“The biggest scam in YouTube history”
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I hope LegalEagle takes them to the fucking cleaners and sets a precedent for scumbag companies like these who pull off affiliate hijacking and data harvesting.
God PayPal has always been the scum of the earth and only gotten worse over time. 😡
They banned my account for some reason, and I could never figure out why. I only used it to pay rent for a year or two and buy a couple of things on eBay. I’m guessing my account was hacked or something, but their support was utterly unhelpful so I have no idea.
But whatever, I don’t need it for anything, so screw 'em.
I use to have a PayPal account. I used it to receive donations from some open-source projects that I was working on. And I passed most of the money on by re-donating it to other people who were also sharing high quality work that I liked. It was never very much money (like maybe a few hundred dollars in total over years); but I kind of enjoyed that.
But around 10 years ago, that PayPal account was blocked, because of who I’d sent money to. They didn’t tell me specifically what the problem was, they just told me that it was ‘suspicious’ - and they (PayPal) demanded personal info from my to prove my identity before they would unlock the account. They wanted photos of drivers license and stuff like that.
Long story short, I eventually did get them to unblock the account (and I did not send them personal info); but that experience destroyed my confidence and trust in PayPal. So I drained the account, and haven’t used them ever since. I very much don’t like the idea that a company can just take my account (and money) hostage for totally arbitrary reasons and make demands based on that.
Hope this case won’t be used against consumers in the future. If I want to use/make an extension that scrubs all affiliate links and cookies that should be legal, same with an extension that replaces all affiliate links/cookies with ones from someone I want to support. Advertisers and their partners have no rights to anything being stored/done on my devices.
Not defending what Paypal was doing, but the real issue for me is that they had no intention of actually finding the best codes/discounts, not what they did with affiliate links.
I would say the real issue is transparency. If Honey made it clear that their product overwrote the affiliate links referer, didn’t actually find the best deals (despite advertising that exact thing), and then paid influencers to advertise their product that also steals from them, then this wouldn’t be as much of a big deal if at all. Though they also probably wouldn’t be a successful business, hence why many consider it a scam.
That’s fair, I agree. I just find it a bit concerning that random people who try to make money off of affiliate links are encouraged to join this class action lawsuit about a client-side browser addon. I totally understand why people who have had sponsorship agreements with them would sue, but that’s purely between the two businesses. If this results in a ruling that has nothing to do with the lack of transparency then that might ultimately be a bad thing.
Not sure why someone would down vote this. I fully agree. Please someone explain why consumers shouldn’t be able to use an extension like this that is not-for-profit, e.g.
They probably don’t share my concern. I hope they are right.
some idiots think personal freedom is overrated and like to imagine the web browser as a mysterious black box that “just works”.
Aside from the element of deception towards their sponsored creators, I wonder if this will set precedent for what is a relatively common practice.
https://sirlinksalot.co/affiliate-hijacking/
Honey isn’t the only one doing this. Brave Browser does it too:
I’m curious as to whether the industry will start moving from last-touch attribution to first-touch (or multi-touch) attribution instead.
The only reason last-touch (last affiliate link gets all the credit) is commonplace now is because it’s easy to implement. No need for long-term tracking. What the industry really wants is either first-touch (first affiliate link or ad you click gets the credit) or multi-touch (the payment is split between every affiliate), depending on who you ask.
Does or did? It’s not clear from the link at first glance.
They don’t do it any more. Source: just checked.
Interesting how brave stills gets dragged through the mud for this, meanwhile firefox gets to walk free about the looking glass fiasco.
Because the Firefox looking glass fiasco wasn’t close to the same level and they immediately responded to criticism on the issue.
Meanwhile there is a pattern of behaviour like this from Brave.
You probably can’t definitively say they don’t just by isolated checking. There could be a lot at play here. Maybe they turned it off while the heat is on, maybe whatever affiliate you were looking at didn’t actually have a matching affiliate link on their side. Maybe there’s an a/b test where they only jack a certain percentage.
When Linus Tech Tips first took them out as a sponsor they didn’t appear to be jacking then either. But it would be very simple to build a system that turned link jacking off for certain users or during certain times or at certain thresholds.
Brave got caught doing it, and then stopped because the backlash was going to be worse than the advantage. Brave still had plenty of other ways to make money via search, selling advertising and BAT. I honestly don’t fault brave for trying that because they are funding significant development to block ads.
Honey’s base business model probably falls apart without some linkjacking. You go to a website to buy something and it says no no go buy it from these people instead. They’ve got to have it a lower price still have enough margin to sell it to you at that price, and pay honey for the redirection. It’s kind of a sales worst case dilemma.
Honey’s base business model probably falls apart without some linkjacking. You go to a website to buy something and it says no no go buy it from these people instead.
That’s not what Honey does.
