this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2020
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Yes, I have nothing against their BAT cryptocurrency (you can disable it with a few clicks). The backgrounds were weirder, it should be in opt-in. They should just give an option like "to support Brave's development, please activate ads on the home page" that would be a nice way of contributing.
But they can't do that. Pretty much nobody opts into stuff. That's why telemetry, and ad tracking are always opt-out. If brave did that, they would lose most of their source of revenue. The true issue is that they haven't found a business model that's not based on ads.
I still haven't seen anyone actually try WhatsApp's originally planned business model which was $1 per user per year. With 500 million users for example that's $500 million, 1 million users > $1 million. It's affordable and accessible, and IMO sustainable (don't hire extra marketing and biz dev people if only 1 million are using the service). But it seems people don't want to try this model because it prevents the ability to sell out to venture capital and make short term profits. Theoretically Brave could sell itself as a privacy focused browser with a built in ad-blocker for $1-2 a year, but it probably wouldn't support all the extra staff at first. Once it got to a certain size though I believe the growth would expand exponentially from word of mouth and a fair business model.
This is what I don’t understand about Mozilla. For 50 million you could have 150 well paid devs benefits, taxes included and people are worried about them scraping by on 500 million while firing good developers and puffing up management. Throw another 50 million in for 150 bus dev and managers. Maybe another 50 for the building and software, hardware. You still have hundreds of millions left over.
It reminds me of how universities have become these bloated administration heavy institutions with a higher ratio of bureaucratic staff to professors than ever before.
There was an economist, I think William Lazonick, that said the natural aim of organizations was not profit, but actually growth. So it didn't matter if it was a non profit, a government, or a for profit company, management always seems to be focused on growing the organization. If there was only a way we could program it in for that not to happen ik some cases.
You would be surprised. I've seen weird things on Reddit. Users that said they lost those sponsored backgrounds and wanted them back and stuff like that.
There's a wide difference between the what a few people say and what the majority will do.
Sure, but still I think you underestimate the "fanboyism" of Brave users :p Money is actually the all-time issue of free software.