I’ve been around for some months now, and the more I’m on the Community pages, the more I’m frustrated.
The core attribute that interested me in Brave was the fact that a group started to look into Chromium and tried to upgrade the security features provided by a cross-platform web browser - giving us the readers more power on getting rid of ads, trackers and all that kind of stuff. The fact that Brave added an in-house VPN was something equally interesting.
The fact that the system build on an internal ad channel allowing publishers/viewers to share some of the wealth distributed by advertisers should be seen as a plus, not as a core attribute.
After a few months of contemplating the forum, I’m amazed by the number of people complaining about THEIR bat rewards that didn’t came through, as if the ecosystem devised by the BAT team was intended at people letting open as many browser as possible showing the maximum number of ads per hour possible to inflate BAT accounts so that people can trade them out of the ecosystem and be “paid” for that behaviour. Not only this hampers a lot of time on the forum (and I suspect lot of time for the forum admins), it gives a skewed impression to anyone joining the forum that this is just about milking the system rather than creating a virtuous circle: currently the last 20 topics are all but 3 related to BAT (payments, not enough token per ad, no ads this month, account suspended…).
In the meantime, important features for people who want to use BAT in a professional environment (and who need key features not related to the ads/BAT process) are in the pipeline and, at least from a communication perspective, almost entirely absent from the discussion. Sync v2 working on all platforms (including iOS) is certainly THE issue, notably in my ecosystem where this has prevented me and others to push for the deployment of Brave in the different teams we’re contributing to, just because of the lack of it.
How do you want to incentivise change for non-tech people if they have to install not one, but two or three softwares (password manager…) for their system (ie laptop and phone) to work in Sync? Why would they depart from Safari which offers that? or any other combination for non-mac users?