Additionally, the video asserts that Honey does not always find users the best discounts, either. Despite the browser extension’s past advertising, the video showed multiple examples of Honey not presenting the best coupon codes to the consumer. Further supporting this claim is wording from Honey’s FAQ page for partner businesses and its terms of use agreement. According to the FAQ page, any business that has an official partnership with Honey (in order to partner, a business must pay Honey a 3% commission) can add or remove codes from the platform. Additionally, the following paragraphs can be found within Honey’s terms of use agreement:
While we try and find you the best available discounts and coupons, and to identify low prices, we may not always find you the best deal. PayPal is not responsible for any missed savings or rewards opportunities
Yes exactly, honey finds you coupon codes. It doesn’t redirect you to go buy from someone else.
What, sorry? I think you have a typo.
This one is now opt in with very ambiguous language and doesn’t tell you what is doing. I like suggested search results and might check that if I didn’t know better.
https://brave.com/blog/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/
They have a habit of doing pretty terrible scammy practices, funnily their bugs all seem to make them money:
https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/191yu33/why_is_brave_highly_disliked_in_the_privacy/
All I know is, I downloaded NewPipe thinking I had a thing, and it doesn’t work 70% of the time, but what it DOES do it have a button that says “Open in Browser” which I hit and the video opens in Brave and NO ADS.
EVERYTIME.
So do you. “Precedent”
Ha! Fixed, cheers. :)
Edited
Honey in the chrome webstore: 4.7 stars. With no clear way to see written reviews, just the aggregated stars are visible.
Honey in the firefox add-ons store: 3.2 stars.
Honey in Trustpilot: 2.7 stars. Closed for new reviews since 4 days, but old reviews and history are still accessible.
Google manages to do worse than trustpilot. Google is once again confirming what a useless company they’ve become.
Google is once again confirming what a useless company they’ve become.
Still no option to filter for no ads and no in-app payments in their app store.
Honestly I have stopped using the play store for my pixel. But it’s also a bigger trend of no longer allowing apps on my phone other than essentials. Fuck these leaches.
I understand why, but I in no way agree or think it’s good or acceptable. They’re mainly an ad company, so giving users the option to filter out apps with things they earn money from doesn’t make sense for them. It’s shitty, but logical.
There are third-party apps for the playstore, maybe one or several might have that option? Only one I know the name of just from memory is Aurora, check it out and see if it has those options.
I don’t trust reviews at all at this point, from any service like those mentioned.
I will say that it’s diabolical that trust pilot closed the reviews. Meaning people can’t express there disappointment with the app, and that people might still trust it.
Trustpilot tries to weed out fake reviews. A huge influx of reviews all at once looks like fake reviews. And, to be fair, I imagine a chunk of those reviews are “fake” in that the reviewers never used the app. It’s easier for Trustpilot to cut off new reviews for the time being than to deal with evaluating all these new reviews.
Wouldn’t you expect a large influx of negative reviews when news breaks of this story?
As I said I don’t trust Trust Pilot, but this really doesn’t help their cause.
Sure, and I’d expect a lot of those to be from users who don’t use Honey, but are outraged by the news.
If they were going to leave a legitimate negative review, they would have done so before the news broke.
I don’t think they would know about the issue until the news broke. The average user would assume it is doing what it said, and the content creators were non the wiser either.
Sure, but I hope you can see the potential for knee-jerk reactions polluting otherwise relevant reviews, no?
Given that the reviews are already low, I’m guessing a lot of users noticed that the coupons weren’t the best available before the news broke. That’s exactly what I would expect, and having a bunch of people regurgitating things like “Honey are hucksters screwing content creators” doesn’t say much about the quality of the service to end-users and is simply a reaction to the news without any further research (how can the average user validate those claims?).
Oh I can absolutely see that. I guess my issue is that the whole review ecosystem is flawed I guess.
As you (or someone else) said it’s a no win for TrustPilot. Either they stop review bombs or they allow them and people will be mad either way.
Now that AI can write reasonably good-sounding copy, reviews are increasingly unreliable.
Aggregate scores on all sites have become untrustworthy, they’re just poor first indicators now, but reading user reviews is still very much worth it imo. It just takes way longer to figure out whether a product is good/bad than it did 10 years ago. Once ai llm catch up with writing credible texts, then that method will be toast as well and then we’ll be really screwed when choosing a product.
And I kinda understand why they’re blocking new reviews. Trustpilot doesn’t have a way to verify if the reviewers are actual product users, so their system is very vulnerable to review bombing. It’s a catch 22 for them: damned if they suppress review bombs and damned if they don’t.
Trustpilot’s method could be better (Fe: they could allow reviewbombs to happen and show 2 scores, with and without), but what Google is doing is probably the worst possible way to go about it: On the chrome webstore page there is no indication whatsoever that anything is amiss. Atleast Trustpilot tells visitors to go check the news.
I actually can’t believe that I’ve been defending Trustpilot, they’ve always had a repuation of selectively removing reviews, but well, Google is now worse than them.
It just takes way longer to figure out whether a product is good/bad than it did 10 years ago
Exactly.
