Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Honey has now lost 4M Chrome users after shady tactics were revealed

9to5google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 336 posts

Re: Honey has now lost 4M Chrome users after shady tactics were revealed

#31

Post by viraptor »

ebiester wrote: post #7
Larrikin wrote: post #2

What is the alternative? Is there an open source version that is community curated?

The alternative to a company that is hiding real coupon codes and stealing affiliate marketing dollars? Honestly, there's no good answer here because most of the work is manual, not automated, and there are a lot of opportunities for bad actors. It's just a bad model in general.

There are legit communities which already collect that information in structured ways. For example https://www.ozbargain.com.au/ is quite Australia-oriented, but could be turned into an extension bringing up the coupon codes automatically.

Re: Honey has now lost 4M Chrome users after shady tactics were revealed

#32

Post by pests »

jjice wrote: post #9
0rzech wrote: post #6

It's ironic that probably the biggest victims were youtubers and other "influencers" who mindlessly promoted this extension to their viewers, for money of course.

Genuine question I was wondering when this went down - wasn’t this completely unknown at the time? If that’s the case, I feel like I can’t blame those who promoted it. I don’t have all the info though.

There is a post on here from a few years ago talking about it. When the scandal broke out people linked it but I can't find it now. We might understand how it works, being tech people, but the vast majority of people most likely have no idea.

Re: Honey has now lost 4M Chrome users after shady tactics were revealed

#33

Post by ttoinou »

ChocolateGod wrote: post #24
magicalhippo wrote: post #14

A couple of YouTubers I watch promoted this and given what I assumed it did, I'm surprised that's all it does. If it seems to good to be true, it probably is.

How did people think honey was making money? I think a lot of these YouTubers are pretending to be shocked or caught out.

A comment on HN in 2019 was explaining how it works, it was accessible through a Google Search

Re: Honey has now lost 4M Chrome users after shady tactics were revealed

#35

Post by magicalhippo »

ChocolateGod wrote: post #24
magicalhippo wrote: post #14

A couple of YouTubers I watch promoted this and given what I assumed it did, I'm surprised that's all it does. If it seems to good to be true, it probably is.

How did people think honey was making money? I think a lot of these YouTubers are pretending to be shocked or caught out.

Yeah I'm torn. I do get that more income means they can invest more and thus grow, leading to more and better content.

But promoting products which have such a high likelihood of being shady like this...

Another one was the app or similar where you scanned your receipts and got some discounts or whatever. Obviously they only make money by selling your data, but they mention none of that during the promotion, just how easily you can save some bucks.

Re: Honey has now lost 4M Chrome users after shady tactics were revealed

#36

Post by 0rzech »

jjice wrote: post #9
0rzech wrote: post #6

It's ironic that probably the biggest victims were youtubers and other "influencers" who mindlessly promoted this extension to their viewers, for money of course.

Genuine question I was wondering when this went down - wasn’t this completely unknown at the time? If that’s the case, I feel like I can’t blame those who promoted it. I don’t have all the info though.

If they didn't know how it works, then how could they promote it as an awesome tool and something good? I expect people to have some integrity, not "god money above all" mentality.

You can and IMHO actually should blame them for promoting crap. No sympathies on my part towards promoters of Honey, to be honest. Especially the so called "tech" channels. But this time they've tasted their own medicine.

BTW., here's a very interesting comment about the issue with regards to LTT: https://old.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/1hkbtlr/peop... .

Re: Honey has now lost 4M Chrome users after shady tactics were revealed

#37

Post by xmprt »

DataDive wrote: post #20
Melonai wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

important context! surprisingly more than i expected! 20% loss of userbase is devastating for an extension, although no doubt not enough for any long-term change in strategy... :)

I had the opposite reaction ... they still have 16 million users ...

Losing 4M is pretty significant considering that's 4M people who actively decided to uninstall something. A majority of the 16M might be dead users (installed on an old browser) or people who don't realize it's still installed but also don't interact with the extension at all.

Re: Honey has now lost 4M Chrome users after shady tactics were revealed

#38

Post by xboxnolifes »

ChocolateGod wrote: post #24
magicalhippo wrote: post #14

A couple of YouTubers I watch promoted this and given what I assumed it did, I'm surprised that's all it does. If it seems to good to be true, it probably is.

How did people think honey was making money? I think a lot of these YouTubers are pretending to be shocked or caught out.

I thought Honey sold consumer shopping data.

Re: Honey has now lost 4M Chrome users after shady tactics were revealed

#40

Post by josephg »

staindk wrote: post #27
jabroni_salad wrote: post #10

In case you missed it, a co-founder of Honey did an AMA on this topic a few days ago. https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1jlfms8/im_ryan_hudso... I'm not a honey user but I thought this section was interesting: > This gets a bit technical but in the video, Jonathon carefully shows you that the ‘NV_MC_LC’ cookie changes from Linus Tech Tips -> Paypal when a user engages with Honey. What he must have seen is that t…

I got a weird feeling from the MegaLag video, but overall don't think Honey are entirely in the clear either. From the AMA it seems Honey has been in the business of taking some/all affiliate revenue even in cases where it finds no coupons - sounds like the sites are fine/happy with this, but I'm sure people who post affiliate links are not.

Yeah, the video wasn’t perfect. But honey is clearly a shady business. Honourable businesses don’t need to trick their customers and advertisers about how their business works. Honourable businesses don’t make an enemy of the truth.
Post reply on HN