this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2023
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Technology
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So far I am happy with Brave Search, but I completely agree with the sentiment. I think that any ad-based business stops worrying about end-users once they reach a certain size and they only way to avoid this is by ensuring that customers can vote with their wallet.
I'll have to give Brave a look, thanks for the recommendation. And agreed. In general, I've been making more of a concerted effort lately to get away from things that are supported via ads. Either making use of open source software when convenient, or moving to paid services. I just hate that insidious feeling of constantly being advertised to.
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.