this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2024
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Privacy
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I really, really like the idea of paying content creators some amount of a monthly budget based on site views.
My only critique of your really thoughtful comment is: I really want those features to be modular. Every time Mozilla drops an extension like Pocket and integrates it directly into the browser, it seems to upset two groups of people:
I can guarantee after watching Brave do their crap that people generally don't want a browser installing an ad network or a VPN without their consent, especially when the browser is already considered pretty big like Firefox. Chrome might suck, but it's practically a minimalist browser compared to Firefox... If not in function, then at least in presentation.
Oh absolutely, and that's a huge part of why I don't really trust Mozilla to handle it properly.
That's because Brave didn't deliver on its promise. It said it would pay content creators, but it didn't. It should absolutely be opt-in for both parties (user and site).
So until there's an ethical way to handle advertising, I'll keep my ad-blocker.
There's an interesting conversation to be had about that. Personally, due to its for-profit beginnings, I don't think Brave would have done a good job even if they had followed through on their promises. For example, cryptocurrency has its own issues, and there are ethical problems with replacing a website owner's chosen source of income with reliance on a different, proprietary one.
Mozilla would have to advance much further with Firefox and everything else before any of that is worthy of discussion, unfortunately.
I disagree, but it's irrelevant to this discussion. The goal is micro-payments to content creators in-lieu of advertisements and/or profit sharing for advertisements. That could use cryptocurrency, or it could use traditional bank transactions.
And yeah, I agree that there are ethical issues here, which is why Mozilla shouldn't put their own ads on a page w/o the content creator opting in. That's where Brave went wrong, and where I hope Mozilla could get it right.
I think they just need a few big names to agree to it. Mozilla should implement some kind of credit system (i.e. to fund Mozilla VPN and other paid offerings), and make a way to keep track of page views in an anonymous manner and pilot it with some big-name brands (e.g. New York Times or similar). Initially, it would just be micropayments per page view in exchange for no ads, but Mozilla could add their own ads using your local search history (never shared with Mozilla or the website) in-lieu of ads supplied by the vendor.
There is an ethical way to do it, but Brave isn't it and I don't trust Mozilla to do it properly.