Brave gets a lot of hate because of its ties to crypto, their recent moves really do not help much, but overall I am a fan. The browser feels designed to be a true user-agent, all of the crypto-related features are opt-in and it’s the only system where the user gets a share of the advertising revenue.

It seems that a lot of content creators (especially the popular ones) feel like that Brave is hijacking “their” ad dollars, but honestly to me it seems that their model is right: the ad dollars don’t get to the creators directly, they go to users and the users can choose which creators they value most. This to me seems more fair and also gives people the power again to “vote with their wallet”.

In my ideal world, people would use be using Brave, collecting $5-$10 worth of tokens every month and redistributing them to creators they like. This is what I’ve been doing since 2019 at least. If the majority of Brave’s millions of active users did the same, the internet would be a lot saner and less algorithm-driven than it is today.