For now. If the rise of Google has taught us anything it’s to analyze a business in terms of its likely future, not its present spin and PR. If all it takes to make more money is to flip a switch, then it’s reasonable to worry that such a flip is just a matter of wider adoption and time.
This is a thoughtful idea. What is the Brave endgame after they win a new browser war? Their model would encourage users to donate to spread BATs to creators, but it would be a small portion who did it. They could try to add a premium subscription, but again a minority of users would pay. Probably, it ends up with pressure to turn ads back on like the Adblock extension did, or to pay users to watch ads in a gamified way?
The alternative seems to be either ads/tracking (chrome), or directing people towards search engines owned by competitors (Firefox).
Then again, their whole tech stack is built on a competitors work too. All browsers depend so much on Google now its crazy
I’d prefer you responded to what I actually wrote, rather than a straw man I didn’t write. I can only really refer you back to my original comment, which answers the question, “What’s your point” without the unreasonable framing of my answer.
To reiterate If the rise of Google has taught us anything it’s to analyze a business in terms of its likely future, not its present spin and PR. If all it takes to make more money is to flip a switch, then it’s reasonable to worry that such a flip is just a matter of wider adoption and time.
Brave is a combination of adtech undermining other adtech, cryptocurrency, and a lot of verbiage. I feel that’s a reason to be concerned when the line between said verbiage and future profits (assuming widespread adoption rather than withering away) is the flip of a single option from “opt-in” to “opt-out”.
It may not simply take flipping a switch to make more money. As far as we all know, Google's value proposition for throwing as many ads as possible in front of us is that they have tons of personal data about their users.
Brave does not offer such value to advertisers (unless they start having people "Sign Up", which would be an effort significantly more difficult than flipping a switch), so where do you suppose the value in throwing as many ads as possible to as many people possible comes in? What value is there in showing me a browser-based ad for something completely irrelevant to me?
That aside, I responded directly to your comment, which basically says that if Organization X does something undesirable, related Organization Y would likely do it as well. On one level, I get it, it's almost agreeable. On another, it seems like you want to hold Brave accountable for the sins of Google, which is almost absurd to me. But hey, that's your right. Can you go ahead and copy/paste the comment again if you continue to disagree? I like being condescended to.
