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Comment by alwillis | Hacker News Reader

This browser has exactly one purpose: to make money. In terms of the people working on it, it's arguably more commercial than Chrome, Safari, or Edge.

Chrome is the only one of these browsers that is produced by a company where at least 80% of its billions of dollars of revenue is generated by monetizing the personal identifying information of web users using ad tech.

It’s also the only major browser without built-in support for mitigating tracking cookies and scripts.

What Brave is trying to do is bootstrap an ecosystem where users can use a utility cryptocurrency to reward content creators they like while optionally getting paid to view ads that related to sites on the web they visit without leaking personal information due to zero knowledge proofs.

Brave really wants to increase the value of the Basic Attention Token by flipping the current business model of the web on its head.

That’s not a bad idea.

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>Brave really wants to increase the value of the Basic Attention Token by flipping the current business model of the web on its head.

It's not a bad idea, but IMO it's a bad execution.

They're effectively running a business based on extorting everyone building anything for the web (everyone from big businesses to small hobbyists trying to make something new) by flat-out replacing the most common form of monetization (ads) with their own monetization and saying, "Hey developers, I know you worked hard on that website, so if you want that money (or, at least, a cut of it we feel is fair), sign up for our platform instead".

1st party ads aren't blocked. So if that developer wanted to monetize with ads, they're totally free to do so.

The dividing line is privacy invading third-party ads.

At a whole 12M users, they're hardly extorting anyone at this point. Let's back the hyperbole train up a bit.

>1st party ads aren't blocked. So if that developer wanted to monetize with ads, they're totally free to do so.

They're only free to do so in Brave's eyes if they roll their own ad solution, which is an option but not _always_ the best option. The "easy" (and, arguably, more featureful/secure/"better") route to monetize across the Internet (especially on hobby projects and small businesses) is third-party ads. There's lots of reasons someone might weigh the options and make the decision to go with a third party ad provider; Brave takes that decision away. Whether that's better or worse for the Internet as a whole is debatable.

Your response did not address privacy which was the main thrust of my point.

wrt third-party ads being more secure... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malvertising

You also point the arrow of causality in the wrong direction. It's not as though Brave magically shows up on devices. The current ecosystem and its host of problems (including privacy and security) are precisely why users are choosing adblockers of all stripes.

In Brave's case, at least they're conscientious enough to provide an alternative path to monetization for creators.

Hard to see how this is different from what Google does. They make money off of everyone else's content too.

A Brave user can choose to see regular web ads and allow for 3rd party tracking.

Or they can choose block 3rd party ads and tracking scripts and opt-in to seeing ads they are more likely to be interested in and get paid a percentage to do so.

Chrome—and by extension Google—does not give you that choice and certainly doesn't share any of the ad revenue with web users.

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