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

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

#71
Have a friend high up at one of the “Big 3” in this space.

The entire business model is predicated on injecting themselves as the last click for attribution even when they weren’t remotely responsible for the conversion. Cool business, but can’t keep going on forever without someone catching on.

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

#72
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honey was replacing their affliate links with it's own. So these tech tubers were only really upset that Honey was stealing from /them/, they don't give a fuck about their viewers. Anyone who flogs ball shavers, ass wipes or fuckin microwave dinners don't give a shit about their viewers, and only care about their bottom lines and will shill whatever they can for the right price.

Seems like a lot of people get value from ball shavers and ass wipes though

It's too late to enter the market now. Let's try for the first mover advantage in influencer-favourite ball wipes and ass shavers.

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

#73
post #71

Have a friend high up at one of the “Big 3” in this space. The entire business model is predicated on injecting themselves as the last click for attribution even when they weren’t remotely responsible for the conversion. Cool business, but can’t keep going on forever without someone catching on.

I remember when this was called cookie stuffing, and eBay even sent a guy to jail for doing it with their affiliate program. That’s the same eBay that owned PayPal, which now owns Honey…

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

#74
post #64
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something that has been making the sponsorship rounds now is Ground News[0] which I have found very useful with just the free tier. But given how many people I have seen sponsored by them, I wonder if there is some catch, especially because I can’t imagine that many people sign up for the paid service. I can’t think of what that catch would be though, they do not have unique access to personal data, and I haven’t see…

I've built a local (for my country) news aggregator that basically clusters news and summarizes them based on multiple sources and gives me the rundown of the most important things, and things that can be found between conflicting sources. It's mostly a pet project for myself as it doesn't seem to have a lot of stickyness without the clickbait. I gave the 'product' to friends and some of them told me "oh, you should…

> Why would I care if it's deemed left, center or right by some commitee.

Because at the day information can be political.

>the information that's there in most sources

While I don't use ground news myself, aggregators and classifiers like them can show you when and where stories are being published in very lopsided manners. When a story is only really being published by one side you can use that as another bit of information.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance

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

#75

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 think the shock for the youtubers was replacing their affiliate "link" (token whatever the correct term is).

Everything else seemed... minor and expected. That was the one that surprised me.

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

#76
post #45

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.

Something that has been making the sponsorship rounds now is Ground News[0] which I have found very useful with just the free tier. But given how many people I have seen sponsored by them, I wonder if there is some catch, especially because I can’t imagine that many people sign up for the paid service. I can’t think of what that catch would be though, they do not have unique access to personal data, and I haven’t see…

> I wonder if there is some catch

Ground News is a startup that had 3 rounds of funding it total. If it sees significant uptake, it will become a juicy acquisition target for any influence-peddlers you can imagine, in addition to the usual data collection and ad-monetization risks.

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

#77
post #45

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.

Something that has been making the sponsorship rounds now is Ground News[0] which I have found very useful with just the free tier. But given how many people I have seen sponsored by them, I wonder if there is some catch, especially because I can’t imagine that many people sign up for the paid service. I can’t think of what that catch would be though, they do not have unique access to personal data, and I haven’t see…

If you look into the founding of ground news in 2018 it looks an awful lot like an intelligence agency operation.

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

#78

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…

This sounds like a distraction. "seems to claim that there is no first click cookie". He brought that up, it doesn't control the payout and doesn't change the result from what I understand. FC cookie is not relevant, Megalag was focusing on what was important information to impart to viewers. If they clicked on an affiliate link from their favorite creator, using Honey hijacked that action of support without disclosing anything.

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

#79
post #2

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

Signing up for stuff. Pretty much every online retailer will pay you via discount for your email address. I set up a specific junk email address for this purpose and give to every retailer I shop with for their initial x% discount, and I receive coupon codes going forward. From what I can tell, this is the best way to get discounts. Retailers are generous with people they know a lot about. The flip side is that you'r…

I toss "10OFF" into almost every promo box when I buy something. Works at least 25% of the time. When it does I try "20OFF" and that works as well like 5% of the time.

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

#80
post #64
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something that has been making the sponsorship rounds now is Ground News[0] which I have found very useful with just the free tier. But given how many people I have seen sponsored by them, I wonder if there is some catch, especially because I can’t imagine that many people sign up for the paid service. I can’t think of what that catch would be though, they do not have unique access to personal data, and I haven’t see…

I've built a local (for my country) news aggregator that basically clusters news and summarizes them based on multiple sources and gives me the rundown of the most important things, and things that can be found between conflicting sources. It's mostly a pet project for myself as it doesn't seem to have a lot of stickyness without the clickbait. I gave the 'product' to friends and some of them told me "oh, you should…

Ground.news also gives the information that is present in only one side, which is just as high signal – if not higher – as showing the overlap IMO. They have a feed for “stories with equal coverage” and “stories covered mostly in left-leaning sources” and “stories covered mostly in right-leaning sources.”
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