The founder of AdBlock Plus weighs in on PPA:
Privacy on the web is fundamentally broken, for at least 90% of the population. Advertising on the web is fundamentally broken, for at least 90% of the population.
Yet any attempt to improve this situation is met with fierce resistance by the lucky 10% who know how to navigate their way around the falltraps. Because the internet shouldn’t have tracking! The internet shouldn’t have ads! And any step towards a compromise is a capital offense. I mean, if it slightly benefits the advertisers as well, then it must be evil.
It seems that no solution short of eliminating tracking and advertising on the web altogether is going to be accepted. That we live with an ad-supported web and that fact of life cannot be wished away or change overnight – who cares?
And every attempt to improve the status quo even marginally inevitably fails. So the horribly broken state we have today prevails.
This is so frustrating. I’m just happy I no longer have anything to do with that…
If brave wasn’t completely unhinged, the idea of the brave attention token was kind of a cool idea (assuming you could pay a reasonable rate and not with ads).
But yeah, I fundamentally am not OK with tracking, am fundamentally not OK with companies paying to try to manipulate me, and am fundamentally not OK with the big attack vector ads expose. I would be willing to pay a reasonable rate for quality content, but it’s so fragmented there isn’t really any way to do that, and because of the way the monetization works, a lot of that content is compromised. So the end result is I don’t contribute anything to most sites I visit because I don’t have a real way to do so, but will not watch ads.
The economics of Brave don’t work.
Pay-to-surf doesn’t work because it’s essentially a Turing test. These didn’t work in the 90s and they sure as hell won’t work today.
Paying a third party to automate donations for you introduces a trusted third party, who in the crypto world are infamous for robbing their customers. They don’t even make it to enshittification.
Brave is a scam. The CEO got kicked out of Mozilla for being a raging homophobe, and even the Bitcoin community told him to fuck off before he started a shitcoin. It’s like if you could invest in early flying machines that flapped their wings - there’s a problem and this rhymes with an answer, but it’s not even close.
I said “if Brave wasn’t unhinged”. But the core concept absolutely has merit.
There’s no inherent reason you couldn’t have sites opt in to another third party service, hosted by someone credible like Firefox, that just signed the connection as “paid”, then distributed most of the revenue to the sites, and it wouldn’t be hard for sites to take that “paid” signature and not display ads or trackers.
Look what they’re doing now. They’re using anti-adblocker tools to limit your access to the site, even though they know the conversion rate to people willing to watch ads is basically zero. If they had an option for “here’s how you can give us money”, a lot of them would take it. And there are plenty of people like me who would like to pay generally, but not dollars here and there to read single articles I have a passing interest in, and am just unwilling to allow the maliciousness (on several levels) of ads or the tracking for ads anywhere near my computer.
But it is unhinged, the concept has no merit.
If you just want automated payments, we don’t need yet another shitcoin just for that purpose. “Most” of the revenue? We don’t need a third party at all, much less one that requires trust.
The concept absolutely has merit. It’s basically what all the music platforms are. People are willing to pay for content when they don’t have to pay individually for every listen.
It cannot even theoretically happen without a third party. Someone has to accept payments from users while protecting their privacy and redistribute it for the concept to work. I don’t “just want automated payments”. I want a single payment that covers my browsing behavior per month. I wouldn’t remotely consider a service that actually did a payment per visit. They can keep earning nothing from me if they want to do that.
But you can’t already get that same music for free, like you can with website access.
If you’re deciding on tips yourself, why wouldn’t you want to automate payments, regardless of how you’d like to structure it? Since you’re already OK with crypto, you could make these payments with much stronger privacy than trusting a corporation to not sell your data.
Tipping makes sense, it’s the trusted third party and shitcoin that are the issues.
A. Yes, you can. There’s the radio and various other ad supported free channels. People pay because ads are annoying, and paying for content in a fair way is a better experience.
B. I have no interest in “deciding on tips myself”. I want the sites I visit to be compensated, without the evil of ads.
C. I have no interest in crypto. Crypto is shit with pretty close to no redeeming qualities. I have no interest, ever, in any format that resembles a transaction per visit, or any format that results in a payment trail between me and websites I visit. I want to pay, once, per month, and have that money divided among sites I visit, just like it works with music.
That’s the premise that brave got the closest to of any browser. But they’re lunatics and absolutely cannot be trusted with any information in any format. That’s what I want a Mozilla, or other organization that is actually trustworthy, to handle. Allow me to pay to remove ads, with the consent of the websites in question, and divide that money among the websites I visit, in bulk so there are no transactions between individuals and sites.
I won’t even consider paying $1/month total to sites if the transaction is to the site. It violates my privacy to do so. I would happily pay $10-20/month to all the sites I visit if it was handled by a third party in a privacy preserving way, and I’m quite confident that there are plenty of people who would voluntarily pay more than whatever the “required fee” was if there was an optional higher tier that just gave more to the websites they used.
A. Radio is much worse quality, not on demand
B. Like, an equal amount per website? Or weighted somehow?
C. How would you prevent a payment trail without crypto?
And websites are much worse quality when ad supported. It’s the same thing.
Don’t care.
By using a fucking third party. The only payment trail would be that I paid 9.99 to Mozilla once a month or whatever. It wouldn’t be to the websites. It’s not a complicated proposition. It happens all over with all kinds of other content. Brave are just the only ones who tried to do something similar in a browser.