With other browsers, the clear and obvious incentive is "to get paid to spy on users". I'm not a big Brave fan but saying their incentives are worse than Chrome or even Firefox is ridiculous.
Have you ever heard of open source browsers like ungoogled chromium or pale moon? They have no incentives and are far better than brave’s, who wants to sell you advertising.
Inaccurate. Brave wants to overhaul advertising: to be able to switch it off completely paying a fee, or earn money by not switching it off (and thus watching the ads), tune it, etc
This is why I happily set Brave Ads to show me the maximum amount of ads per hour.
Brave is serving ads in a privacy-conscious implantation which uses local machine intelligence to determine interests. There's no broker trying to sell your data to advertisers and yet personalized ads can still be served.
Also, Brave Ads show up as a notification. Much more aesthetically pleasing than those whole-page ads that some websites have unfortunately adopted.
I agree that their system avoids a lot of the ethical problems that would come from leaking all the user data to ad networks.
Having said that-- ads are an unethical distracting nuisance. From the evidence of every use case outside of esoteric journals they will increase their aggression even to the point of threatening to destroy the value in the medium to which they are attached. Try listening to a Youtube version of "Tristan und Isolde" that has ads turned on. It becomes a broken video file at that point.
Worse-- web site owners have already shown that they lack the expertise needed to asses the ethics of the ad delivery systems they use. I can't tell you how many otherwise ethical open source devs used to have a fake download button from ad malware right above the real download button for their software. Never mind that the previous incarnation of Sourceforge just decided to turn evil one day and bundle malware. I don't think Github would do the same thing today, but most open source devs have no plan of what to do if they did. So we're not any better off today in terms of awareness of these problems.
Plus, adding cryptocurrency tokens to that same confusion in no way makes it easier for those same devs to suss out the ethics.
Edit: just to be clear-- the fake download button came from the ad network domain. The site owners almost certainly just leveraged ads to pay the bills under the logic, "How bad could it possibly be for the UX?" They'll ask the same question of Brave's system, or any system, and have the same lack of expertise with which to understand the given answer.
Brave's model is to try to remove the coercion from advertising. Right now most companies are spending immense amounts of efforts spying on your and then trying to shove ads at you, and fighting every effort to block those ads or to avoid their spying. Brave's model is instead to try to create a more cooperative system. You view ads if and only if you want. The motivations they give you for this is to support the sites you like while also getting a little kickback yourself.
Somewhat analogous business models have failed, repeatedly, in things such as 'socialism restaurants' that tried to operate on a pay-what-you-can scheme since enough people opted out (by paying $0) to make it a losing venture. But I think it's something that will likely succeed here since the purchase price is always $0 - you're paying with attention, not money. Hahah, perhaps one of these socialism restaurants could actually work if they also provided a "free" pay method such as watching an ad!
Okay, not no incentives, but incentives that match up with our own. I doubt the maintainers of ungoogled chromium have a secret agenda to take over the browser market. Their incentive is that they dislike google and they want a good browser without google spying on them.
Where does most of the Mozilla Corporation's money come from?
I'm not trying to cast stones here, but they're still primarily (last time I checked) funded by Google- not users. Your incentives are aligned with the people who pay you.
Brave Software has a clear and obvious incentive structure. Here is the business model:
1. Build and maintain a browser which creates a local profile of its user, a profile which never leaves the user's machine.
2. Sell ads which can be targeted to users with certain characteristics. Distribute the entire catalog to every user's machine. The browser selects a suitable ad from the catalog and displays it to willing users.
I'm not a big fan of BAT, but how much clearer can the incentive structure be? Offering a browser completely for free is actually much more questionable. User becomes the product, but it's never stated anywhere. With BAT it's pretty clear who are the interested parties and why.
