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Comment by giords | Hacker News Reader

Brave promotes a toxic business model centered in killing off internet's advertisement and providing their own in house solution. This is very bad for guaranteeing a healthy competition on the market, it creates an enormous walled garden.

Firefox is truly multiplatform, open source, committed to privacy, security and an open web and Mozilla is an authority on these topics. Sure, they're not perfect, but so far they proved to do a great job most of the time. Firefox is updated, alive and vibrant, very performant, welcoming and produces the ONLY remaining alternative to Microsoft/Apple/Google's joint effort to own the web with Chrome.

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> Brave promotes a toxic business model centered in killing off internet's advertisement and providing their own in house solution.

Good. The Basic Attention Token is meant to take the power away from adtech by making ads less intrusive and establishing a market directly between content consumers and content creators, cutting out the advertising middleman. The safe ads can eventually be completely removed from the transaction, as users can fund their BAT wallets instead of seeing ads, and support the creators they want directly.

There's a lot to dislike about Brave Inc., but the BAT is the only scalable solution to the ad-infested web we have today. Yes, Brave Inc. makes a profit from this (and other arguably shady means), but this is a far more consumer friendly way of supporting a browser vendor than the established alternatives.

Please read https://basicattentiontoken.org/

"Brave promotes a toxic business model centered in killing off internet's advertisement and providing their own in house solution. This is very bad for guaranteeing a healthy competition on the market, it creates an enormous walled garden."

So has anyone using an Adblock in the past 20 years. Also what do Ads have to do with market competition? And what is "toxic" about having a browser that promotes alternative revenue models?

I'd argue the worse "toxic business model" is the advertising model you're advocating for. I'm not saying Brave's solution is correct, but I'm glad someone is at least trying something different.

To me it's not the advertising that's wrong or bad per se. It's the tracking. The personal privacy violations. That's what I find toxic and ultimately unethical.

Sure I hate ads as well, but Brave's proposal is just making it worse. It's like a different incarnation of Facebook.

Killing off the competition? Enormous walled garden? If that is Brave's business model, it's a delusional pipe dream. Brave trying to kill Google, or even merely match with the scale of Google's garden let alone surpass it, is like trying to cool down a volcano by pissing into it. The scale discrepancy between these two organizations is off the charts.

The browser is a user agent. In this case, the user has decided that the ads Brave serves are better than the original ones on the website (otherwise they would't use this browser). Why is that so bad?

Although I don't wish to participate in it, I find Brave's business model an interesting pro-user take on the problem of a toxic industry. Calling _Brave_ toxic is a weird turnaround of the facts.

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