.torrent (Creative Commons licensed)
Disclaimer: I integrated my WebTorrent library into Brave. Sharing this tip because not enough people know about this feature!
[+] [-] bufferoverflow|6 years ago|reply
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:02cd53257b68fac90489850be10691df7c42e45a&dn=The+Terminator+%281984%29+1080p+BrRip+x264+-+YIFY&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.leechers-paradise.org%3A6969&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3A80&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fopen.demonii.com%3A1337&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.coppersurfer.tk%3A6969&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fexodus.desync.com%3A6969&ix=0
[+] [-] mping|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] erentz|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anirudh24seven|6 years ago|reply
To me, Brave is what Firefox should have been. Good UI, good defaults, fast enough, support for Chrome plugins, etc. I am slightly concerned about their future direction though (if they enforce the BAT system down users' throats).
[+] [-] Etheryte|6 years ago|reply
[1] https://community.brave.com/t/why-doesnt-brave-market-share-...
[+] [-] icandoit|6 years ago|reply
You do if bad products are spending more ad dollars than you. Being good isn't enough to capture the market.
[+] [-] seibelj|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wiggler00m|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jjeaff|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ganstyles|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Elof|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] napoleoncomplex|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] karpathy|6 years ago|reply
Agree with some of the other users that the tooling around the rewards is still a bit hard to navigate. There's the separate Uphold account, from which I seem to have to manually move BATs around to my browser wallet (?), I'm getting BATs from sources I don't fully understand, I don't think there is a page that just shows the timestamped deltas (debit/credit) etc.
[+] [-] SlowRobotAhead|6 years ago|reply
https://www.reddit.com/r/BATProject/comments/7l4033/transcri...
[+] [-] sirn|6 years ago|reply
I'm using Firefox as my primary browser, though.
[+] [-] JohnTHaller|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] sam0x17|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] buboard|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _ps6d|6 years ago|reply
So far the site's account has a balance of 258 BAT, which should be worth about $50 USD right now. The "Brave Creators" interface is so bare-bones that I can't figure out what kind of rate that's come in at though. It says that 60.50 of it is from the "Current Period", but I don't know what that means.
Trying to set up the process to actually be able to withdraw the BAT has been annoying and has gotten hung up at multiple points with no indication of how long it'll take until it moves forward. At this point I don't even really think of it as money that I have, because I have no idea how many more steps I need to go through to be able to convert it to actual money, what that process will involve, or how many more fees will be taken on the way.
[+] [-] alwillis|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sam0x17|6 years ago|reply
Also loving profile switching which for some reason I never used in Chrome but now use in brave like mad because I have several clients with separate gsuite / google cloud platform environments.
[+] [-] degenerate|6 years ago|reply
Or can you only be "viewing" one profile at a time?
[+] [-] dross|6 years ago|reply
I'll give it a go on the PC I'm using for work(family) until I upgrade. Free BAT!
[+] [-] im3w1l|6 years ago|reply
Still using Firefox as my daily driver.
[+] [-] BlueTemplar|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Angeo34|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aclelland|6 years ago|reply
I'm not familiar at all with this company and I'd really rather not go giving them data just to earn revenue on my site that Brave has taken away by blocking ads.
Could someone who's more familiar with Upstart assuage my concerns? Are they legit, have they got a good track record?
[+] [-] buboard|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] glofish|6 years ago|reply
(been using it for an hour now, it is kind of neat)
[+] [-] kylehotchkiss|6 years ago|reply
I'm a happy Brave user but the "Rewards" are a gimmick. I've made a dollar a month at best for clicking their amazon/intel/VPN ads. But the actual browser serves its purpose well as a well supported and actively developed de-Google'd chrome with pretty good ad blocker baked in.
[+] [-] loh|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jayess|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nashashmi|6 years ago|reply
But it's webkit and I like Firefox.
[+] [-] rhexs|6 years ago|reply
I suppose the other reason is that it's mostly the same thing due to iOS restrictions, but I do like Brave.
[+] [-] randie63|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jayess|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onyva|6 years ago|reply
It remember being force to read about Brave in any article about the web, especially when the click bait title actually mentioned its competition.
Untrustworthy, and not just In their business model.
[+] [-] aloukissas|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hellofunk|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swozey|6 years ago|reply
I also finally got sick of the ads popping up as system notifications, which are far more distracting to me than regular ads, so I disabled that.