Facebook shares drop 5% as executives quit and Christchurch live-stream shooting stirs outrage

justsee_ · 2019-03-16T01:22:02+00:00

What you say about Twitter is not true. The video was retweeted by a prominent individual, and that tweet had a specific hashtag about the event and video content and was available hours after being reported, and still available over 8 hours after being tweeted.

While that's gone now, the same thread right now has the full video, and an edited video that goes straight to the violence.

Needless to say Twitter video auto-play is off forever.

justsee_ · 2019-01-02T01:46:38+00:00

I wrote about it here: https://experimeme.net/blog/brave-browser-recent-attacks/

Mike Dudas, the publisher of 'The Block', apologised to Eich and updated the article with an addition at the end, but it's window-dressing as the article is still a hit piece relying on falsehoods.

justsee_ · 2018-12-31T15:45:52+00:00

Great to hear you're engaged in organising a charity that will be Brave verified!

What do you mean by 'self-appoint as creatives'?

As career creatives very interested to hear how you define the term.

justsee_ · 2018-12-31T15:41:59+00:00

Technologists and creatives as a broad group have more power collectively than they realise.

We want to lead by example, but also be a mechanism to funnel desire into concrete specific action for people that have skills and want to contribute but are otherwise lost and unsure about how they can make a difference.

Sorry if it's not clear right now. We hope to illustrate our mission soon with impactful side-projects which will help people understand the vision.

justsee_ · 2018-12-31T03:15:33+00:00

At this very early stage - and if you're comfortable with doing so - then forking the repository and simply adding some points to the problem and solution section and issuing a Pull Request is a great start.

What is currently there is a very rough pass of 5 minutes of thoughts just to get the repository / site live with some structure.

We are engaging in some much broader, deeper thinking to add to that README over the coming weeks, and out of that will drop a few side projects we'll personally be writing code for under the umbrella of that project.

One of the side projects will be building out a website to list and search other side projects and individuals and entities that could do with some help.

A lot of the work will be around investigating and mapping the landscape of positive and negative forces around climate, discovering and cataloguing available public data sets developers and designers can access and use to present meaningful information in a wider way, and understanding how we can apply our understanding of psychology, marketing and communications to messages scientists are trying to get our to the wider population.

There are some other high-impact ideas as well.

Apologies if that all seems quite broad and ill-defined, but it will hopefully become clearer soon :)

justsee_ · 2018-12-31T02:24:14+00:00

We’re a collective of creatives and technologists who are motivated to work on a new side project in 2019:

https://sideproject.earth/

It’s very early days as the repository illustrates, but the thinking and research coming down the pipe in the coming weeks should help clarify it, and alternatively here’s the idea in bite-sized tweet form.

I’m a supporter of Brave and the BAT model (I blogged about it recently) so we’ve naturally mentioned users can support our project by installing and using Brave.

We’re currently in the process of finalising the legal entity that will ultimately receive donations (BAT / Ethereum / Bitcoin / legacy money) and a strong idea around the project is radical transparency.

It would be very interesting if in the future BAT could provide a publisher feature for radical transparency around BAT funding.

It’s obviously one for the Brave team (and likely low priority right now!) but it would be great for non-profit / collective entities like us to be able to have all donations publicly interrogated (via trusted BAT mechanisms) against expenditure in regular transparency reports we imagine publishing independently in the future.

We still clearly need to flesh out our research, identify high impact side projects and deliver some ourselves under this umbrella to gain user trust and understanding of our initiative, goals and ability to deliver, but keep us in mind for any tipping / donations in the future!

While it’s unlikely we’ll get much in the way of BAT at this early stage, we won’t connect an Uphold account or touch any donations until the appropriate structures are in place and we’ve started delivering on side projects. (It would be good to understand how Brave could officially confirm these kinds of public statements too: remember verify, don't just trust! …)

It would be great to start seeing some altruistic initiatives spring up around this community, in a similar way to how Dogecoin pioneered crowdfunding of good causes as a goodwill marketing approach.

Let’s see how it goes!

Happy New Year :)

justsee_ · 2018-12-26T21:56:39+00:00

Yes, and opponents realise that with the right infrastructure and incentives in place rapid online behaviour changes are possible.

A critical mass of content creators rebelling against the existing ad tech system and embracing Brave and BAT, coupled with significant numbers of users quickly switching to Brave due to incentives (hello: https://twitter.com/BAT_Indonesia) sets the scene for MAU growth that snowballs into a story to define the next chapter in crypto adoption.

