Always wondered why YTers were complaining about lack of commissions and this explains most of it
If you’re wondering how a browser extension got so much money to pay all these YouTubers for sponsorship, well, they’re not. They are literally stealing the money they paid the YouTubers right back from them by replacing their affiliate code with their own.
For people looking for replacements, Edge’s integratedauto coupon code works well enough. RetailMeNot does the same job and has also been around for a long time.
as a consumer why should I care if I still get a discount ?
isn’t this influencer back office bullshit and not my problem ?
I used honey for a few years. in that time i think it found me a working code like twice.
The coupons honey applies may not always be the best deal around. Honey works with online shops to only serve you the coupons that specific online shop wants you to see, causing you to be ripped off on occasion.
Simply put, there might be a 20% off coupon that can be applied to your cart, but because Honey is getting paid by the online shop, they are only going to show you at best the 5% off coupon. This makes Honey redundant, because neither Honey nor the online shop tell you when they are working together, which is why you can never trust honey to actually give you the best deal.
it is your problem because they’re stealing your money too.
famous person code gives you 30% off a product. honey tells you it’s 10% and keeps your 20% for its pockets.
at least that’s how I understood it.
Yep and a great question that allows more people to learn. Please stop downvoting real questions
People are downvoting the tone, not the question. Calling it bullshit when it is seriously stealing money from other human beings and calling it “not my problem” under the assumption that it doesn’t matter if it affects others, displays absolute lack of empathy. Devaluing the question and making it a bad faith comment.
It’s not just Honey swapping the affiliate codes. Practically all the major coupon sites do it too. That’s why they require you to click on a coupon code to reveal it. When you click, they usually reveal the coupon code in a new tab, and helpfully redirect the current tab to the store, using their affiliate link.
It’s more obvious when websites do it though, since they can’t auto-close the tab like Honey does. They also don’t automatically pop up at checkout like Honey does.
I imagine some of the other coupon extensions do the exact same thing as Honey though.
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.
They might not be able to say anything. Advertising contract might have a clause saying they can’t speak of the details of their deal, or speak negatively about the sponsor.
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.
The “hard R” thing still permanently etched into my brain lol.
Context
Linus misunderstood that the phrase “hard R” referred to the N-word. He thought it was the R-word. He was saying “people used to use hard R all the time, like on Family Guy and stuff. I used to use it too!” His co-host caught the misunderstanding and it was sorted out quickly before he said anything else embarrassing lol.
My favorite was the trust me bro shirt.
You could see Luke having to physically restrain himself for calling his boss a fucking hard R word on live stream.
Wait. How is honey a scam? It’s purpose is to give people discounts they didn’t know about otherwise, and as far as I can tell, that’s exactly what it’s doing. Maybe it’s in a gray moral area, but a scam?
If you actually watched the video you’re currently commenting on you’d have an answer to your question.
But since you didn’t watch it I’ll give you a hint. It steals affiliate links taking money out of the pockets of those who are getting you a discount. It then uses those stolen affiliate links to take money out of your pocket as well by short changing you discounts (By telling you it found you a 10% coupon that is actually a 30% coupon and is pocketing the difference)
Watch the video, dumbass
Honey is getting paid by shops to only serve you the coupons that Shop wants you to see, potentially keeping you from discovering a better deal on your own.
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’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
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
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.
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.
If Honey finds a 30% code, supplants its own 20% code and tells you it’s a 10% code, both Honey and the store save money.
Was it not obvious that the extension was doing that and scraping your browser data?
Scraping data yes Scraping affiliate links? No
It’s kind of ridiculous how long it has taken for people to realise that this is happening… where did people think that their referrals had gone after they cratered?
People realised years ago but didn’t really care much. End users generally don’t care since it doesn’t directly impact them, and “influencers” will often take a sponsorship deal without thoroughly researching the product or service being advertised, and probably just figured that people were buying less stuff due to the economy or whatever.
The tech-savvy people that realised what’s happening tend to either avoid afilliate links, or use a cash back service (TopCashback, Rakuten, etc) that requires you to use their affiliate link.
It’s not just Honey doing this. Practically all the major coupon sites do it too.
Thats where I’m at, I thought it was fairly obvious it was doing this and theres a hundred extensions like this. Are real people surprised this is how it works?
I knew Honey was sketchy, but I just assumed it made it’s money from just data harvesting everything
Yeah I always felt something was off with honey. I never downloaded it for that reason, it was just kinda too good to be real or something. Like how are they making enough money to pay all these YouTubers to promote them? Something wasn’t adding up
If you have multiple extensions installed honey always secretly steals the revenue from competitors without asking for consent. Most other extensions will ask if you want to activate cashback. Honey just disables their competitors and steals that affiliate revenue. It should be classified as malware
how are they making enough money to pay all these YouTubers to promote them? Something wasn’t adding up
- Know average amount of revenue a customer gives you over some period of time
- Figure out what percentage of that you’re willing to lose
- Get a loan
- Use that loan to pay to advertise to get customers you wouldn’t have anyways
- After the period of time (mentioned in step one) passes you’ll have a profit if everything went correctly
It’s not really a mystery.
The thing is I think it’s feasible to do this in a non gross way…it’s essentially a search engine that just looks for promo codes, matches them against brands, and then tries them in rapid succession on the checkout screen. I think they would probably need humans to resolve the many 1-off issues (could work in a crowdsource manner like adblock filters) and a central registry to keep track of which ones fail, but it’s not a hugely complex problem.
I just bought some local honey. Don’t know what this shit is, hopefully I never will.
bee puke
of this I am certain
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.
My wife uses it and I’ve never seen it find a discount code. I assume it’s because we don’t buy enough online since money’s been pretty tight
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
Why would you need to order pizza online? Not everyone wants to pay fees for the “convenience” of paying more for the food and having to type in my credit card info myself. You call them up, you get a better price, and you pay when you get there.
