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Comment by __MatrixMan__ | Hacker News Reader

I wish brave would focus less on attracting advertisers and more on the use case where people just buy BAT and let their browsers fund content creators from the wallet without having advertisers in the loop at all.

I'm perpetually on the edge of doing this but I haven't because I want

- a way for sites to transparently "cite their sources" so that, for instance, the field-work guy gets paid, not just the writer.

- more granular control over auto-contribute (implicit 1×, with a button to tweak to 5× or 0×)

- community curation so if I 0× a site for being shady about how it got my attention, people who trust me will have it at 0× automatically

- links to community 0×'ed and 5×'ed sites appear in different colors to cue trustworthyness before I even click links to them

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> I wish brave would focus less on attracting advertisers and more on the use case where people just buy BAT and let their browsers fund content creators from the wallet without having advertisers in the loop at all.

This sounds like a desirable group of features, but might this tread a bit too closely to making Brave a money-transmission service and put them under the scrutiny of far more complex regulations?

> This sounds like a desirable group of features, but might this tread a bit too closely to making Brave a money-transmission service and put them under the scrutiny of far more complex regulations?

If it can be made clear that you're paying for content you're consuming, that might waive it to an extent? Who knows.

If I go to a restaurant and leave separate tips for the bartender vs waitstaff, is the restaurant now a money transmission service?

That's a payment to the restaurant, and is counted with the employee's normal pay. Or if you personally hand cash to people it becomes a personal gift.

The situation is more analogous to patreon: a centralized service which you make bulk payments to, and they divvy the payment to your selected set of people who are not employees of patreon.

Brave is starting a centralized service where you make bulk payments to them, and they divvy up the payment to your selected set of sites who are not employed by brave

> Brave is starting ...

I think the situation you describe is how brave has worked for many years now. Just fund your wallet and enable auto-contribute and it'll happen. Whether that's legal or not, I dunno.

My point is that however legal it is is unchanged if you give users more control over how much goes where and let them curate such settings for each other.

Sounds like a tax nightmare since you'd need to keep track of your cost basis and calculate your profit and loss on every time your browser made a payment on your behalf.

You mean like so?

> Loss: 1 BAT

> Profit: viewed a website

Surely its only when you change one currency for another, right? I enjoyed a banana earlier today and didn't have to pay capital gains on its ripeness...

A banana is not a security, so the IRS does not care about the banana gaining value due to ripeness.

Most cryptocurrency tokens are.

If you buy a banana by selling some penny stocks, then you have to take notes on that sale to be able to pay taxes correctly.

The parent commenter is claiming that, due to how cryptocurrencies are currently regulated, viewing websites would automatically trigger selling a "penny stock" like thing (a security), which is an event the IRS cares about.

Ah, well that's kind of dumb but you've described the dumb thing clearly, thank you.

You need to track all of your crypto purchases and sales for your tax return, but you knew that already :)

Apple News (the paid version) is, by far, the market leader at this. I find it pretty frustrating. I’d much rather support independent journalists, etc.

It’s a terrible model, directly rewards click bait and attention grabbing crap vs. selectively paying for good stuff. Substack is much better and the quality available there reflects it.

Substack is also going the Medium way though. Ever more popups and other marketing crap. Soon it will be unusable like Medium has become.

The incentives are different.

Substack writers retain their audience (via email lists). The Substack changes are about helping their writers get more reach.

Medium was all about commoditization of writers for their own (imo crappy) brand in pursuit of ads. Totally different.

They have no choice but to maintain focus on advertising. That's the whole schtick. Without it there is no product.

I think the primary innovation is that they can distribute money in a way that is analogous to how attention is distributed. Getting that money from their ad business strikes me as a temporary necessary evil. I hope that the long term plan is to get people to recognize that a non-ad-funded-web is a better web so that we just pre-load our BAT wallets with $10 each month with the idea that it'll gradually go to the content creators as we browse.

It's a bit of a leap from where we are today, but if anybody can make a culture shift like that happen, it's the content creators united behind a common cause. They're influential by definition.

Also, in a soon-to-be-dominated-by-LLM's web, I think a steady trickle of BAT contributions to your site might be a reasonable component in a scheme that suggests to you that I'm a human user. Sure, bot makers can fake such a history, but it would be expensive for them to do so at scale. Hopefully something ZK something can be done to allow for this in a way that doesn't require me to also make my browsing habits public.

I mean... their could ask people to pay for a quality product that protects their privacy and keeps ads out of their faces.

You know, the old fashioned concept of making a product worth paying for and asking people to pay for it. And... I know this one is going to be even more controversial, use real money instead of inserting crypto into the mix for no good reason.

How much would you pay for a lifetime and/or annual subscription? I am only asking because I've been trying to figure it out for myself. Would I pay 100 and expect zero telemetry, tracking, healthsheck, studies, etc? That would be unrealistic, imho.

Then again, I am not exactly a visionary, or an expert

I wouldn't pay $100 all to Brave, but I'd pay $100 and let Brave keep $30 if I had reason to believe that the other $70 was making it into the right hands.

Why is that? Capitalism forces them?

That's the thing, isn't it? The people who want this will only use a 100% product, not a 50% one, so there's no way to bootstrap to it.

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