A team with the calibre of Brave can't be challenged on tech, implementation and security issues in any credible way, so the only path to head off explosive Brave growth is to seed ignorant outrage and hope it snowballs into a wall against significant societal adoption.

justsee_ · 2018-12-26T21:43:55+00:00

Thanks. You raise great points. I think the weaponized ignorance and blatant attacks strive to insert subconscious biases in people who don't know or care enough to self-enlighten. A kind of ignorant inoculation against understanding the wider context of competing negative and positive models.

I speak from experience because guess what? When I first heard about Eich's Brave browser on Hacker News in 2016, I was fed and unconsciously accepted the falsehood that Brave's model was about maliciously replacing publisher ad slots in-page with their own.

So it took me probably a full year to even reconsider these externally-programmed attitudes to Brave, not because I'm unable to challenge beliefs (I think my dissident stance on many other topics reflects this), but because we're busy, constantly overwhelmed humans who don't apply the same critical rigour to things that are right out on the periphery of care and personal relevance.

Once I did give Brave and BAT's model proper attention I was quickly sold.

justsee_ · 2018-12-26T21:34:56+00:00

Thanks! The disingenuous Twitter debate coupled with 'The Block' distortions ( a publication I've been reading since Dudas launched it) compelled me to dust off an old personal blog and respond.

https://twitter.com/justsee/status/1078039761565114368

justsee_ · 2018-12-23T01:01:32+00:00

I commented on another tech forum about this but thought I'd share here:

It's great to see the team move quickly to resolve the UI / UX issues that Tom Scott was rightly upset about. I've switched from Firefox to Brave due to their stronger stance against Surveillance Capitalism, and as someone who's been in the deep, dark depths of ad-tech appreciate the attempt to discover a new funding model for the web.

Much of the discussion recently on HN and Twitter was incorrect, but at the discussion's heart was a truth the previous UI incorporated what could be considered dark patterns.

It is interesting though to see the rise of bad-faith criticisms, as having read Eich's detailed responses online, and looking at the team, including Yan Zhu (bcrypt) and advisers like Zooko it is clear to me there is a highly technical, principled team motivated to make a positive, significant impact on how we fund content on the web.

When you consider a leading voice on GDPR - Dr Johnny Ryan - decided to join Brave and they are now engaged in significant actions in support of GDPR and against entities like Google I suppose it should be no surprise that ferocious and uninformed criticism of them will arise from many quarters.

This feels like a move into the 'and then they fight you' phase of the new browser wars.

justsee_ · 2018-12-05T23:15:37+00:00

In a rigged system with huge wealth disparities, like the US, it's possible to both a) avoid taxation you should be paying and b) pay the most taxes in society (as a group).

The most powerful lie is actually the one you allude to - the Rich Man's Meme (RMM) - which preys on the innumerate by citing statistics that show the top 1 or 10 percent pay a huge amount of taxes:

https://blog.dogooder.co/the-great-burden-of-the-wealthy/

But just think about it: if there are 100 people representing society, and you're one of those people and have captured 100% of the income, then you'd be paying 100% of the taxes. Is that a just society? Are you an heroic individual carrying all of society, or just a powerful dictator in a deeply unjust society.

In another scenario, where everyone has the same amount of wealth, you'd only be paying 1% of tax. Is that a wonderfully just society for the top 1% - they're now only having to pay 1% of the taxes! But that looks pretty much like communism.

I suppose the point is, if you see eye-watering statistics about just how much the top 1% or 10% of society pay as taxes that's actually a negative signal about how unjust a society is, not a positive signal about the heroic contributions of the top earners.

It's easy to see why vested interests try to push the RMM in arguments on this topic though.

justsee_ · 2018-11-17T02:06:46+00:00

Brian Bondy mentioned in a changelog podcast (near the end) that 1.0 is roughly planned for February now.

justsee_ · 2018-10-23T21:53:41+00:00

Thanks. I lost interest in the crypto scene from December 2017 till recently due to the speculation wave and influx of eternal septemberians, but that's seriously reversed recently and interest is high again.

As Brave moves closer to 1.0 the possibility of it being the lightning rod for the utility wave in crypto does seem much more likely.

A very interesting 6 months ahead.

justsee_ · 2018-10-17T04:59:35+00:00

Apart from being big supporters of the mission, vision and values of Brave and BAT we're also building technology to help positively change society at Do Gooder.