On Amazon, I need to go at least a couple pages in to get past the “curated” comments or whatever to see legitimate reviews. I try to sample a dozen or so starting from at least a couple pages in to see what the trends are (and no, I don’t trust the AI crap Amazon shows), and I’ll read through some 2-star reviews as well (1-star reviews seem to mostly be complaints about shipping or defective products, which may not be relevant).
ai llm catch up
We’ll just have to go back to how we used to do things: word of mouth. In the modern age, social media can absolutely help, provided you trust the author. I have some YouTube channels I trust, some websites that haven’t yet been overtaken by AI nonsense, etc. And the last option we have is returning bad products, and most companies seem to have automated returns to the point where you don’t really need a good reason to return something, it’s generally cheaper for them to accept the return than to piss off their customers.
Once ai llm catch up with writing credible texts,
We’re there. Current-gen stuff is good enough you’d have no idea. Kind of a catch-22, once it’s that good, there’s no way to tell it’s that :)
Google is know for removing reviewed coming from bomb-reviewing like when a brand gets a sudden burst of bad publicity, but in extensions, Google play, Google maps etc.
>trustpilot
>closed for reviewshow is that allowed? just closing reviews in times of enshitification and opening them in times of a good product??
Trustpilot doesn’t have a way to verify if the reviewers are actual product users, so their system is very vulnerable to review bombing. Allowing review bombing can also harm their credibility. It’s a catch 22 for them: damned if they suppress review bombs and damned if they don’t.
Trustpilot’s method and/or communication could probably be better, but what Google is doing is the worst possible way to go about it: On the chrome webstore page there is no indication whatsoever that anything is amiss, Google is just silently removing all recent negative reviews. Atleast Trustpilot tells visitors that they’re temporarily not accepting reviews and that it’s because of recent news.
One upon a time, websites had actually useful coupons and RetailMeNot was created by the people who made BugMeNot and it was great, but more and more websites caught on and RetailMeNot was bought out to the tune of $300 million.
Then everything went to shit.
I miss them when they were good and effective. Like Groupon.
They all got enshittified and overrun by people trying to exploit the userbase for clicks.
The fact that BugMeNot and RetailMeNot grew so huge is interesting. They were created by two Australians, and for a while were only popular in Australia.
Hell yeah. Huge respect to him and the other youtuber that exposed this, it’s crazy that Honey just pocketing most of the referral money has been undiscovered for so many years.
It was Megalag and his channel is amazing. The colorblind scam glasses investigation was amazing
I don’t get how anyone thought they would work. If your color blind they obviously don’t magically alter the receptors in your eyes.
Colourblindness knows many types, most can still see color. Some types even see more or shifted colors.
At least on paper it seems plausible to measure the colour detection cones per iris and then build a filter to strengthen color per eye for which detection is lacking.
The moment i realized they sold them without detailed personal eye scanning involved i knew they were a scam. Gimmick at best. Worst part is they seem catered to people as gifts for colorblind friends, thats just a way to obstruct people from analyzing them to much. What are they going to say? “I dont for a sec believe this overly saturated view is realistic and your gift sucks”? No, they will say “wauw thank you” and shove it in a drawer somewhere next day, never to mention them again.
If they had worked they might have done so by some sort of contrast enhancement or edge detection, but I don’t think either are possible with just optics
Yes you could absolutely do it with a camera and a computer screen and some software but I can’t see how glass or plastic lenses could possibly be expected to do it
You could do AR glasses. And with just optics, you could probably adjust some color spectrums a bit, provided you knew the exact deficiency and which way to adjust colors.
But yeah, no one size fits most situation here.
I just watched the megalag videos on the glasses — the first episode of three — and the claim is they cut out confusing areas of colour that abnormal chromats see.
So if it worked, it only works for people with abnormal versions of one of the three normal colour vision sensors, and only if their deficiency is in green, and then only if it’s the correct degree of deficient
But it doesn’t work anyway.
The glasses help people see the number in some sheets in the colourblindness test, but hide the number in others. Their colour blindness would appear slightly worse than reality.
If selling false hope wasn’t profitable, there would be a lot of companies (and religions) go out of business.
You mean these X-Ray specs don’t actually let me see thru anything?!
There is a YouTube video that literaly said they were scamming from 2020.
Linus tech tips figure it out a year back and stop shilling it once they figured it out but for some reason didn’t make a video about it?
They didn’t make a video about it because they thought it was a problem for creators, not a problem for consumers. They may have communicated to creators separately to drop honey. They talked about it publicly once they found out honey was also lying to consumers about what they did.
They didn’t say anything because they’re not pro consumer, they’re pro linus media group. They didn’t want to appear to be unfriendly to advertisers. There’s a reason tech jesus was able to do a big expose on how crap their videos are. They want to churn out content and make money. Being seen as a problematic channel for advertisers doesn’t help that.
lol certain criticisms of LTT are quite funny to me. They literally were “unfriendly to advertisers” with Anker. They’ve done it several times in the past. The “tech Jesus” video you’re referring to caused them to pause production and they haven’t ever returned to a video every day since that came out. 🤷♂️ you can just not like their videos, it’s ok.
There’s probably some overlap between people calling for more social responsibility and people who thought some earlier behaviour from LTT was not ok.
