In this week’s Basic Attention Token news, we are looking at the community run AMA of the Brave and BAT team. This AMA has been running on Reddit and gives the team an opportunity to share updates on the progress and challenges of the network with the community.
It is also an opportunity for the community to know the mind of the developers who work behind the scene to make the network meet the expectations of users.
The latest AMA featured Alex Wykoff who is a user and a developer. He attended to pre-submitted and impromptu questions from users through the network’s sub-reddit forum.
Brave and BAT Will Welcome More Contributors
He spoke on a wide variety of issues ranging from how anyone could pursue being a user researcher, what made him interested in BAT and Brave and the open nature of the platform.
“The things which I think folks forget to ask is how they can participate. This is an open source community and we can achieve unbelievable things if we can leverage the power of contributors,”
he said
“I hope that everyone, regardless of where you come from and what you’ve learned, knows that they have an opportunity to collaborate and do something great with us.”
According to Wykoff, his participation in the project involves analyzing feedbacks from users of the browser and network to make sense of data, connecting with and networking with other developers in the team and much more.
“The fun comes when I get to sit with a user or get on a Zoom call with them and explore Brave or various user behaviors. That is an absolute joy to see what kind of adaptations we all make to deal with these weird abstract electronic systems.”
A Future Google Competitor
On the state of the Brave browser which the interviewer thinks is the main competitor for Google, he highlighted the progress and accomplishments of various browser noticeable implying that these are working at becoming forces to reckon with as future competitors of Google.
“Kudos to Mozilla and their hard work to bring motion graphics into the browser experience. Opera’s Flow system is also superb. Vivaldi also impressed me with their sidebar, split pane, and especially their History functionality.”
He however emphasized that the progress made by all the browsers cannot be credited to any individual or group because innovations diffuse through the industry, adding that he would welcome collaborations and cooperation with even competitors.
On the ad trial of the Brave browser, he announced that he has been a success so far adding that the team had to do some tweaking on DND times and relevancy.
A Browser For Everyone Irrespective of Technical Competence
He mentioned that one surprising issue a new team member will encounter is that the expectations of the technical team from users are higher than most users are capable of. Having this in mind, the Brave team is adding changes that will make non-techie users find things easier.
“Perhaps the one major point of contention lately is around how to solve web compatibility issues. We have an expectation for users to click on our brand logo and understand that by toggling switches next to very technical terms, that will somehow fix their problems. That’s a gross overestimation of a general user’s technical ability and patience. It’s also a misunderstanding of how lay people solve web compatibility problems”
Right Content At The Wrong Time
He mentioned that the reason people bookmark is finding the right content at the wrong time, adding,
“As humans, we have a profound sense of Loss Aversion which leads us to hold onto things even when the value is marginal. So we bookmark or leave a tab open. Unfortunately, we also have a mechanism for moving things out of active working memory called the Zeigarnik Effect. Once an item has been written (or stored), it is out of sight, out of mind. So we never have the cue to return to that content. I am deeply interested in solving this problem.”
Korean Perception of Brave
Speaking on how Brave will be received by Koreans, he said that the Asian countries like China, Japan and Korea are averse to foreign influences since after the World War II. This is the reason these countries have not really opened the doors to internet giants such as Google and Yahoo.
These areas absolutely do not want to be beholden to any foreign power, so there is a strong psychological resistance, especially in the older generations toward an outside tech group coming in (hence Baidu for China, Daum & Naver for Korea).
He added that for Brave to make inroad into these countries, it must not be seen as coming to extract from the people but to enrich them.
The next AMA comes up on December 5 and Cryptoinfowatch will be on ground to deliver it on the next episode of Basic Attention Token News.
