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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

#91

Why do retailers put up with Honey? They're clearly not providing value with the attribution theft. Why give them money?

Extortion, essentially. Honey will actually give users the largest available discount if the retailer doesn't buy into the affiliate program (i.e. the retailer loses money). If they do agree, then the retailer can limit the coupons and discount code shown to customers through Honey.

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

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Same. It seems like very valuable data since they have access to the individual items in the carts across many sites.

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

#93
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…

Interesting, I found an article about it: https://www.businessinsider.com/shawn-hogan-sentenced-in-eba...

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

#94
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've found that sponsorship quality varies dramatically by channel.

I never saw a single sponsorship for Honey, but I see a ton for Kiwico and Ground News. I can't speak for Ground News, but Kiwico is a sponsor of basically every educational YouTube channel, and it's actually just that good and totally worth it for kids of the right age.

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

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Do as I say not as I do.

To be fair Paypal got spun out in 2015, far before they bought Honey, so there actually isn't any point in time where eBay was engaged in cookie stuffing.

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

#96
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…

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

Care to elaborate? Sounds potentially interesting but I doubt many people are going to do a deep research dive based on a vague single sentence post.

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

#97
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…

Now they can just avoid paying for affiliate links for anyone who has honey installed

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

#98
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…

Another tip that works especially well on Shopify sites is to add the item to your cart and then abandon the page. You'll usually get an email or text (depending on your Shopify settings) for some discount code to entice you to finish the purchase.

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

#99
post #74
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 in…

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

>> Because at the day information can be political.

Umm. Yes. Which is precisely what placing it left / center / right amplifies.

> 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.

Sure, it's another bit of information. I think more important are the facts. Did this actually happen? If so, what happened? The tl;dr of what happened should give me a pretty good idea, without having to become a reporter myself, especially if covered by both sides.

I think this is more of an issue of an union, than the 'argument to moderation' or 'false balance' might appeal to. If I'm left, and report or something and you don't. That's probably high noise. If you're right and report to something I don't. That's probably high noise. If we both report on something, and we report differently on 80% but we have the same 20%. I'd say that 20% is high signal.

What if we cut out the left / center / right ideas and just take as many sources as we can? Then extract what's common between them. Wouldn't that have some sort of higher signal to noise ratio than any single viewpoint?

Of course, I'm willing to accept I'm wrong. From my personal experience so far, I'm much less inclined to extremes than I was since starting to use this system.

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

#100

Why do retailers put up with Honey? They're clearly not providing value with the attribution theft. Why give them money?

Extortion, essentially. Honey will actually give users the largest available discount if the retailer doesn't buy into the affiliate program (i.e. the retailer loses money). If they do agree, then the retailer can limit the coupons and discount code shown to customers through Honey.

Sounds like more of an issue for the consumer than the retailer? Suppose the best coupon for a retailer is 20% off, and Honey shows that to its users. Retailers want to stem that loss, so they bribe/pay Honey, maybe 5%, to post a 10% coupon in its place. That way the store loses 15% rather than 20%. That might be bad for the consumer, if they thought they were guaranteed the "best" deal, but I'm not sure how the store has any standing to sue. If so, that would put forums like slickdeals at risk.
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