Why am I entirely not surprised that LMG knew what the fuck was going on, and didnt say a fuckin thing about it.
Made more public comments over legitimate criticism about his “just trust me, bro” warranty, than about honey being a out and out scam.
Never watched the channel, but I would guess that being tech-themed makes it a worse look that they promoted it for so long before catching the issue, so they were worried it would cast doubt on all other endorsements and tank the value of advertising with them.
I think coming out and pointing out what honey did would probably be the least damaging thing they’ve done in the past few years.
because holy fuck have they had some whoppers.
If you dont know how a business makes money, chances are its some shady stuff
Providing coupons on stuff for free, with zero ads? Thats pretty weird. Being Bought by PayPal for 4 BILLION dollars?!?!? There has to be some real sketchy shit.
While I agree with you, I think we should be careful about allowing the ignorant to be punished. It’s unreasonable for a non-tech-savvy person to be aware of all the ways a company can screw you. If they’re skeptical of everything, they can’t use anything
I wonder what websites think of this toolbar stealing affiliate links from people doing all the work of promoting their prices. I wonder if Honey goes even further and turns vanilla purchases into affiliate purchases, actively stealing actual money from the site. If I were NewEgg or whoever else Honey has created affiliate links with, I think I’d be banning their affiliate account right now, or throwing in some captchas so their link theft doesn’t work any more.
I just bought some local honey. Don’t know what this shit is, hopefully I never will.
bee puke
Was it not obvious that the extension was doing that and scraping your browser data?
I’m glad this information is coming to light because I think that it should be fixed, at least as far as the affiliate link piece goes, but I find myself irritated by the sensationalism of the poster.
They’re really pushing to make this seem as evil as possible, and milking it for every drop it’s worth. Making this a two-part series and not exposing it immediately feels super shitty to me.
Just post the full information you have, if this is really so bad, stop trying to farm clips.
Also, not enough focus on the timeline. Honey’s business model has changed dramatically since it was released long ago, and I feel like the part two video is going to complain about the original Honey business model, which was literally just a coupon code aggregator, just based on the “cliffhanger” at the end
The dude spent a year figuring this out, researching and getting all his ducks in a row. What did you do, whats your contribution? Oh, let’s see, you bravely complained in a comments section about the way he chose to release the info, accusing him of the crime of sensationalism for clicks.
Gee, why would he want to get paid for his work?? HOW SELFISH! It’s not like there are companies out there trying to steal content creator revenue, right??
The way you complain more about him than the company, makes me wonder, do you work for Paypal, or that new project, Pie? Just weird to see you trying to make him look bad for wanting to get paid for his work. Sounds like a Honey thing to do.
My guy take it down a notch, damn. I’m not calling for his head on a pike, I have legitimate and valid criticisms. I apologize if the tone came off more critical than I meant it but hot hell you came in spicy.
But, to address your issue:
Why does one wrong make a right? Why does him exposing the issue invalidate any criticisms or expectations of quality or integrity? To me it does not, hence why I criticize. And I even said I was glad the information is coming to light, and I’m grateful for him drawing attention to it, I just wish it could have been done a little more tactfully is all. I would like to have all the information right now, rather than waiting for a “part 2”.
I also just don’t appreciate the stoking of anger, which has clearly worked. Ragebait is toxic and that’s what is being done with this story, from my perspective, so I don’t love it.
it should be fixed
It’s not a mistake, but an incredibly unethical business model. Why minimize the issue?
not exposing it immediately feels super shitty to me
it doesn’t change anything to the facts though
It’s serialization, as old as printed news. You can dislike that but it’s not like he’s the only one doing it
If you look at their history, they seem to be a younger YouTube channel. I think he’s breaking it up more so that he can actually put out one video a month and not lose subscribers. He seems to be slowly managing to make the videos longer each month.
I suspected it was a smaller channel, but didn’t look myself. I haven’t heard of them up until this point so this story could be a particularly big opportunity for them, so it makes sense why they are choosing the delivery method that they are
I knew this shit was too good to be true!!
Can someone ELI5? Does this mean they used refferal codes from people that had these “bring a friend” referal codes?
No, it’s a little more complicated than that. How a video explained it was, say someone was trying to sell you a TV, you decide to buy that TV and the salesman gives you a card to let the cashier know who the salesman was to get the commission. When you’re at the checkout line, a different sales man comes up and offers to find you a coupon code to help save you money. In the process of looking, regardless of if a coupon code is found, the second salesman takes the original card the previous salesman gives you and switches it with his own unbeknownst to you or the original salesman. Then when you buy the product the second guy gets the commission.