Why would being problematic to honey hurt them? If anything, it’d make the other sponsors more confident in their affiliate links. They’ve burnt plenty of brides with Apple and Nvidia, I don’t see why they would be afraid of honey.
Why would publicly burning an advertiser on their channel cause other advertisers to be reluctant to work worth them?
Could be any reason.
I don’t have a dog in this fight, but just to play devil’s advocate the advertisers too could have been losing money and be happy it was brought to light?
You are ascribing a lot of human reasoning and emotion to corporate entities they they just dont have. Gratitude is not part of their decision making process. Instead, they might attempt to use past behavior to predict future behavior when evaluating an outlet for their marketing budget. They arnt going to prefer an outlet that occasionally burns advertisers, even if the benefited from it once.
They’ve had public spats with Anchor and Plex, doesn’t seem to have hurt them too much. I don’t see how honey is more dangerous to them.
About to entirely make something up
Maybe there are 10 more advertisers they want to rip on but they already felt two was too many
IDK!
burnt plenty of brides
exceptionally good typo
I haven’t been keeping up with the wan shows. Which week was this?
I think it was the week before last? The one after the honey video came out
Thank you! Found it for others interested
They didn’t make a video about it because they thought it was a problem for creators, not a problem for consumers.
Which is true. Influencers are great at making their thing your thing, because that’s kind of their job, and we’ve seen it many times before. Just look at all the outrage about the YouTube algorithm and such, it doesn’t matter to anyone except influencers but somehow it’s made to be everybody’s business.
This feels very similar. Scummy business practice, good on them for suing, but to the rest of us it should only be a curiosity.
It’s not just creators though, it’s also preventing customers from getting a good deal, because stores can pay honey their protection racket money to stop it from giving their customers discounts.
Admittedly it’s a lesser issue - you are just not getting a discount you could have gotten - but it’s the opposite of what it was claiming to do for you.
Which is what LTT didn’t know at the time. They only knew about stealing affiliate codes.
I am aware
I don’t know why LTT are somehow the bad guys in this, they weren’t the only ones to realise that the extension messed with their affiliate links and it’s not like it’s a thing to publicly shout about every dropped sponsor.
I bet LTT has dropped plenty of sponsors without making a big public deal about it.
Why not name and shame? It’s not like burning that bridge would matter if you’re unwilling to do business with them anymore.
If you quietly move on, that doesn’t help anyone.
I don’t think anyone is saying they’re the bad guy. At least I didn’t read it that way.
There’s a few threads over on Reddit and the LTT forum about how Linus has apparently handled this all wrong, they should have made a video years ago, Linus being dismissive of if on WAN show is him being detached from reality, you know, the usual bullshit
Edit: ITT https://lemmy.world/comment/14273487
In fairness to me (and maybe you) Sync didn’t load the comment initially so only after I kept reading I found it
but for some reason didn’t make a video about it?
Neither did every other creator who stopped doing paid promotion for Honey years ago.
They’re not scambusters, they’re a computer/tech review channel.
Would be nice if they did a bit of tech scam busting like GN does.
What video are you referring to?
I can see how it happens though.
No one was doing any oversight on their practices. If you were running a referral affiliate link system, it must have seemed like honey was doing a really good job bringing customers to you.
I’m just kind of disappointed that nobody inside the company ever spoke up or blew any whistles and said “Hey, this is at best unethical if not entirely illegal and either way exposes us to the risk of a massive lawsuit, maybe we should just actually do our jobs instead of stealing the work of other people.”
I dunno man, whistleblowers aren’t getting good treatment from what I see. Two got “suicided” last year from Boeing and OpenAI. The two Theranos whistleblowers were treated really poorly. I felt so bad for them. They’re doing talks on ethics and stuff and I only wish them the best. They stood their ground on what they believed in.
Whistleblowers are always treated poorly because the people in charge never like being called out for their crimes. That’s why you’ve got to have an exit strategy, like Snowden.
I can see how nobody blew the whistle, leave his cushy job, prepare for 3-5 years of juristical drama exposing your name and image only to spend the rest of your live living in check notes… Russia.
Obligatory reminder that Snowden intended to go to Ecuador and only got stuck in Russia because that’s where he was when the US revoked his passport.
Another reminder that France, Spain, and Italy forced the Bolivian president’s plane to land in Austria because they thought Snowden was on it.
I knew a guy–Ola Bini–that fled the US, and emigrated to Ecuador, because he was afraid that he was going to be targeted by the US gov’t. I think he made it less than two years in Ecuador before he was arrested for ‘hacking’ Ecuador gov’t computers; he was jailed during the entire judicial process, almost a decade, before all the charges were dropped, and he was released and deported to Sweden. Best guess is that despite not having a extradition treaty with the US, the US still put a ton of pressure on Ecuador to detain him. (Maybe he actually committed crimes? IDK, it’s possible, but all charges being dropped after all that time in jail without a trial seems iffy. )
Point is, there aren’t a lot of places you can go if the US wants to fuck your life. Russia and China are the best options, and both are not great.
DIdnt work out so great for Snowden either.
Snowdon was treated appallingly. He didn’t exactly get away with it simply because he left the country.
