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…
On one hand, hosting content online isnt free, so there should be some form of subsidization to offset that. But I feel like selling my privacy to massive firms so that they can analyze my habits to serve me ads about things I would be statistically more likely to buy is a bad solution to this problem.
I dont have a good fix, as the only 2 alternatives that seem to show up are paid subscriptions and decentralization. Which are both useful options, but not one that fits all cases.
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.
Except there are tons of alternatives that actually work. I watch plenty of YT videos with paid sponsors and if it’s done well, I don’t skip the sections because they are interesting.
What people dislike is obnoxious advertising, not advertising per se. Unfortunately, most advertising is obnoxious.
In other words, reality has already shown us what is possible. But it would probably reduce certain types of ad revenue, and big ad companies (i.e., Google) don’t like that.
And also, these sponsors should be at least somewhat relevant to you (ofc does not always mean it is.) ex. I watch The Linux Experiment channel, and he has Tuxedo Computers as a sponsor, who make hardware for Linux. Perfect match.
Other example is on mozilla’s developer platform (developer.mozilla.org), where the ads are not intrusive plus these are relevant for developers.
I just dont understand why cant we have these types of ads, instead of the tracking bullshit we have currently.
I feel that this money should be coming from what I pay my ISP. Most of that infrastructure was built with public funds and it does not cost the 180$ I’m paying per month to keep the lights on.
I mean, that’s just your ISP ripping you off. They would just increase prices even more, if they’d have to give some of it to webpages.
Yeah, I know they are. My point is, I pay for internet acces each month. I’d like that to include full access to all the internet has to offer. If that were the case I feel that what I’m paying currently would be a fair price. This should be what pays for all these services and and should cover running all the stuff if each and every company wasn’t as greedy.
Basically if we strip away all the CEOs and shareholders, then each household paying for internet access should be more then enough to run it.
But I feel like selling my privacy to massive firms so that they can analyze my habits to serve me ads about things I would be statistically more likely to buy is a bad solution to this problem.
That’s why they’re looking for an alternative solution, no? As I understand it, this only tells advertisers which ads get clicked on how often, without sharing any data about you specifically.
You’re criticizing advertising in general and looking for a “fix” which does not involve advertising of any kind.
What Mozilla is doing here tries to address your critique of advertising. It tries to fix the system that’s in place. Obviously, we’ll have to see, if it works out, but I don’t feel like it’s that different from your vision.
