Misleading title.
They don't want you to use a VPN if you plan on watching ads to earn money, which is widely accepted as the norm, and absolutely necessary to fight ad fraud.
It's way too easy to fire up 1000's of cloud instances with brave browsers watching ads automatically all day.
If you don't care about earning a few bucks a months then use a vpn.
The submitted title was "Tell HN: Brave doesn't want you to use a VPN". Then the submitter changed it to "[Ignore this]".
Submitters: please don't do either of those things! Both are against the site guidelines, which ask: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
I'm actually back to Firefox from Brave, the development tools are better and with their new memory management and suspend feature, it's way more efficient. I just couldn't stand sorting bookmarks in brave, it closes the dialogs when you drag-drop which is infuriating even on 1 sublevel.
Come on, what kind of clickbait is that? So Brave has an opt-in option to see ads [1], and they have some measures to protect against fraud. They are simply being honest about the fact that using a VPN would increase the chance of being marked as suspicious for the purpose of paying you to see ads.
This is HN, and one might hope we can do better than BuzzFeed. In fact, Brave probably would want you to use a VPN, they sell their own VPN service after all [2].
I don't know, but Brendan Eich (Brave's CEO) [1] is pretty active on Twitter, and I think he used to answer the questions people asked. You could try asking him there. Let us know if you get an answer.
Also, I apologize for being a little bit too harsh in my previous comment.
"Brave discourages using VPNs for the purpose of downloading ad catalogs from other countries. Doing so may increase the chances of being flagged as suspect, and result in issues with claiming tokens on the payment date."
As far as I know, this is something that happens automatically without user intervention, and I don't see any settings or buttons to push related to this.
Therefore, if you use a VPN while using Brave, you might be flagged as "suspect."
Is this why even though they partnered with Guardian to provide VPN services for iOS in 2020 [1] they have yet to provide desktop support?
> I don't see any settings or buttons to push related to this.
Yes, there is. Just don't turn on the ad rewards.
The ad matching is anonymized, so it can't really tell where jamesdwilson is really connecting from. All it can know is that there is one device that connected from one place but wants to claim that is has seen an ad intended for another country.
Imagine if you are responsible for the "ad confirmation" service and your job is to ensure that there is no abuse of the ad delivery. Do you think it would be okay for it to issue the ad confirmation to your device? How would you design a system that could avoid fake viewers?
Clickbaity title, it implies that the browser itself somehow doesn’t want users to use VPN. That’s untrue.
This is just about Brave Ads, an optional component some users opt in to. VPNs are used for ad fraud and may reduce traffic quality, so it’s understandable that they turn off ads for some VPN users.
I’ve been using Brave for over a year and always use VPN.
Clickbait editorialized title, and their system seems pretty reasonable. If they suspect someone is farming BAT (eg. using a bunch of VMs with different VPN endpoints to look like separate users) they simply won't show those "suspect" users any more ads.
Also, I used Brave for a few months with a VPN enabled and had no issues with ads or redeeming BAT, so it clearly is just one factor they take into consideration when looking for ad fraud.
The page title was: "Why don't I see any Brave Ads after enabling them?"
The Brave ads are entirely optional, requiring user opt-in,
and it is hard to criticize them for defaulting to not showing ads if they suspect the user is fake. Their advertisers pay to show their ads to real users, not headless browsers in a data center.
I don't understand the recent Brave hype to be honest. Shut third party ad and data companies out, try to capture the entire stack, with some BAT tokens slapped on top to monetize. It's like the crypto street-dealer version of Apple.
> try to capture the entire stack, with some crypto stuff slapped on top to monetize
No. The last part of your sentence is what stops them from being able to do the first.
There is absolutely nothing stopping any competitor to set a different ad network that also uses BAT as the payout. There is nothing stopping Facebook (or any other media company actually) to start accepting BAT for payments.
there's nothing stopping anyone from taking dollars, what does that have to do with brave's business model? When you use the brave browser, brave takes a share of publishers ad revenue in the bat program, just like Google or Apple do, and publishers who want to participate have to agree with the terms and conditions set by, you'll never guess it, the Brave developers. Whether Apple, Google or Brave pay you in dollars, bitcoin, BAT or sheepskin changes nothing about the fact that they all attempt to generate value by taking control of the distribution channel.
The difference of course being that Google and Apple at least pay you well and in dollars rather than a crypto token that has been premined by the company that also happens to run the browser and in reality isn't going to be adopted outside of the Brave ecosystem. Imagine if Amazon started to pay its vendors in Amazon gift cards, that's what Brave is. (everyone is free to accept amazon gift cards, of course!)
> there's nothing stopping anyone from taking dollars,
Yes, there is. There is a good part of the world where people can not accept payments in dollars, so the revenue share program wouldn't work.
Not to mention the tipping system. If they wanted to do with "real cash", they would have to either find a global partner like Western Union (yuck), or partner with PayPal (double yuck) or become themselves a money transmitter (basically impossible)
Granted, what they could've done would be to use another existing token. And they did just that, at first. The first version used BTC. It didn't catch on. It was only later that they did the ICO.
It would be nice if they used a stabletoken, but DAI was launched after BAT's ICO, Tether is poison and USDC is centralized. BAT is not ideal, but there was no better alternative at that point in time.
> terms and conditions set by, you'll never guess it, the Brave developers.
In the ad network that is built-in to the browser, sure. But again, there is nothing stopping a competitor to make another ad network, with a similar structure, which displays ads in their own properties. And if were starting now, what do you think would be easier: to get users to be interested in something that can give them more BAT, or something that would give them a different type of "gift card"?
> in reality isn't going to be adopted outside of the Brave ecosystem.
Why? If no one else realizes that the is possible to use BAT without depending on Brave, then you'd have a self-fulfilling prophecy.
But I could easily argue that this is not really true. BAT is already part of the DeFI ecosystem (accepted by MakerDAO as one of the currencies to provide stability to DAI), youtubers and content creators are getting more aware of it, there are already people providing services that accept BAT as payment, there is a guy selling coffee for BAT... Brave does not control any of it directly.
It's way too easy to fire up 1000's of cloud instances with brave browsers watching ads automatically all day.
If you don't care about earning a few bucks a months then use a vpn.