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.
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.
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?
I knew this shit was too good to be true!!
Was it not obvious that the extension was doing that and scraping your browser data?
Scraping data yes Scraping affiliate links? No
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 am fine with them scamming influencers. I am not fine with them being paid by websites to not give the best deals
What kind of rat is fine with scammers?
Scamming the scammers is fun
Topcashback consistently beats honey and others out (almost all competitors beat honey btw). And they pay out and have customer support. Easily thr best way to sell your personal data to a shadowy data broker
Your okay with a large corporation stealing from the working class? Why is that? I’m sure only a very few of the make good money.
well, this segment of the working class are selling obvious scams to their audience, so its a funny ironic justice. People like Linus from LTT, only stopped because he found out they are scamming him as well, not just the audience.
Yep. and he decided to let the scam keep happening to everyone else by being absolutely silencio on the subject.
Maybe because anyone who calls themselves “influencers” are just as bad as corporate execs, but, oftentimes, more insistent/stupid in their shilling so people hate them more.
So you hate sales people in general
lol “influencers” are trash
Almost every one who has tried to sell to me yeah.
I don’t think they said that. However, I am. For the most part they are my enemy.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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)
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 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).
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’m that cynical i just avoid anything being shilled by a YouTuber. I assume if they’re pushing it this hard it must be nefarious in some way and I spend no more time thinking about it.
I will drop my subs for channels that shill this stuff though once it becomes evident it’s shady.
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 don’t seem like you’re ok.
Cybertruck breakdown?
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 of the entire food supply chain 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 don’t have McAffee’s installed then! /s
I just assumed it was a scam the moment I saw it. Just thought it was farming data for profit out in the open because everyone else dose that. They went above and beyond and made corpo malware.
Did Amazon kill off their smile thing yet? I don’t order enough on there to notice anymore but I always used to use it when I did
I think Amazon smile got axed in early 2023
I don’t know why they would kill off a tax ride off.
I can’t tell if you are serious.
American companies get tax breaks for charity and they all exploit the shit out of it.
True but they don’t make money with this, they still have to spend most of the money.
From your link is a great example:
To illustrate, suppose that the American Cancer Society is hosting a formal dance as a fund-raiser (the ACS is a certified charitable organization). Further suppose that the fair market value of a ticket to the dance is $75, and that the donor pays $375 to purchase a ticket. The donor may claim only a $300 deduction, because the amount contributed ($375) is reduced by the amount of the benefit that he received ($75, the fair market value of the ticket). This holds true even if the donor does not actually attend the dance.
The taxable income of the donor is reduced by $300. If the donor’s income was in the 35% income tax bracket both before and after the deduction, the donor’s tax liability (amount of taxes owed to the government) is reduced by $105.
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!
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.
You act like PayPal and eBay aren’t in a codependent relationship. Has that changed? I mean I see PayPal as an option everywhere but I don’t use it because giving money to Paypal is like giving money to ticketmaster.
If anything, I imagine eBay is more dependent on PayPal, than vice versa
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
OnePulse is legit too. It won’t make you rich, but you can earn a bit of cash on it. You’re limited to $20 a month, but it’s unlikely you’ll reach that every month
I fell way off of onepulse since their paid surveys were scarce as hell. They know no one is using that app “to be part of a community”