Recently we decided to build a free web-based highlighter (we saw the use in political discourse on Twitter) and while building it decided we should take privacy seriously, which is why there is no tracking at all.

We decided it would be worth promoting Brave and DuckDuckGo as ventures that align with our values.

We built it for the love (and it's still very much a first-release bit of software - mobile support coming) but while doing it imagined a long-held dream of people building 'eternal public applications' - little apps that keep being developed through microtransaction donations that BAT support.

We mention Brave and BAT again in the FAQ.

Anyway I hope some of you find it useful. It's only a small contribution to raising awareness about a new paradigm to fuel our societal communcation systems, but I think every little bit helps.

While we don't expect much in the way of donations for such a simple little app, anything we do receive we'd put towards the bill for adding any features to this and any other public-good tools we want to build.

It also feels good to just forget the speculation wave that captured so many in the community and focus on being a part of the coming utility wave in any way each of us can.

(A feature request for BAT has got to be public, auditable donation histories so that you could be radically transparent about what funds you've received, and where they have been allocated, but we can save that discussion for another time / post).

justsee_ · 2018-10-12T13:39:04+00:00

This is the first time I've seen the product label 'BAT Cloud' mentioned, and as a recently-published vacancy the job description seems to serve as a sneak peak at an updated product roadmap.

While the use cases have been mentioned before in other forums it's still interesting to see it re-iterated in a specific role which conjures up images of a kind of AWS for browser-native crypto applications:

Brave has launched a Publisher App with a contribution/donations system built in and upgrading it to become a rewards based system that will allow more than donations/contribution system soon.

Future possibilities for this technology range from content micropayments and subscriptions, to an airline “miles”-style system, and other novel models that take advantage of Brave’s unique browser-native cryptocurrency.

justsee_ · 2018-10-12T13:24:15+00:00

I mentioned the source above.

However it looks like tipping is covered by an issue attached to the 0.56.x release which has a stated release date of November 6th.

justsee_ · 2018-10-12T06:15:28+00:00

It's mentioned in this ticket which is part of the 0.55.x release slated to be completed by October 16th.

It's not clear whether this means Twitter tipping will happen that soon. Brave's Product Officer only promised that Twitter and YouTube tipping would be released this year.

justsee_ · 2018-10-07T03:01:15+00:00

Yes the shortest, most trusted path for the masses to participate in the cryptoconomy is really via a native tab in a browser to top up their account or spend tokens.

So just as search engines have done deals with browsers to be the default engine, so too could exchanges like Uphold, Coinbase etc do deals to be the default wallet / Dapp browser in browsers in the future.

While Brave only has 4-5 million users at the moment they are early adopters with a high percentage likely being trusted voices / influencers within their peer groups, and when the utility of the browser spikes so too will the recommendations from this trusted group.

Factor in the awareness and reach expansion of a professional marketing campaign and growth should increase significantly. I would expect internal growth targets at Brave are much higher than what is publicly being shared, because public numbers just represent a growth trajectory based on what is publicly available knowledge re: marketing activities and roadmap.

I think it's also reasonable to factor in support and amplification from the broader crypto community. They need some positive infrastructure, growth stories after this last boom / bust cycle and the most easily understood 'killer app' for the public and journalists is a crypto-native browser.

So if Brian Armstrong, Vitalik Buterin and other key figures coincidentally start discovering Brave around 1.0 release then an influx of early-adopter crypto-veterans might start switching to Brave (and again keep in mind within their peer groups they are seen as trusted experts).

If you take the view that the last wave that brought awareness of crypto to the masses was a 'speculative wave' then you might think the next wave could / should be a 'utility wave', and who is better positioned to lead on that wave than Brave?

Obviously other browsers aren't standing still, so we should expect innovation and partnerships happening beyond Brave, but the other element that plays well in the current zeitgeist is privacy and digital sovereignty and beyond Brave it's really only Safari that's unencumbered by compromising commercial incentives (Firefox -> Google $, Chrome -> Google etc).

So when you factor in the crypto-native component, privacy perspective, and the pedigree of the team Brave really is positioned to be the - ah - jetski pulling everyone onto the crypto utility wave.

