Hacker News Reader

Comment by fastball | Hacker News Reader

Do you believe ads should not exist in the world period?

How do you justify such a broad-spanning assertion?

I did not say they should not necessarily exist, I said they should not exist in their current form. I also want to go back to the days where websites were a labour of love from individuals, not always for-profit enterprises. Ads right now are attention stealing, privacy invading monsters as a result of an arms race for users' notice. They actively harm users for profit. There are ways to advertise without harming users, and hence there is a way to make business work on the web. I will continue to block every ad I see and refuse to use websites that find ways to circumvent ad blockers until providers significantly change their behaviours.

> Ads right now are attention stealing, privacy invading monsters as a result of an arms race for users' notice

All true, and this is why I use Brave. Brave punishes privacy invading ads.

If you opt in to BAT, Brave values attention and gives users control over how the attention value is spent.

Don't get me wrong, I am not being a contrarian for the sake of it, and I'm willing to be proved wrong and would be happy to find out someone has solved this. I just can't see how - related to your point about Brave punishing privacy invading ads - forcing advertisers to behave can be done effectively. Do Brave hire an army of ad referees to check if they meet Brave's criteria for privacy invasion (I doubt it)? Does it only let through same-origin, static ads that are part of the HTML source of the site? That'd be great but I also doubt it. Do I have to trust Brave to curate the ads I am allowed to see? Because they're also profit driven and have investors to please and I would not give them my trust lightly either. I'd be interested to find out how Brave actually achieve privacy respecting and non-attention invading ads.

Brave is open source, so their ad blocking mechanisms are transparent:

https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust

Here is an excerpt of the read.me:

It uses a tokenisation approach for quickly reducing the potentially matching rule search space against a URL.

The algorithm is inspired by, and closely follows the algorithm of uBlock Origin and Cliqz.

How do Brave's ads actively harm users?

I would also like further explanation, since it appears the parent is criticizing Brave because it has "ads", without differentiating between the implication of different methods of delivering ads. Since Brave ads respect user privacy, it seems that this specific criticism against ads is an argument in favor of Brave.

That's kinda the point of ads.

The purpose of ads is to harm users?

Do you even have any idea what Brave is? It was literally made to address everything you said.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com