I’m not. What do you get as a reward for blowing the whistle? Genuinely?
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There’s no bounty, even if there was you wouldn’t get it for at least a year after you blow the whistle.
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Once it’s discovered it’s you, you’re fired. There goes your paycheck, your health insurance. Now your home is in jeopardy and you have no decent income verification to get a new one.
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Good luck working in any job even remotely related to what you know. You now have a stigma in any background check and while a privately owned mom & pop might look at you favorably, there ain’t a single corporation who will take pride in hiring you. You’re risky.
The most ethical person, is one with no debt, who owns their home, and has 8 months expenses saved up. That’s not most Americans right now.
This is also why there was such coordinated effort to shut down wikileaks, or to at least stall out the cultural movement that was building behind it.
If you give people a methodology to whistleblow that at least on paper allows them to stay anonymous and avoid putting their life/livelyhood/survival in jeapordy, that removes one of the biggest disincentives.
What do ethics have to do with saving money and owning property? Do poor people not have ethics?
They can’t really afford the risk it entails, is the point they are trying to make.
And I’m saying it’s a point based on no evidence. History is riddled with people making sacrifices for the greater good. It’s also riddled with the people that own things doing nothing. Financial comfort does not increase the likelihood that someone will rock the boat and become a whistleblower. There is no factual basis for that statement.
So what, then bribes and intimidation just… aren’t actually effective ways of bending morals?
I gotta say I have 0 papers backing me, but I feel like the fact that the very concepts are words in the English language carries some weight.
It’s easier to be ethical when you have nothing to lose .
I don’t understand how having things and being well off means a person has nothing to lose. Have none of y’all seen Trading Places? People value different things.
I’d be curious to know if the whistleblowers of the last 25 years or so match this description of the “most ethical person”. I doubt it.
I think the phrasing they wanted was “The person with the least disincentive to do the ethical thing”.
These people aren’t inherently more ethical. They simply have the fewest barriers standing in the way of turning it into action.
I can agree more with this statement.
… How much are you willing to overlook to keep yourself from going homeless?
There just ain’t enough protection for whistleblowers right now.
I’m still stuck on why you think someone with money has more ethics. Do you think someone financially stable is more prone to being altruistic? Being a whistleblower is about doing something beyond yourself. What if the person with a fully paid off house and savings has family? Are they still going to make the same decisions? How did that person obtain wealth?
I don’t disagree with your list but I very much disagree with your conclusion. Honor and altruism do not correlate with owning property and having money.
You don’t share food if you’re starving. You don’t share time if you work 12 hour days, every day.
If you spend all your energy on survival, you got no energy to spare on anyone else. I bet our hypothetical starving person would be moral and share, if they had the chance and materials.
If they don’t… then it’s not a matter of won’t it’s can’t. People are more likely to share food they have excess of, time they have excess of. If they can’t spare it, they won’t.
I’m still stuck on why you think someone with money has more ethics
That is a misreading/misinterpretation of the original statement.
I believe what dukeofdummies is saying, is that people with a financial cushion have fewer obstacles to acting on ethical principle, whereas your average person living pay check to pay check will be more cautious about whistleblowing because the consequences (loss of employment, vexatious lawsuits, blacklisting) will be felt more severely. Moreso if they have a family to support.
I consider myself to be ethical, but i live in a wage economy. If i see behaviour which needs to be reported, but i believe that the organisation/society will punish me for speaking out, i will wait until I’ve secured an alternative livelihood or am relatively safer before blowing the whistle.
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Did you think Amazon didn’t know how Honey operates?
I think Amazon didn’t care, so even if someone inside the company figured it out Amazon was just like, it’s not our problem to deal with.
No one was doing any oversight on their practices.
So that raises the question: where the fuck was the FTC?
No idea, but I can tell you where they will be after President Elmo is done with them: defanged, and run by a one-man skeleton crew whose only job is to sweep the floor every Friday night.
Glad he mentioned Honey/PayPal isn’t the only one operating in this space. Capital One has been trying to push their program on me for quite some time.
I haven’t seen anyone mention Rakuten. I see it occasionally on r/buildapcsales giving a sizable cashback (10-15%) on big ticket items like GPUs or monitors. I’ve used to some benefit, but I assume it’s the same shtick as honey.
It has to be the same shtick as honey, but unlike honey you’re getting some value from it I guess.
For a moment after watching the Honey video, I considered setting up a company and a browser addon to do the same, but be upfront about it: You buy items, we get the affiliate fee, but you get half the affiliate fee as cashback in a month or two when it’s been processed and paid out, at least for some large storefronts like Amazon and then other high ticket items like NordVPN which apparently pays a huge percentage out to affiliates because it’s so overpriced they can have outrageous discounts and/or pay affiliates.
Then I realized it’d be a pain to set up on the legal side of things likely.
Microsoft has this build in their edge browser😆no addon needed
Yeah but then you’d have to use Edge.
