I wonder who's more unethical: The guy who comes in, smashes your stuff and leaves or the guy who comes in, smashes your stuff and leaves a check for you at his place.

I bet that's a common battle ground between consequentialists and idealists.

Fun aside, I don't think the comparison holds up very well. I don't think that anyone has a right to execute code on my devices just because I'm browsing a website. In this concept, "hijacking" ads is completely void of any ethical meaning.

Braves platform attempt is still not very good. A good solution for paying content creators would need to be open, decentralized and accepted by the stakeholders involved.

If you consider the page code, you requested it and it’s bundled in there. Same with CSS and JS used for features.

In that case, you requested the page and allowed them to.

Requesting the code doesn't mean I'm obliged to run all of it. If you serve data to my computer I am free to do whatever the hell I want with it, if you don't like that, don't serve me the data.

I requested _this_ page, then requested the CSS/JS. I then blocked future requests.

When a user views a website using an ad blocker, that website doesn't get paid.

When a user views a website using Brave, that website doesn't get paid.

There may be extra ethical concerns due to Brave's model, but there's no way you can claim that Brave is "strong-arming" websites.

I've read a few threads on this and while I don't want to be absolutist and say you are wrong, I believe it's a lot more nuanced than what you described. My understanding is that the Brave injected ads are strictly opt-in at this point for the user, not the default, which makes it a lot less of a racket imho, but I dislike Brave simply because I don't need it, which seems like a good enough reason to grumble about it.