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Comment by eredengrin | Hacker News Reader

I don't use brave myself, but I appreciate that it's actually taking serious efforts trying to fix the problem of ads. I'm kind of a little surprise hn seems to be so blind to this issue, considering the number of people here who are employed by companies that literally live off of ads. If ads are bad and annoying (which most here would agree they are) but I still want to support certain websites (because some websites produce good content that I value), there's no convenient way to do that right now outside of allowing ads on that website, which is not particularly desirable. Brave seems to be the only one seriously trying to address that.

Do you know of any other major effort being put into alternative (convenient) mechanisms for monetization? I'd be interested in looking into it if you do, since I don't use brave (Firefox has too many useful features to me).

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I've seen a couple of comments in this direction across sites and would like to take a moment to point out that while advertisements are certainly annoying and a hassle, the root of the problem comes with the mining of behavior data that is then transformed into profile packages sold for advertising (and whatever other) purposes.

So, even if a browser is blocking ads, or changing the way ads are interacted with, the more important worry (imo) is whether the browser (or its features) are successful in blocking the behavior profile being built by aggregators such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc.

Yeah in my view there are 2 main problems with ads. One is as you say - collecting data profiles of people that are shared around with no respect for the user's preferences. The other is they are an unpleasant experience (resource hogs, obscure the content, etc). In my understanding, brave actually tries addressing both. For the issue of data collection, I believe its goal is to eventually enable (if it hasn't already) local profiling, so that you can still build profiles, but none of the data ever leaves your machine (and presumably they'd allow you to disable this feature - also it's open source so worst case you could always hack it out). For the user experience, since the ads (if you enable them) are served locally, they don't incur the same level of performance penalty as normal ads. Or (I believe) you can also just buy bat separate without ever enabling ads and use those to contribute to content creators (this is probably how I'd use it). I might have gotten a few details wrong but I think the overall direction is definitely worth exploring.

As for blocking the existing ads until the unlikely future where the brave style of ads becomes so common that the ads as we know them today entirely disappear - that's definitely a valid question. It doesn't help to be on the brave model if websites are still able to collect your data anyway. I think brave might have some special features helping obscure the data but I'm not too knowledgeable on that.

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