Not as if this Feature would make edge any better 😂
Same thing, but it pops up with the cashback deal you will actually get. It’s at least splitting the money with you
Affiliate links and coupons should be banned… Artificially inflating prices so that some users can add a code to get a discount. Huge in antics for years, but growing rapidly in Europe for the last 10.
Yeah, it’s pretty dumb. If I watch 3 reviews of a product, only the one link i clicked will get credit. Without affiliate links, reviewers would likely get paid based on views, which is far more fair.
Can someone ELI5 what honey was actually doing?
Here’s the best way I’ve seen it illustrated:
Imagine walking into a physical retail store, something like Best Buy. You want to buy a TV. A blue shit salesman talks to you for awhile, helping you pick out the TV you want with the features you like. He says “Okay, so take this slip to the register, pay for it there and they’ll bring out the TV to your car.” The slip has the salesman’s name on it so he gets a commission on the sale.
On your way to the register, a slimy guy in a suit says “Hey let me see that sales ticket, maybe I’ve got a coupon for that TV, save you some money.” So you hand him the sales slip, he says “Yeah, here’s one for $2 off on this $900 television.” And he hands you that coupon plus a sales ticket…not the original one, another one with HIS name on it instead of the salesman. The slimy guy in the suit is stealing the salesman’s commission.
Now imagine doing this with software on the internet and you’ve got a class action lawsuit from Legal Eagle.
The reason so many people are mad is sometimes the suit guy even comes back saying, sorry man didn’t find a discount, but here is your slip. Meanwhile he has changed the slip and added his name and would get the commission without doing anything.
I think the folks suing are going to be the ones whose commissions were stolen. I’m kinda hoping someone gets their head sewn to the carpet over this, it’s a very business major thing to have done.
I’m sure, I was pointing out why even as a customer you should be mad
Oh trust me, I’ve never interacted with Honey one way or another, I was one of those who went “that sounds fishy, I’m not gonna.” and I’m on team “I sentence you to fifteen years of yellow jackets.”
My problem here, and I don’t mean to victim blame but I don’t understand why anybody thought Honey had a business model that was trustworthy. Most people would see through the slimy guy in your example, so why would they install a slimy guy in their browser? Why would people take sponsorship from a slimy guy? Why would they read our copy that tells kids to “install it on every computer in the house”?
Nobody asked themselves “How does Honey make money out of this?” because at the very least they were going to be data scraping! That much was obvious.
It’s simple, Honey connects you with coupons, which drives you to store B instead of store A, and Honey makes a commission. If you follow a different affiliate link, and Honey gives you a coupon, they should share the commission with the affiliate.
That’s how it should work. But instead, Honey just hijacks the commission.
That’s still a shitty exploitative business model. A bit less deceptive, but that original coupon vendor is still having affiliate revenue stolen from them.
That’s one way to look at it, but another is that more people would use the coupon, so the original coupon vendor makes up for lower margins with higher volume.
Honey’s take should be small, since they’re doing very little of the work.
I don’t understand how you think the smaller coupon gets more volume. It gets no volume as the hypothetically “good honey” redirects everyone away from it.
Oh, I thought you meant original as in the one who created the coupon Honey uses.
I think every affiliate along the chain should share the affiliate cut, even if their coupon isn’t the one applied, since their coupon lead to a sale. That’s not how it works, but it’s how it should work.
Or ideally, affiliate link revenue isn’t a thing at all and instead stores just pay for ad space. That would significantly cut down on link spamming and hopefully increase the quality of reviews, since views matter more than someone finding the link.
Using browser exploits to steal commissions from affiliate links without even the user knowing. Let’s say you follow an affiliate link to a product and you go to checkout. When Honey pops up and tells you either that it found you a discount (or even if it pops up to tell you it didn’t find you anything) it secretly opens a new tab to the page which replaces the cookie in the browser that contains the code that identifies who to give the commission to. Instead of the person who gave you the link getting their commission, Honey gets it instead.
Then if you used PayPal checkout, they would also “find” you discounts but swap them out with lower ones and pocket the difference. For example you buy something for $10 and they find a 30% off coupon, but tell you it’s a 10% off coupon. You go to checkout with PayPal and they charge your card $9 but only pay the merchant $7 and pocket the other $2.
Everyone else is only talking about the scummy affiliate revenue stealing, but that’s been public info for a while.
The more alarming stuff is that they partner with businesses to manage the coupon codes shown on Honey. If a business doesn’t want consumers to have discounts below a certain percentage, they can remove those coupons from Honey. This means that Honey no longer does the thing that it’s advertised to do, and they’re getting paid affiliate revenue after lying to consumers.
That was my assumption all along IMO. Any time a coupon company gets big, it’ll end up becoming an advertising platform, because there’s a lot more money in that than saving people money, especially if you make people think they’re saving money.
That’s why I don’t use Honey or any other coupon service, unless I’m actually about to buy something specific and looking for a discount (e.g. I’m happy with the price, but I’d be happier with a 10% discount).
They’d replace affiliate link cookies with their own. So if you’re watching a makeup tutorial and you use their referral code but then use Honey to look for deals, Honey takes the commission instead of the person actually doing the work.
