This makes sense to me. If you make the system opt in, publishers aren't going to give a fuck because like 0.01% of their users browse on Brave. And that means users aren't protected because sites that were already okay selling their users out are still going to do it. So you have to make it opt out so that users are protected by default. Idk just seems like the incentives are nicely aligned here: the user-centric option also happens to be the one that benefits the browser vendor. Isn't that what we want?

I think some have issue with them collecting monies on behalf of an organisation who has made no indication they are interested in participating. If my site gets 1000 BAT in payments which sit there because I decided I don't want to take part, what happens if I say to Brave I never intend to take part? Do they give those BAT back? Site visitors may have had the impression they were paying for my content while Brave is pocketing it.

Personally I reserve judgement, but I see why some look at it this way.

I can see that. Perhaps there's social a fix somewhere around messaging or something. Ultimately it's not Brave that's doing this to site owners, it's the users who install Brave for Brave's feature set. I think the elephant here is that it's not really up to site owners to say whether users can use ad blockers or not or which browser they should use. If I install an ad blocker as a user, that's my choice. So installing Brave, essentially an add-blocker-as-a-browser doesn't seem like the thing that site owners should be able to opt out of at all. Allowing publishers to opt-out feels like a tactical compromise.

Of course sites can block requests based on Brave's user-agent string if their business depends deeply on ad revenue and they consider users with ad blockers to be abusing their service. That's their prerogative if this really irks them and it's worth losing the users. On the flip side if this becomes popular enough then site owners see real money on the table and they'll opt in to picking it up. That seems like an easy fix for them. If I was a site contemplating either blocking content to users with ad blockers or allowing cooperative users to opt into a more private client-side ad experience which still gives me the opportunity to collect revenue for their traffic, I'm pretty sure I'd choose the cooperative approach.