So, his homophobic donations aside, because that’s a problem I have but not the biggest…
This is the old “Borrow someone’s revenue source and sell it back to them” methodology at play. Ads are dangerous, and annoying, and frustrating, and they are ALSO the choice of the people that put up the website. If you as a user don’t want to see ads, and you ad block, that’s your choice. If Brave just did ad blocking, I’d be okay with it.
But it doesn’t. It does ad blocking, and then inserts its own ads. This means that Brave now decides what ads the users see for the given website, not the actual website. Deals that the website made with other people don’t matter, they don’t get a say, and Brave decides what appears on the website.
Of course, then Brave says “Yes, we do, but you can work with us and we’ll pay you for the ads and take a cut ourselves and you can choose what ads display! OR users can opt out of ads and you can just get THAT money! Isn’t that great!”
It would be, except, I’m not browsing to sites for the ads. I’m browsing to sites for the content. And the content is paid for by the ads. So when Brave cuts out ads and puts their own in, how am I promised that the right people are getting compensated for those ads? What stops Brave from just taking the money and running?
Replacing one unethical situation with an entirely different unethical situation is not acceptable.
Point taken! But I think it would show meaningful contrition to do something pro-QUILTBAG after being a public homophobe.
Depending on whether your profile pic is ironic or not, we might see eye-to-eye on whether private property is theft, but I don’t think it’s necessarily exploitative of one’s customers to start a business.
So, nothing from Apple, Microsoft, Google, Dell, etc?
AFAIK, he doesn’t think he did anything wrong and sees himself as acting on his religious beliefs. He’s not issued any apologies for donating to any political campaigns and, if he hasn’t done so yet, I would question whether he ever will. He’s not contrite because that would require him to think he did something wrong.
unless i’ve misunderstood their business, which is v possible, the plan is to compensate the content creators whos ads are replaced, either through a cut of the new ad profits or some kind of direct payment. which would necessarily require them to keep track of whatever weird shit you been looking at
No, it would require them to keep track of the ad that came down the wire and what site it is for. Doesn’t mean your person information would need to be in the mix.
Except he is running Brave as an open source project, I believe. Which means the browser cannot store the knowledge of what you paid for or not without sharing that with a central server, which means that the server giving the ads must have a way to tie the browser to the user.
Otherwise he loses HIS revenue stream when people just turn off the ads entirely.
I don’t see replacing ads with different ads as being any kind of meaningful improvement. I’ll continue to try to visit sites with the least intrusive ads. What we need are independent ratings of sites’ rampant dumb-fuckery. Then we can vote with our feet.
I don’t mind “normal” ads. They’ve been in newspapers since forever.
Why are you bringing me, personally, into this and what’s that have to do with the software his company makes?
This isn’t about me and I’m not going to play that game. I get that you’re new here but that isn’t the kind of thing that’s going to go over well on this site. Let’s keep it out of the dirt.
I’m all for social shunning and the like but, yeah, I don’t think having horrible political opinions, even homophobia or racism, should mean you aren’t allowed to have a job and provide for your family.
This really has nothing to do with Brave’s browser or the legal threats against it though. It is sad that people have to take this conversation and make it about Brendan instead of the actual issues.
actually, both of these companies are pretty strongly supportive of their lgbt employees. microsoft in particular recognized same sex couples for purposes of health insurance very early on: even in places where those couples couldn’t legally get married.
people are diverse. good employers recognize and respect that diversity.
from the consumer side, giving preference to companies with good ethics helps encourage ethical business behavior. when talking about a company, it helps to talk about track records in order to help people make informed decisions about where they’re sending their money.
Oh, you’re narrowing the scope. You simply said “In general I try to avoid products made by unethical companies/founders…” You didn’t say that this was only about LGBT rights, not unethical practices in general. I thought you meant this to be applied widely.
There are plenty of things that Microsoft could be accused of doing that are unethical. See late 1990s court cases and various strong-arming tactics with other companies.
As to Microsoft’s stance on LGBT folks, I’m well aware. I worked there for nine years. Issues with how Microsoft did business is part of why I eventually left but my queer friends were always pretty happy there as a group. Female friends, less so at times.
What a dull, uninspired idea. He could have at least built new standards in his ad model, forcing companies to use better designed, lower bandwidth, unobtrusive ads, eg vector animations instead of video etc. I don’t see how this browser would benefit me.
For my extremely occasional use of Facebook, I typically download the latest build of K-Meleon and run it in WINE. Facebook is too toxic and is too contaminating to run natively in my nice clean linux os, in my estimation.
Issues with how Microsoft did business is part of why I eventually left but my queer friends were always pretty happy there as a group. Female friends, less so at times.