"It's a scam because you're stealing from publishers and then using tokens to leverage your ill-gotten gains."
But we are not stealing from publishers, per your own agreement that users have the right to block ads. You are contradicting yourself. Anyway, this does not justify "scam", which is not the same word as "theft" if noun or "steal" if verb. Duh!
How tokens "leverage" anything (no debt, no forward market, no speculation) is beyond me, but save it.
I followed your previous link. The link immediately above is to a newer post (14 minute ago) than the one from you to which I was replying. No time travel on HN.
"Scam" (glad you looked it up) means "a dishonest scheme; swindle", i.e., someone was deceived. Whom did we deceive? You keep abusing it to mean extortion or theft, while admitting users can block without compensating anyone.
Reminder: we don't put ads on pages unless the particular publisher partners and the user agrees. No one is deceived. Since our baseline mode is just blocking, no one is owed, either.
I read every one of your comments. When you link to something I was supposed to have read before the prior reply from me to which you are responding, it's customary to link to the earlier in thread, or root of subthread -- not to your latest.
As for "dense", you still don't employ "scam" by its meaning, even after citing that meaning -- and you contradict yourself about users' right to block ads and right to donate. If users do not owe publishers anything in lieu of ad blocking, but we help users anonymously route tokens to publishers anyway, who is scammed? Answer directly.
The link was for the comment to respond to. This argument about commenting custom is completely uninteresting and off-topic. I'm leaving this as a courtesy, so you can try to think from someone else's perspective. I sincerely hope it will help you with other problems in your life.
This is the kind of comment we ban accounts for. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and don't post like this to HN in the future, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are.
Flamewars like this one are the kind of thing we don't want on HN, so please don't perpetuate them.
You're the one who complained about my replying here not there; I'm happy to drop thread etiquette but your way has nested things awfully deep, and on two subthreads. Better to stick to one, and answer the question: who is scammed? You still have not said.
I am simply trying, with no small frustration, to keep the discussion in one thread to make it easy to follow.
I'm not the one making threats of physical violence or calling someone a troll for making the same criticism that many others (including the newspaper industry) have made, a criticism that remains unanswered except with disingenuous deflections about "40%" rev share of smaller pies.
Oh, you mean my "when I was young" remark? Don't be dense, that is a memory not a threat. On the other hand, if you were in a f2f situation, you'd behave better than you are here. Give it some thought.
40% was not disingenous (we pay 70%, so you seem confused; again). It was to show that Brave users can more than pay for the cost of their ad blocking. When has a "scam" improved revenue to publishers who lost it to users, whom you agree have the right to block ads? Don't bother torturing "scam" further.
The size of the pie for adblocking users is zero. Brave's size is the number of our users who opt into the token economy times their average revenue to publishers. Which is greater than zero.
Now if you complain that it's still not enough, you are being inconsistent vs. your agreement that users have the right to block, which results in zero.
Don't shift the argument to users who never block ads. Those are not Brave users.
P.S. "in person" and "f2f" mean the same thing (face to face).
> The size of the pie for adblocking users is zero
You're changing the argument. You claimed that you were more generous than the ad networks and that publishers should choose you over the ad networks. Let me refresh your memory. "We pay publishers far more than the sub-40% they get on a good day from programmatic advertising." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18157795
That they would otherwise get zero from users of your browser is how your scam works. That's the whole point. Nobody disputes that.
> Now if you complain that it's still not enough, you are being inconsistent vs. your agreement that users have the right to block, which results in zero.
Nope. Users have the right to block. That doesn't mean that it's ethical for some middleman to step in to collect ransom from the publishers.
There's no contradiction. 70% of our premium-quality ad deals for high-end adblocking Brave users (who are off the grid but who use search and ecommerce more often than average) is > 40% of the bots and lower-value users converting via programmatic, which is in turn > 0% for pure ad-blocker free riders. Clear?
You keep abusing "scam" without saying who was deceived. No one was. Our users won't become non-blocker users (if you think so, you are deceiving yourself). But some of our users want to give back and not just free ride -- probably around half, judging from wallets as a fraction of browsers with token features.
In any event, since we agree all users have a right to block, the only relevant calculation for publishers is our something vs. the free-rider nothing. Anything positive is found money. But as I wrote just above in this reply, I bet we easily beat the average revenue from a programmatic ad slot. We'll find out, and in no way is this ongoing experiment a "scam". Our users and publishers already win, vs. pure adblockers or the truly scammy ones who take pay-to-play ad whitelisting fees.
Browser is always in the middle for users who don't curl directly. We are one among many browsers. Your last sentence is confused about who chooses browsers: the user, who has the right to block, donate, share private ad revenue, work directly with our publisher partners using the token. These are all non-scam options with growing adoption, from trials and betas to final releases and real revenue. We are working with other browsers to standardize bottom up. Ta!
