Here's the threat model that justifies uses a public VPN:
1. The VPN provider and its infrastructure is trusted.
2. Attackers (private or government) can access data the VPN stores some period of time after you use it, but not while you are using the VPN.
3. Given assumptions (1) and (2) are true, attackers should not be able to determine which websites you visited.
A VPN does nothing if you don't trust the VPN provider (since they can always be lying about keeping logs) or if the government can access the VPN's servers/data while you're using it. But it does protect against one of the most common ways a government/private party could gain access to your browsing history: the government/private party subpoenas the websites you visited or your ISP for all pages visited by a given IP.
In this case, providing an alternate way to pay protects against storing data that an attacker can use to connect your account to your identity.
Isn't that the point? That is, the argument is right now the money goes to the devs, management, and stockholders, when it rightfully should go to those people damaged by the software (or toward preventing them from being damaged).
> the companies and industries move very slowly
How much of this is due to liability law and how much is due to natural aspects of the relevant technology? Liability law may be part of the reason, but software probably naturally moves faster than other engineering fields.
Is there any way to mitigate code execution issues (besides just fixing bugs)? Because allow code execution might be a pretty big deal breaker in certain contexts.
If you use Firefox, ads pay for your browser experience. It's just one extra level of indirection (Advertiser -> Google -> Firefox vs. Advertiser -> Brave).
With regards to original argument, my impressions was you didn't assume good faith and respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what the Brave developer said, as the Hacker News commenting guidelines suggest you do. Take that how you will.
> If you carry the analogy, you're saying the billboards destroying my view through Colorado are somehow paying for my roads. Well, actually taxes pay for my roads.
You are entirely misinterpreting the Brave engineer's good faith argument. The argument wasn't that billboards somehow pay for roads. You introduced that analogy, and the reply showed where your anology falls apart. The argument was that unlike roads, most websites aren't funded by taxes and won't be for the foreseeable future. The engineer also points out some ways Brave ads are different from billboards: they are opt-in, they are personalized, they give you useful tokens for your attention, etc.
It's impossible to ignore that every major browser is subsidized by either user tracking or OS sales. Even the privacy focused Firefox, which I use and love, is funded almost completely by Google ads.
And lastly, one great thing about Brave is it's completely (besides maybe Widevine, which isn't their fault) FOSS, so you are free to fork it and remove the Brave ads functionality. In fact it's probably not even hard to write a script to do it automatically. But no one has successfully funded large scale browser development while being FOSS and not relying on ads.
Also, I know people who would opt-in, though I wouldn't myself.