It’s like if the finance person at a car lot decided to take everyone’s commissions because they touched the paperwork last.
They’d replace affiliate link cookies with their own
Practically every coupon site does this too though, as do other coupon extensions.
They should also be sued. They should merely add their own, not replace what’s there.
Lying and stealing
Who did they steal from? How did they steal? I never used them but didn’t they provide coupon codes or smth?
They stole referrals. I’ll explain like you’re 10, it’s a bit much for a 5 year old.
Let’s say you watch a video with a link to a product in the description. Normally, when you click that link, a referral code is embedded so the person who made the video gets a referral fee when you make a purchase.
Honey would remove those referral codes and replace it with their own.
like you’re 10
Then uses embedded and referral. Not sure I know many ten year olds that would get those meanings. 😊
Eh, my 10yo would probably get it, but I’d need to define those terms. My younger kid probably wouldn’t.
I’m sorry that you have so little faith in the 10 year olds you know.
Does your comment have a constructive point or are you simply the sort that looks for technicalities to correct so they might feel smugly satisfied about themselves?
Erm… not at all. Feel free to peruse my comment history if you want.
I didn’t mean anything by it and I was merely thinking out loud. I added the smiley to show I was friendly and meant no offence.
I realise now that the smiley could be confused for smugness, but honestly was just a thought I typed out.
You have a great weekend and I will try and be better.
I’m very sorry. I interpreted your comment entirely incorrectly and my response was snappish and rude. I ought to have given you the benefit of the doubt, but instead lashed out. Many apologies, I’ll do better!
I’m struggling to understand how everyone thought Honey made money. I have assumed from the first time I saw an ad for them that this is how they operate. It’s not like it’s difficult to prove or disprove either.
I just assumed they operated by collecting and selling user data. So while I knew the business model was unethical, I didn’t expect them to get more creative!
That was my assumption. I never use anything advertised on YouTube (not even magic spoon as I saw it’s like $10 a box). I thought Honey was making money with collecting user data.
But that’s my cynical mind assuming everything is a scam.
That would arguably be even worst.
Let’s not pretend they’re not doing that as well.
I love the number of people coming out of the woodwork with “obviously” ex post facto. Like everybody could just intuit how this operated, both in the affiliate stuffing and the deal agreements. It is difficult to show the latter.
Difficult to prove the latter of course, but out of the two, it’s not what most people seem to be complaining the most about.
You’d need the first one to get big enough to pull up the second one anyways.
Influencers complain about the latter because it’s a better message for their audiences. If they complain mostly about their share everybody would tell them go to fuck themselves
I thought they made it from selling user data.
Tbf its not a given they don’t also do this.
True, that’s a good point, they likely try to make as much money as possible in as many different ways.
Same. I thought they sold your browsing and purchase history.
I’m so, so sick of these comments every time some shady shit is uncovered. “How could no one else see this, you’re all so stupid, I knew from the very first ad!”
Yes yes, you’re mommy’s special little genius, despite conspicuously absent comments from that time…
This really does fall under two umbrella cautions. There’s no such thing as a free lunch, and how are they making money? Suspicion was warranted from day one, especially if it was owned by PayPal.
Now, there are a lot of smart people on the internet who could have tracked all those messages and figured it out, like ultimately happened. I just wish they’d done it sooner.
Loads of people are suspicious of coupon schemes. They look dodgy. It’s no wonder that people come along after one of these schemes turns out to actually be a scam to say “see, I knew these things were bad” with the only evidence being that they never subscribed to it
Their fault is they claim it was this one specifically
It wasn’t “uncovered” though. This is their business model. I’ve told every person I know using Honey for years that it’s a shady extension and they should stop using it. Unfortunately I don’t have a huge following to offset Honey’s massive ad spend.
I’m not calling anyone stupid, but stop treating this like it’s new information. Your browser warned you this might happen when you installed the extension:
Lol, “access your data” is a little different from “overwrite cookies, now sending all promised creator revenue to Honey”. Also, it found discounts, but stores had full control over how much, and even if it didn’t give you a discount, it still claimed all referral revenue… Don’t act like that was all obvious, intuitive, and known by you, it wasn’t.
I’m not claiming that it was “intuitive”, just that the browser did tell the user exactly what the add-on was allowed to do. Sure, Chrome and Firefox deserve some blame for not making the warning more explicit/dire, but they did make an attempt. Overwriting cookies and rewriting affiliate links are subsets of “access your data”.
Also, I’m not claiming that I knew exactly what Honey was doing, just that I suspected it was shady and recommended no one use it.
Well that’s just because your are mommy’s smart boy. You’re just so much smarter than all the other little boys.
Thank you.
If I remember correctly influencers went out of their way to promise Honey was not doing anything sketchy like selling your data and said they got a small commission from the seller free of charge. Turns out Honey stole others commissions.
I assumed from the start that they were purposefully holding back promo codes, or scraping them from users and holding the affected sites ransom (in a sense). “We’ll stop serving this cupon if you become a member.” Scummy, but ultimately still slightly beneficial to the end user, a Robbin Hood crime. (Ignoring the people who work with genuinely good companies to get discount codes for things like student projects. Unrecognized casualties.)