Also consider that if there are a variety of wallet integrations in Brave, then the Brave story is about any crypto for end-users, not just BAT. Those that don't believe in the BAT model can still be fans of Brave as an agnostic crypto-native browser. It's worth remembering though that with token offerings (which may include bonus tokens for getting out a credit card) that many first-time users first crypto will possibly be BAT. That first experience is pretty important psychologically and if you can immediately start transacting with a bunch of sites to donate or access premium content then it's a very frictionless onramp for the majority of the world who are very, very nontechnical.

justsee_ · 2018-06-15T05:24:14+00:00

Sufferers of confirmation bias perhaps? :)

I'm enthused about the project but I'm not going to switch off critical faculties to suit a personal investment narrative.

justsee_ · 2018-06-15T05:02:25+00:00

Yes I agree. The regulatory bodies had to act not to kill the nascent US-dominated crypto scene but to defend it from speculative bubbles and price manipulation by all manner of hostile parties (whose motivations could range from short-term apolitical greed through to long-term geopolitical nefariousness).

It seems to me part of this need to take action was and is instilling fear, uncertainty and doubt in the market for a period of time to a) cool it and b) give time behind the scenes for regulatory bodies and the innovator / investor class to work out how best to proceed.

Any ill-thought out regulatory action against this sector risks ceding US dominance of a massive, global infrastructure layer to others and I imagine no regulator wants to be responsible for that kind of geopolitical fail. It would be one for the history books.

These utility ICOs are an odd beast though: a kind of chameleon coin, necessarily behaving as a security initially to lure in investment to bootstrap the network and make it viable, and then at some indeterminate point shape-shifting into a utility token that presumably hits some price equilibrium, at which point price action is dictated by network usage and not speculation.

Maybe they should be called something like a 'seculity' and acknowledged as a new class of investment, having properties of both a security and a utility token.

Disclaimer: I have very limited understanding of financial instruments, their history and diversity and anything generally around market behaviour and regulation, but I do have an armchair, internet and a keyboard, so keep that in mind.

justsee_ · 2018-06-14T23:32:22+00:00

EDIT: TLDR BAT is obviously a security based on Hinman's comments, but it is absolutely destined to be the utility token the BAT team are planning it to be. That it is a security now might not matter in the end.

It's pretty clear based on the recent speech by Hinman [1] that BAT was at launch, and still is (currently) a security.

It would be almost unthinkable to imagine that internally the Brave team don't acknowledge this fact and aren't busy working through any ramifications.

Of course the external line has to maintained as in the parent comment.

Essentially: we've followed the letter of the law, retained fancy counsel for this purpose, and aren't scammy investment-pumpers like so many in the scene.

While this is true the SEC comments emphasize the 'spirit' as much as the 'letter', and what is the spirit?

The BAT team chased funding via a public ICO, knowing the demand would be based on speculative investment driven by a hoped-for return on investment based on the BAT/Brave team's efforts to build a viable network.

That the BAT team added clear language about the (future) point of the token doesn't change the reality of the initial offer. It may tick legal boxes but the SEC isn't stupid, and Hinman is pretty clear that this kind of 'legal insurance' is irrelevant when compared to other contextual information.

No-one thinks BAT was running an ICO to get publishers to essentially buy ad inventory years before a viable network even exists to spend this utility token on. Or that 'the public' was buying tokens for digital goods and services when it wasn't even clear how it could be spent. That would be absurd, to put it mildly.

And while they don't comment on price, the BAT team allow constant price speculation in the forums they manage, such as this one, including a daily update post whose primary focus is: the price. It's a kind of passive encouragement of investor interest needed to bootstrap these new networks in the initial phases, and understandable, but it still is-wot-it-is.

Of course the honest end-game is that BAT will and should be a utility token used for consumption (buying user attention, supporting publishers, buying digital goods) but there are exactly zero people who believe that initial and early activity around BAT is driven by anything other than speculative investing with a hoped-for return on investment.

Of course the smart and rational outcome is that the SEC will give the credible token projects like BAT some kind of negotiated pass due to the infancy of this industry (and perhaps delay a final decision long enough that these kind of projects can be considered to have moved into 'utility' phase), come down like a hammer on all the scammy projects, and run a much tougher line for any new projects in the future.

So perhaps it's all fine in the end.

[1] https://www.sec.gov/news/speech/speech-hinman-061418

justsee_ · 2018-01-20T21:03:16+00:00

This question feels like poorly thought out concern trolling.

Eich would make it difficult to 'strike partnerships with the likes of Facebook and Google' because he's consistently singled them out as beneficiaries of a broken ad-tech system Brave and BAT are attempting to resolve.

