If their money comes from advertisers and not users, they serve advertisers and not users. Supporting them as a temporary solution just means if they succeed we have all the same problems when the same incentives come into play.
Configurable.
> Will that last through a financial crisis if advertisers offer them more money?
Will Brazil win the 2090 world cup? I'm not sure I get your point...
> Supporting them as a temporary solution just means if they succeed we have all the same problems when the same incentives come into play.
Internet services are run by ads. Unless we can transfer to a model which is publicly funded or subscription based (even free software needs to pay for servers and employees -- the money has to come from somewhere) then the best we can hope for is an ad-funded service which allows you enough control to turn everything off if you want to.
Do you have a better solution and are you willing to start working on it?
Otherwise, you are making 'perfect' the enemy of 'good'.
Sure I can:
It was built to block ads. You have to tell it to do so in a way that blocks "all of them" otherwise it just blocks the terrible/annoying/malicious ones.
Remember when you responded to a post about blocking ads by default?
> Internet services are run by ads. Unless we can transfer to a model which is publicly funded or subscription based (even free software needs to pay for servers and employees -- the money has to come from somewhere) then the best we can hope for is an ad-funded service which allows you enough control to turn everything off if you want to.
Now we get to the point: you support ads, so you aren't actually committed to getting rid of them.
The internet existed before internet advertising, and the kinds of websites people built for intrinsic reasons rather than for money were far superior. If Facebook et al disappeared completely the world would be a better place.
There is not a shortage of content, there is a shortage of filterability created by low-effort garbage funded by ads. If people aren't willing to pay for something, it's because it's not that great.
Patreon shows that some people are willing to just make donations for free content. And incidentally, Patreon-supported content tends to be higher-quality because they're serving donors, not advertisers.
We don't need ads. Ads are a blight on humanity which provides negative value.
> Do you have a better solution and are you willing to start working on it?
You mean the < 10 lines of code necessary to have an ad blocker installed by default?
> Otherwise, you are making 'perfect' the enemy of 'good'.
Brave is not "good". It's literally no different in any way from a browser which supports adblocking extensions.
It does block ads by default. You then asked about analytics.
> Now we get to the point: you support ads, so you aren't actually committed to getting rid of them.
I definitely do not support ads. I block them.
> The internet existed before internet advertising, and the kinds of websites people built for intrinsic reasons rather than for money were far superior. If Facebook et al disappeared completely the world would be a better place.
Yes it did. It was funded by the government, universities, the military, and people through personal servers (you can probably also count BBSs as well). These things had functions orders of magnitudes smaller than are available today (want to see a satellite picture of your house then get walking directions from there to Alaska?).
> If people aren't willing to pay for something, it's because it's not that great.
Someone pays for everything. Do you have a solution? I would happily pay more taxes to publicly fund services like search engines and browsers -- but that isn't politically viable right now.
> We don't need ads. Ads are a blight on humanity which provides negative value.
I agree. That's why I block them.
> You mean the < 10 lines of code necessary to have an ad blocker installed by default?
No, I mean how to fund massive projects and infrastructure without public funding.
> It's literally no different in any way from a browser which supports adblocking extensions.
I never said it was. I said it blocks ads by default.
If you open google.com and search for 'mattress' in Brave, you will see Google ads in Brave, by default.
Furthermore, Brave is capable of blocking these ads, but chooses not to, therefore it does not block ads by default.
>> Now we get to the point: you support ads, so you aren't actually committed to getting rid of them.
> I definitely do not support ads. I block them.
"you" was referring to Brave, not yourself. The point is that Brave is a first part ad vendor (showing ads is how it makes money) so for this reason it is not commited to blocking first party ads by default (as it would be ironic I guess).
> Someone pays for everything. Do you have a solution?
Yes, you can chose to support paid search engines and browsers, paid by users, not advertisers.
> I agree. That's why I block them.
Original comment was about which browser is blocking all ads without discrimination, on default settings.
You can make any browser block ads with some effort, through for example extensions.
It doesn't block all ads everywhere -- I don't know any browser or extension that does. It certainly blocks most of them. I don't see google ads because I don't use google for search (and I also run a pi-hole), so I wouldn't know.
> "you" was referring to Brave, not yourself.
Well 'you' use strange sentence structure and grammar and it doesn't communicate your point clearly -- or you are retroactively changing what 'you' mean after 'you' write it.
> Yes, you can chose to support paid search engines and browsers, paid by users, not advertisers.
Does 'you' refer to 'me'? Because I already do that. 'I' was speaking of browsers and software and services in general. And I already brought up the subscription model but that doesn't work for browsers, apparently. Why don't you make one?
> Original comment was about which browser is blocking all ads without discrimination, on default settings.
Original comment was about browsers blocking ads. I mentioned Brave was built to block ads. You seem to have changed this conversation to be about Brave supporting ads and how if it does then it doesn't 'count' when it blocks them. Try to keep up.