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Comment by qz2 | Hacker News Reader

Boo hoo. Crocodile tears.

I know this is probably the wrong audience here but I’m getting fed up with whining from companies who have dubious funding models based on trading something less honest and more invasive than money for gain. Operating like this is an existential business risk when regulation and platforms are heading in the direction of privacy and data security so get over it. Come up with a product which is worth throwing actual money at not proxy money, advertising, tracking, data collection or invasive crap. If you can’t do that, bugger off.

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> Brave Rewards is built on the Basic Attention Token (BAT) and is a new way to value attention, connecting users, content creators, and advertisers.

Yea no thanks. As you said come we should be heading towards privacy not finding new ways to value “attention”.

Without advertising sites would require direct payment and that would make most sites unavailable to all but the rich.

I rather miss the days when sites were operated by enthusiasts in a field, rather than by opportunists outside of the field, hoping to cash in on advertising dollars and privacy violations. Maybe that's rose-tinted glasses, but that's how it feels.

You can have advertising without invasive tracking.

Those aren't mutually exclusive are they?

Eg lets say we have 100% privacy tomorrow. Some magical browser, 100% anonymous. That doesn't mean no one is going to try and have an ROI for published content on the internet.. producers still want to get paid for content and/or products, and consumers still want to avoid paying.

So yay we got privacy, but what is the next step? You said it, finding new ways to value attention - or more specifically adjusting monetization to this new anonymous reality.

Not that i'm defending BAT here at all - just that the idea of both respecting privacy and paying content creators are not mutually exclusive.

The internet doesn't exist without cash flow, simply put. And no one wants to pay.. so....

(note: i do want to pay, but i'm the minority - imo. "Free to Play Internet" reigns supreme)

I think the problem is actually that content has no value because it’s cheap to copy. It never did have hence why we had to come up with other parasitic models to make money out of it. One way was to stick a wall around it but because it’s so easy to get content elsewhere without that wall it’s a dead end.

For me, if I was to write content it’d be open, free and be used for marketing my skills which you can’t copy easily.

Value comes from scarcity, consumer apathy, skill and trade off gains. Content doesn’t win anything there.

Honestly, if Brave made sure that no BAT was spent on websites that haven't joined their program, I'd consider it an improvement over the existing ad-supported internet.

As it stands, their system is just a crypto implementation of Flattr that site authors never asked to participate in.

The creator only gets that tip if they verify with Brave.

no BAT can be spent on websites that haven't joined the program, even if a user tips a website that is currently not in the program, there's a limited window of time, after which if the website is still not part of the program, the tip comes back in the user's wallet.

I didn’t see any crocodile tears. It was a very sober write up of changes and why they were made.

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