| I think the idea is this: - Most people won't paypal/patreon/send money directly - The current system uses ads as a shorthand for attention. If you're able to get attention you get more ad traction and more money. - Ads suck and are a corrupting influence on everything, if there was a way to directly award attention without ads that would be better. - Brave replaces ads by tracking attention directly and attempting to reward it directly with BATs. These is done instead of cash because (I'm not really sure why) - I suspect because it's easier to manage and easier to split into tiny amounts. - Flattr from the late 2000s (2007?) was similar, but with cash (Flattr = Flat Rate) the idea being you'd put in $XX/month and it'd distribute it depending on what pages you viewed. It was created by some of the Pirate Bay founders iirc. It never got much traction. The issues I have with these services: - Ads are bad, but the attention economy is the underlying problem. Removing ads is good, but still incentivizing attention for $$ isn't great. - In the case of 'privacy' Brave has now inserted themselves as the tracker of all attention, this is very high risk and not a lot better than the ad companies. Sure you don't see ads but a lot of the bad slot machine incentives around content remain. - I don't want to necessarily pay everyone based on what I view, what if what captures my attention is crap? What if I'm reading something for context, but don't support it? --- I get what they're trying to do, reward people without ads and without making users pay - but I'd rather the ad model just die and if some businesses can't survive without it we probably don't need them. I recognize this isn't super realistic because companies compete on a global stage. A business truly operating in the interest of users would make a browser that had ad blocking built in without tracking - and worked on subverting ads full time (what users actually want). This includes real privacy by not being a new middle man tracking attention. Apple is the closest to doing stuff like this with their new onion router VPN, making it easy to block tracking from apps in the store, etc. Brave pretends its interest is privacy and browser users, but it feels like a rationalization to me. Brave's core business is attention tracking and taking a cut of that, if not now - when they have more power. Its user's attention is what they monetize - those incentives don't lead some place good. |
The browser is sent a list of ads, and the browser decides which ads to serve based on its metrics. Brave doesn’t see this data and the user can choose to participate or not.
There are no easy answers, but this is an interesting model and a reasonable compromise for many.