Why would you need to ordering pizza, period?
Food ordering apps aren’t convenient as fuck and I dare you to argued against that.
If you live in a bigger city and have trusty restaurant’s with trusty service, yeah, call em. I do for two of my trusty places, but theyre rather far and expensive from where I now live. And the places around here change like everyone year or two. So yeah.
Most people use apps.
Food ordering apps aren’t convenient as fuck
I agree. Nothing convenient about overpaying to entrust your food to underpaid, unvetted delivery workers
God I hate this new phone the screen is just the tiniest bit too small and I keep hitting the left most suggestion instead of the middle one, turning ares into aren’ts and woulds into wouldn’ts.
I’m sure you know what I meant.
Pretending they aren’t massively popular exactly because they make the whole thing easier and more comfortable (browsing menus you know are up to date, being able to specify allergies as much as you want, etc) would be incredibly naive.
Is capitalism using it aa a possibility to exploit even more? Yes. Does that suck balls? Yes. But does is the tech itself shit? No.
Capitalism enshittifies everything. Automation isn’t cursed at because the current economic system mean that the working classes will get less, and that is a bad thing. The technology isn’t. So the tech isn’t the issue. Capitalism is.
I use them only when it’s free (ie someone else is paying for it). I hate them so much. They are not more convenient, they increase the price by 100% and they actively hurt people and small businesses.
browsing menus you know are up to date
A quick web search shows plenty of anecdotes to the contrary.
being able to specify allergies as much as you want
And you trust that?? If I had a serious food allergy I would absolutely NOT trust that a food delivery service would communicate those effectively given how much they push restaurants around, up to and including adding restaurants without their knowledge or consent.
I suppose in the strictest sense, sure, these apps are convenient, but you sure are paying a lot for it, and some restaurants charge extra for it on top of the fees, and the delivery folks aren’t getting a fair cut of the fees. Most of the fees go to big tech.
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.
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!
Yeah the one that somehow has the money to get the biggest influencers to advertise them.
Lmao, I never trusted a browser extension.
Like, immediately “Too Good To Be True” red flags were raised.
If I want coupon codes, I could just google “Coupon Codes for [shopping platform]”
Soooo… You don’t have ublock installed then?
Open Souce baby
Not the same
Open Source what? Ad-blocking? Do you mean pi-hole?
Did you read the source or do you know anyone who has? Do you have statistics on vulnerabilities found?
If not, it is the same, you just trust gorhill more than honey without evidence to back it up. So do I. But it’s important to remember this is just a lie most people are telling themselves, not backed up by anything other than faith.
Trusting strangers isnt a good thing, bur trusting that out of the many users out there, someone would’ve found out malware, is much better trusting one entity’s proprietary code.
But practically, you can’t expect everyone to be auditing code. The average person isn’t that knowledged, myself included. But “Use Open Souce Software” is still a very good advice, even to an average person (like myself) who couldn’t possibly verify the code by themselves.
Firefox itself is also based on trust on its developers, but Firefox is still better than Chrome.
We live in a society, there’s no way to conpletely avoid trust.
We have to trust our food souce isn’t poisoned.
The farmers
the people picking up the crops
or if its meat, the butchers
the druck drivers
the people packing and unpacking
the grocery store workers
I mean, we cant possibly have everyone auditing the entire food supply chain.
That’s why we have government to audit it.
Preferrably a transparent government with many workers in the departments, and also overseen by a democratically elected government, who can pass laws to regulate the process, and the citizen to hold the government accountable. That would be very close to open source. A fully open source system would be having CCTV footage publically available. But even then, not everyone is gonna have the time to check all the cameras, but the point is we just trust that someone out there is gonna be watching it.
In contrast, a close source system is essentially one single corporation doing all the audits, with no transparency, and no government/citizen oversight.
You sent a lot of words that seem to be agreeing with my point and I appreciate this.
How do you know Ohio is real? Have you been there yourself? Have you seen it with your own two eyes? Or do you just trust all the people who claim to live there?
You see, believing in the existence of Ohio is exactly the same as believing that my dad works for Nintendo and I got to play their next game early. It was awesome btw.
Yes I’ve been to Ohio. It’s as terrible as people say.
However the correct analogy is this: “I distrust alliant credit union, but I trust a random internet stranger that in theory is doing their work in public”. That’s the right number of employees and the right scale.
Your analogy is basically accepting my point. In this case, I’m trusting a random internet stranger not to lie to me, and you’ve very clearly illustrated why that doesn’t work. Believing Ohio isn’t real would require a large conspiracy. Ublock introducing something naughty would require one man. I trust that one man, but there’s no reason to. If you think that’s absurd do some research about recent software package changes that introduced backdoors.
I trust a random internet stranger that in theory is doing their work in public
There’s no ‘in theory’ about it.
I’ve actually had an extension I was using be revealed as spyware (it was hoverzoom, I immediately switched to an alternative afterward).
I don’t read every line of every piece of software I use because that would be impossible, but I do actually look at some of it and modify it to suit my needs. It was because there are many thousands of people like me that do this that the problem in hoverzoom was caught. It’s been ten years, so I don’t have the best memory of the event, but I think it only took a few days to catch it as well, despite the fact that the offending code was left out of the GitHub repo and was only in the compiled extension.
The state of open source isn’t perfect (not everything has reproducible builds yet) but in general I ‘trust’ that every other programmer in existence isn’t in on a conspiracy to screw me over specifically.
Why would any of this be about you personally? I honestly can’t take you seriously when this is your view of security, and it’s made worse when you extend that to “we caught em once so the system works”.
You don’t have McAffee’s installed then! /s
