This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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.
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.
Now that AI can write reasonably good-sounding copy, reviews are increasingly unreliable.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
I'm not. What do you get as a reward for blowing the whistle? Genuinely?
There's no bounty, even if there was you wouldn't get it for at least a year after you blow the whistle.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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...
Well that's just because your are mommy's smart boy. You're just so much smarter than all the other little boys.
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.
Can someone ELI5 what honey was actually doing?
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.
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.
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.