Damm, that’s shady and morally awful
some companies, instead of paying youtubers a lot of money to promote the product, tell them ‘we will give you some percentage of every sale we make that was advertised by you’ They do this by giving the youtuber an affiliate link. its basically the link to the product, except for that when you open it you get a cookie that says ‘[youtuber] brought me here’ What honey did, was replace those cookies with theirs, meaning they get the cut from the sale, instead of the youtuber.
with for example, NordVPN, you get 35 dollars per sale with your affiliate link. if you watched a youtube video about NordVPN and then went into the description to buy it with the YouTubers affiliate link, honey would pop up and say ‘we have no coupons for you’ if you clicked on the close button of the popup honey would replace that cookie with theirs; if you would currently buy a NordVPN subscription, the money would go to honey, instead of to the youtuber that advertised it to you (who deserve the money)
Technically isn’t telling anybody anything “stealing”? You’re transmitting a copy of the information and whoever created it gets nothing.
In the entire time I used Honey, I never once got a valid coupon code for literally anything. Pretty sure they scraped a ton of my browsing data though.
Are you aware that there are other chrome extensions that offer more coupons for a ton of online stores? Dontpayfull Automatic Coupons or Retailmenot always have plenty of coupons available. I don’t understand why everyone is stuck on Honey, which has been of very low quality in recent years.
For how long, I wonder:
Saw reCAPTCHA on a discount code box the other day - one click per each code tried
I need to check this out, sounds pretty interesting to me. I never tried Honey because it seemed way too shady!
Same here. Newer found a single coupon for me. I uninstalled it a few months ago, not because I thought it was sketchy, but because I figured it must be better at finding discounts for things that I don’t shop for online, like shoes and pizzas or something.
I don’t shop for online, like shoes and pizzas
How do you shop for pizza not-online? Bro still going with pizzas brochures? Respect bro. If you top that off ny ordering by landline, it’d be perfect.
But yeah I had similar thoughts on Honey, never installed and now I think I definitely won’t. Thx 4 i Lemmy
Do people not immediately google “How does X make money” or is that just me?
It is about Honey hijacking the referrals, which wasn’t known until a youtuber made a video about it (or at least not widely known)
Yes, they’ve been doing this since even before PayPal bought them. This is how they’ve always made money.
This is why I don’t trust Brave Browser. They did this in the past. Well, I don’t know if they replaced referrals but they added them when they weren’t there.
The problem is that a lot of these startups don’t make money. The enshittification comes later, first stage is just burning through VC cash to establish market share.
I didn’t Google it. I just figured, if it found me a 10% discount, the vendor would also send Honey some % of what I paid for the product.
I feel like I’ve searched it up for honey, but the search results said the same thing as the YouTubers shilling it. Didn’t download it anyway because of how many people were advertising it. Anyone who uses that much money to advertise can’t be getting their money in a reasonable manner.
No need to do even that. If a simple piece of software becomes a company, it’s 99% a scam.
I have, for some businesses I’ve wondered about. For example, I use the virtual cycling platform Zwift, which charges a monthly or annual fee to use. The biggest competitor, Rouvy, also charges a fee. Makes sense, it takes money to develop these things, buy and maintain servers, etc. The income and expenses are obvious. (Zwift does offer bike frames and wheels from real world brands; I assume the brands paid something to be included.)
Enter MyWhoosh. Free to use, so the income side is unclear. From some searching, they claim they’ll generate revenue via ads - but I doubt that would generate enough to support the platform.
The company is based out of Abu Dhabi, so I assume it’s really sportswashing - they’re just dumping a bunch of money into it and not really caring that it isn’t making money (at least for now).
I’m sticking with Zwift (in part because I have it working under Linux and Wine).
They do, but then a trusted “insider” youtuber or podcaster who they have a years long parasocial relationship with “signs off” on the product and the person says to themselves, “X person has integrity and they are very smart, they wouldn’t put their name on Y unless they did a lot of homework, so I don’t have to.”
And life is difficult, complicated and overwhelming, so you can’t really blame “normal” folks for putting the same faith they’d put into their tech saavy nephew into these personalities. The influencers should pause though and accept that if they can’t enthusiastically describe the reason a thing is actually legitimate, they should refrain from endorsing it or accept part of the blame for misleading people.
Fuck PayPal and its related entities and all executives past, present and future. And I guess fuck you too now, Will Ferrell - you cosigned Mel Gibson in whatever the fuck that daddy movie series was and now you’re the face of these people? The “PayPal mafia” (cringe) literally just bought the US election. I know you need to bankroll a lot of family trips to Sweden, but you h ave too much obviously dirty money now, Will. Hard to chuckle at your comedies now, and that’s a bummer.
