Aside from some of the common critiques of purpose-oriented blockchain tech, I think there's a question with BAT of if creating a token-based ecosystem with this thing actually creates economic incentives that align with the overall improvement of our society, or if it merely contributes to the existing problems that have enabled intrusive ad tech in the first place.
On a small scale, paying to be able to take away ads (or getting paid to see them — ultimately, the difference is negligible, given how pervasive ads are in our lives) is a nice experience to have. But it has a lot of implications long-term on our society, given ads are the primary way we finance pretty much all information we have access to these days.
How does this affect upward mobility? If a person in poverty wants to get out of poverty by learning a difficult skill, getting access to the information and learning it will be a longer, more difficult process for them. They will be interrupted more often than wealthier people, they will have less time to dedicate to doing the task at hand than wealthier people, etc.
I personally think it's difficult to get excited about any system that wraps the way we gate access to information in our society without considering this element, because the ability for people to move up in life is really one of the great promises of the internet, and nobody should lose that.
But we have all this today. Just install an adblocker. Ads are hardly pervasive at all for me, I really rarely see them unless I go out on the street. On the internet adblocking is almost 100% effective and I don't watch live TV.
In fact I see people who are more wealthy not using adblockers and paywall bypassers because they feel like they should support the sites somehow. It's a similar thing with downloading video content, many of my better-off friends are not downloading because they are worried about content disappearing. They actually care about the overall economic model working. My friends from worse circumstances (I know many people in lesser-off countries) don't give a shit about that and download all they can get. And I agree with them.
I myself don't have this worry. Content will never disappear one way or another. We had content on the internet before ads were really a thing and it was better than it is now in many ways. And I like cutting into the big megacorps' profits.
On a small scale, paying to be able to take away ads (or getting paid to see them — ultimately, the difference is negligible, given how pervasive ads are in our lives) is a nice experience to have. But it has a lot of implications long-term on our society, given ads are the primary way we finance pretty much all information we have access to these days.
How does this affect upward mobility? If a person in poverty wants to get out of poverty by learning a difficult skill, getting access to the information and learning it will be a longer, more difficult process for them. They will be interrupted more often than wealthier people, they will have less time to dedicate to doing the task at hand than wealthier people, etc.
I personally think it's difficult to get excited about any system that wraps the way we gate access to information in our society without considering this element, because the ability for people to move up in life is really one of the great promises of the internet, and nobody should lose that.