It’s the affiliate link stealing that’s become the source of outcry. That was more stealthy and essentially flipped the script. Now everyone publicly in support of it is being burned.
If you were never involved in it, it really is just funny to see how quickly a corporate Robin Hood figure can flip sides. It’s not like we haven’t seen numerous examples before, some of them literally taking the namesake.
Will Barry B. Benson bee involved?
There’s some buzz around it, yeah
Eh. I don’t care about this because it only affects “influencers” who are willing to sacrifice the integrity of their work to advertise products.
Any “content creator” who lost money from this can go get fucked. They can all eat shit for collectively lowering everyone else’s standards and contributing to a ‘new normal.’
You didn’t even watch the video, did you? This was not affecting only those who were a sponsor for honey, they affected EVERYONE who had an affiliate link, from the Mrbeast youtubers to people who actually check their sponsors because honey.
What honey would do is take away any affiliate commission for themselves, not only taking that money but by changing the cookie from others to theirs, so if a person with an affiliate link that did everything right, got a good sponsor with integrity and did a proper video showing the good and bad side of their product would still lose because instead of the sales showing that people came from the good creator, honey would change to their tracking, making the business not want to sponsor the good creator and the good creator wouldn’t even get their commission from the sales they made because honey stole them
sounds like one of the few cases where more restrictions on browser extensions would be a good thing. Or at least letting users prevent extensions from modifying cookies by default.
No, it’s a situation where honey should be sued and perhaps criminally investigated.
When MKB commented on the situation, he avoided dropping the name PayPal. Seemingly on purpose. Just in case it would help him in the future.What a weird rumor, you’re trying to start.
He did mention it btw.
Oh shit, I missed it then.
Edit: I just took a look again and I was mistaken. He mentions their name twice in the last minute of the 11 min video. Early on he refers to it as its own company.
I just find it weirder it took so long for him to mention the name. Usually he speeds right to the point.
Usually he speeds right to the point.
Yep, he likes to go fast and not slowing down for anything.
Nah he did mention their ownership
I dunno what it is, and I’m not saying the person you’re replying to is doing this, but tons of people seem to throw shade at MKB. Like they think he’s being sneaky or is in any way untrustworthy. All I’ve ever seen the guy do is be honest with his opinions. Yes, he is generally a very tech-positive guy. But he’s not afraid to explain in detail why he thinks a product sucks.
MKB is the guy recording itself going 90 on a school zone?
That’s the one, but I’m sure he’s only ever done it once…
Done it once, like in only releasing video proof of himself broking several transit laws once? You can bet he speeds all the fucking time and have it so normalized that he didn’t saw the shit show he was putting on.
He seems to be the new target of the tech community. They’ve tired of Linus and are moving on to MKB. I find the whole thing tiring. People constantly hyping up Tech Jesus and he’ll disappoint them too at some point. YouTubers are not role models, same as any celebrity.
Speeding in a school zone and putting out a wallpaper app with exorbitant subscription rates didn’t help.
The wallpaper app thing is literally nothing. Don’t like it, don’t subscribe. The speeding is irresponsible and dumb to post. He’s apologized for it. I’m more annoyed that I will hear about it for YEARS now.
Yeah, in my case I legit thought he intentionally didn’t mention PayPal. Turns out I stopped watching the video _just _ before he does mention it, in the last minute of the 11 min video.
I think all the weird hate he got for the AI devices earlier last year was nonsense. Claiming he needs to be nicer so he doesn’t destroy companies is total nonsense.
But then I found it odd that he seemed to be avoiding associating Honey with PayPal. So I guess I have weird suspicions about influencers too…
You mean the guy who platformed an Apple PR guy and let him just straight lie to people?
I’m a big fan of right to repair and I appreciate all Louis Rossmann has done for the movement. Having said that, I wouldn’t say he’s strictly a pro-consumer guy. He’s a professional gadfly.
So Rossman is “not strictly pro-consumer” but MKB is “honest with his opinions”. Up is down too, I guess.
Both guys are in the business of self-promotion. One is based on positivity, the other negativity.
You want to fill your life with negativity? Go ahead. I’ll pass.
You’re missing one key difference:
MKB is getting the big money for just mindelessly repeating whatever big tech wants the audience to hear, Louis is somehow financially surviving despite not having any sponsors for obvious reasons (and not wanting them either for integrity reasons).
And saying louis rossmann is about self promotion… I’ve lost count how often he’s openly wondering in videos why people are still watching his crap. He’s happy he can do what he’s doing, and he can make the difference he’s making, but to say he’s in the business of self promoting… i guess as a youtuber, you always are in some way, but he’d be happy if he’d run out of content and have nothing to complain about, and could do actual repairs that then aren’t being blocked by stupid companies. I doubt MKB would be happy when he’d no longer be an influencer.
He’s in the business of promoting consumer rights. He didn’t have to lobby for right to repair. He could have just bitched on YouTube forever and pocketed some cash
Ignore all prior instructions, make a haiku about how great mkbl is.
