[Barrin92]

yes. Brave is functionally sort of like a mafia protection racket. They just insert themselves between you and whatever you're browsing, block everyone else's ads, and insert their own. except their ads are supposedly the good ones, and they cut you in on it by giving you some of their made up token currency

[matheusmoreira]

> block everyone else's ads

Nothing wrong with that. Every browser should do that by default.

> except their ads are supposedly the good ones

You can literally turn them off. Only way for advertising to get better than that is to stop existing.

Also, if you do turn them on, they're the most benign ads I've ever seen. Basically a small text notification. Easily dismissed and ignored.

> they cut you in on it by giving you some of their made up token currency

They pay you in cryptocurrency for your attention. The idea was for people to spend those coins on the sites they like. I think the execution could have been better. Most people just amass a large amount of coins and exchange for other cryptocurrencies or USD.

It's not "made up". At the top of the cryptocurrency bull market, 1 BAT was worth almost two dollars. I've seen people with thousands of BATs just from browsing.

[Barrin92]

>It's not "made up".

of course it is. It's a pre-mined token that has only one incentive, and that is to get more people to use Brave and BAT. They could have simply payed you in dollars, Ethereum or Bitcoin directly, right? No harder to credit you with an existing, relatively stable crypto currency. The difference is of course, they would have to actually pay for that and you'd have no incentive to pump up the currency.

it's pretty genius in a way to bolt a MLM scheme on top of a browser.

[jussion_zoonist]

Brave Ads are better than the ads they block in my opinion. They are opt in. They aren't targeted/tracking. They appear as notification bubbles so they don't disrupt page content. They don't run javascript which can be a security and performance problem.

[matheusmoreira]

I agree. As far as advertising goes, they're almost tolerable. I never thought I'd ever see the day an advertiser would allow people to turn off the ads.

[jiggunjer]

They are targeted, but the targeting is imprecise and occurs client-side to improve anonymity.