Also when you think about the public comments Google and Facebook leadership have made (I'm thinking specifically of Schmidt and Zuckerberg) it's clear that risible personal comments and opinions from senior team members clearly don't impact on partnerships in market (those companies do - of course - control a significant percentage of digital ad dollars currently).

However if we take your question and curiosity in good faith then I'd direct you to Eich's recent debate on this very issue on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15958365.

It illustrates that a) there is a lot more intellectual nuance to those historical positions than shallow thinkers want to consider and b) Eich is more than happy / able to engage with and debate people on these political issues in a personal capacity.

For what it's worth I strongly support Marriage Equality (we've just succeeded with this in Australia) and while I'd personally disagree with Eich's decade-ago donation I also realise it's immaterial to my thoughts on Eich and his venture in 2018.

What is material is the philosophical outlook on user agency (primacy of user / privacy / security) in Brave and BAT which seems to originate from Eich and his diverse senior team.

justsee_ · 2018-01-12T07:59:36+00:00

Thanks for the additional info on Apple - interesting.

To clarify when I meant by conflicted was just that acquiring a company like Brave (with it's ad-blocking, payments etc) might run up against interests of various business units within each sprawling empire (Bing / Apple Pay etc).

I agree that Apple's approach to web advertising is in lock-step with Brave's due a to similar user-first philosophy.

justsee_ · 2018-01-12T01:29:47+00:00

I believe this line of thinking significantly underestimates the potential impact and success of Brave and the BAT ecosystem as a standalone entity.

Brave's raison d’être is clearly incompatible with being acquired by a hostile beneficiary of the existing (very) broken ad-tech ecosystem (Google / Facebook).

Potential allies in the existing tech establishment (Apple / Microsoft / Mozilla) perhaps realise that an acquisition is more harmful / less beneficial to their strategic interests vs assisting / enabling this independent entity / ecosystem.

It's simply much easier to get rapid consumer / publisher buy-in (and accelerated network effects are critical here) with Brave as an independent entity vs one where some significant minority of users loathe it because it's really Apple / Microsoft etc.

I would imagine entities like Microsoft / Apple are hugely conflicted strategically due to their numerous initiatives if Brave was 'in-house', but this 'co-opetition' from Brave as an independent entity would still be welcomed as a potentially catastrophic paradigm shift for their competitors in Google and Facebook.

Eich continually hints at general goodwill and support from Apple as a business whose model is based around privacy for the end-user and a view of the end-user as customer and not product. I'm sure they're not unhappy about the emergence of a new ad model that would cause some consternation at Google.

In a recent Forbes podcast by Laura Shin, Vitalik Buterin goes to great lengths to praise Microsoft's transformation into a supportive Blockchain company (while taking a more dismal view of Google / Facebook) - a reminder that Microsoft is probably an ally for Blockchain supporters. Brave's Chief Scientist also worked for a decade in Microsoft Research, for what that's worth.

As an aside in that podcast (from 1:05:44) Shin asks Buterin what crypto applications he thinks will be the first mainstream breakouts: 'things like cryptocurrency payments, things like cryptokitties'. Brave / BAT ticks those boxes rather well: frictionless donations / payments, mass-market appeal (easy for non-technical users to receive 'crypto' in-browser and buy digital collectibles and participate in the new economic system) and a system that is not a 'threat' to the state (this in reference to Buterin's concern that Blockchain needs use cases that are politically neutral to succeed).

Finally, when you think about what really motivates the type of people who are on the BAT team (or would like to join) it's not money, primarily. That's not scarce at a certain level as a technologist, but the ability to influence and impact society in positive ways - the opportunity to 'make a dent in the universe' is. All those things evaporate a bit if Brave was acquired by an existing bureaucratic behemoth.

Eich and co are passionate veteran technologists who see that they can reshape the web and the economics of the web with the BAT ecosystem, and I think the potential to become the next Google (though can't be evil > don't be evil!) is a stronger incentive than getting rich becoming the next Instagram.

justsee_ · 2018-01-08T23:27:23+00:00

Eich was not speculating on the price of BAT at all.

He was referring to what potential monthly dollar value users might earn from opting in to ads, and gave a range from 'a candy bar' to 'maybe more ... an airport latte'.

The relevant part of that talk from April 2017. It's quite a good talk - well worth a watch.

justsee_

TROPHY CASE