The Brave Browser is making genuine efforts to remain relevant

While reading a very good post from @thatkidsblack, I realized I followed a very similar path to his when I decided to start using Brave two years ago.

I have always found internet ads to be intrusive and intolerable, way before they turned the web into the unholy mess it is today, therefore I have been a very early adopter of aggressive adblocking: from Proxomitron onwards and since Mozilla Firebird introduced browser extension and Google Chrome followed suit, all the way with AdBlock, AdBlock Pro, Disconnect, Ghostery, and uBlock Origin, which is my current weapon of choice.

At the same time, I was feeling bad for creators: it wasn't fair they had to suffer for the very poor choices made by websites and platforms, which drowned their content in banners, backgrounds, pop-ups, and any other flavor of bad advertising. While I claimed the right to browse a cleaner web, I felt like I was throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Brave seemed to take care of this. A platform that would reward publishers for the reader's attention while filtering the obnoxious parts away: best of both worlds.
That's what drove me there in the first place.

And yet, Brave has had a long string of issues: so many in fact that I even questioned whether it was still worth using it.
The most egregious of them all: minimum monthly auto-contribution for Brave Rewards was fixed at 5.0 BAT, which was way more than I ever managed to accrue with all my careful attention and browsing over 30 days; things got even worse when the impression value was curbed without notice from 0.05 to 0.01 BAT. All of a sudden, my time on Brave was worth 80% less than before. Brave Rewards was a non-starter for me as it did not make budget sense.

I did not want to give up on the idea, so I adopted the interim solution of turning off automatic contributions every other month, just to have a chance to accrue 5 BAT and have them available when necessary. And yet advertisement campaigns in some months were so poor it would take more than 60 days to reach the threshold.

Then, sometime between August and October 2021, Brave introduced new basic tiers in their Auto-Contribution interface: besides the existing values from 5.0 BAT upwards, it was now possible to set automatic contribution to 3.0, 2.0, and even as low as 1.0 BAT per month.

That solves my issue and allows me to use Brave confidently knowing the monthly contribution will not exceed my reward capacity. Even better, thanks to the higher granularity this is offering and a new upper limit of 10 ads per hour, if on any given month I am showered with glorious Brave ads I can afford to contribute more without having to worry about micromanaging the Reward wallet.

Some of the issues outlined in my original article have never been solved: for instance, there still are issues where BATs are not awarded in time, now and then some user reports their wallet amount dropped overnight and would be restored only with the prompt intervention of Brave Support, and the infamous visual captcha that is required to claim BATs has been broken on zoomed screens that are not set at 100% display size.
New services like Brave VPN and Brave Talk look like a mild attempt at cash grab more than anything. A recent update changed the default search engine from Google To Brave Search, yet another branded service with a subscription twist: Brave Search does not display any ads for the time being, but a premium ad-free version has been announced while the free version of its search engine will "soon be ad-supported". It is unclear why one would ever prefer using a clearly inferior ad-supported search engine, while Brave (the browser) allows using Google without ads.
And the Rewards program has been replaced on iOS devices by a very opaque "automatic contribution" system as Apple considered BAT rewards akin to in-app payment, which is not allowed under the App Store rules.

Despite all these shortcomings and a very abysmal 0.05% market share (source: Kinsta), the Brave Browser is still alive and delivering on its promise of better privacy, fewer ads, and direct support for content creators. As much as niche products go, Brave still deserves a try.