You mean a free extension that claims to give me discounts seemingly out of the goodness of their hearts that also has access to every website I go to in the browser where it is installed is not exactly on the level? I’m shocked…well…not that shocked.
Yeah the one that somehow has the money to get the biggest influencers to advertise them.
I tried it in a Firefox container once, while shopping for Xmas gifts. Not only did it want access to absolutely everything, none of the things I was looking to buy got any meaningful discount from it. Surely that would make one question how and why this thing is even still running, unless you don’t ask many questions.
People add extensions and then forget about them immediately, those are the true whales for these companies
I can’t believe that something too good to be true was too good to be true!
Rent-seeking middlemen. This is the pinnacle of capitalism. Taking revenue while providing nothing is maximum efficiency. You can tell because it raises prices invisibly for everyone.
This is just a baby version of how credit card companies have placed a 1%-5% sales tax on the global economy. You might say “at least the CC companies provide a service”, but that tax get’s added no matter if your using a CC or not.
How does the tax get added if you don’t use a credit card?
Because enough people use credit cards that businesses have felt compelled to raise prices across the board to compensate.
Credit card fees get baked into the general price and are averaged between all the accepted cards. Hence cash transactions and lower-fee cards (debit, credit with less benefits) end up paying more of the share of the higher-fee cards.
It’s well explained in the following video: https://youtu.be/OceYCEexDqQ
When you get a credit card machine you sign an agreement saying something like transactions under X amount we, the credit card network company, will charge you 50c or any transactions over X amount we will charge your 1.5%.
Now as a business owner you raise prices 1.5% to cover this fee. If someone pays in cash, the extra 1.5% goes to you, if the customer pays with a card, the 1.5% goes to the card network .
Cause they can’t charge more for CC purchases so they raise the prices for everyone.
The same price must be charged for products purchased with credit card or cash. Otherwise the card provider will withdraw their service from the retailer. So the credit card margin is added to every price.
card provider will withdraw
Dubious, as I regularly see gas stations with separate cash vs card prices. I’ve seen small businesses offer discounts for cash, too. And it’s not like visa is going to stop processing cards because walmart started offering cash prices. It’s just scare tactics. And for big companies, people who pay in cash offer bigger profit margins, so it’s not like they are incentivized to help the situation.
Actually true, but outdated. There was a massive decade long $30b legal fight that eliminated credit card network’s “anti-steering” provisions. Those were contractual terms that retailers signed that prohibited them from offering different prices for cash and card. Some retailers have responded by offering different prices, or otherwise adding a processing fee to card transactions as a result of that settlement.
And the vast majority did nothing.
Obviously it varies from business to business. Some may not want the hassle, some may see consumer sentiment against fees and not feel it’s worth the impact. Some are content to merely leave prices 3% (or more) higher.
Ultimately, very few businesses price things based on their costs…instead they price based on what they think people are willing to pay, or what the market will bear.
It’s also worth considering, at the scales of many of these businesses, accepting and handling cash is very much not a free option. If I’m a supermarket chain, I pay a card company a few percent and maintain my payment terminals and I magically get my income deposited daily directly in my preferred bank account. I’ve got some risk with stolen cards and chargebacks, but the big Chip Card and Mobile Wallet rollouts have dramatically limited my exposure to that liability.
With cash I have a substantial cost to handle, collect, count, and deposit at each location. I have concerns about counting accuracy, interval and external theft, counterfeit currency, purchasing change from my local bank (which typically has a fee assessed for businesses), etc.
Brian Dunning (Skeptoid podcast) went to prison for wire fraud for doing a similar stunt with EBay. Not sure what makes this any different.
What makes it different is that it was perpetrated by Paypal, so nobody will see any consequences whatsoever.
Google had that one browser extension that paid $1 per device type (phone, tablet, and computer, up to $3) per week. I signed up 5 accounts and had $10 every week for Starbucks, Amazon, and a few more but I only ever used it at those places. Especially Starbucks. I loved getting a free coffee and croissant every Friday and also getting points off those 🤣
However that time is over. Do not waste your time with money-making or saving extensions.
If you want extra money use UserTesting or Brandbee. Everything else is a waste of time.
The one Google extension I liked they killed years ago. It was Chrome to Phone. Basically when I was at my computer and saw an article I wanted to read later Id click it and it would send it to a new chrome tab on my phone. And when on break at work I could look at / read whatever it was.
That feature is now built into chrome.
Ah that’s neat
