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

101–110 of 336 posts

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

#101

Post by johnnyanmac »

beAbU wrote: post #48
ChocolateGod wrote: post #24

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.

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.

So this perspective boils down to "entrepreneurs are evil"? An interesting take to put on a site dedicated to funding entrepreneurs.

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

#102

Post by charcircuit »

lozenge wrote: post #88
charcircuit wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only a percentage of people on a site will convert. Increasing that percentage is valuable.

How does displaying a message "Honey didn't find any discounts for your order" on the cart screen, increasing that percentage?

A potential customer could leave the site, spend time searching for a coupon code, not find anything and give up, and then not return to the site to complete the purchase. Honey could keep users on the site moving through the order flow even if it didn't find anything.

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

#103

Post by Sophira »

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.

Given that the original exposé was meant to be a three-part series, I'm almost certain this is not all that Honey does.

The remaining parts have never been released. In January, MegaLag tweeted to explain what's been going on: https://x.com/MegaLagOfficial/status/1884576211554201671

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

#104

Post by NalNezumi »

willy_k wrote: post #45
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.

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'm curious about answer to this too. I don't use it, but offhand mentioned it to my dad and it took him 30min of scouring before he purchased a subscription. (to my big surprise)

I hope it's just an "good" product that will (like every SaaS) be plagued by enshittification 5 years down the line.

Either case, it's hopefully a silver lining to my dads "don't trust MSM" tendencies. (fortunately he's too academic to go full conspiracy crazy but you never know)

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

#105

Post by totallynothoney »

willy_k wrote: post #45
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.

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…

The catch is that the premise of the service is faulty.

Their segmentation of news organizations according to bias, can be obviously be biased itself. That's not a problem necessarily, but the service promotes itself as neutral while it's VC funded. You are part of a demographic that will be propagandized in the future to recoup costs.

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

#106

Post by quickymonster »

ThalesX wrote: post #64
willy_k wrote: 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…

I think you misunderstand the feature.

Ground news tells you the bias of publications that have published the news item not the slant of the news item itself. It lets you see how much news gets completely ignored by the right and left (the right is way worse) when it isn't favorable to their cause. It's also really interesting to sample both sides and see how wildly the facts get slanted as you get further from center.

The publishers are biased, not the news item.

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

#107

Post by lozenge »

kmeisthax wrote: post #85
jjice wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

LTT found out about the affiliate code changes and dropped Honey as a sponsor. The problem is, when they drop a sponsor it's usually only announced on their forum page. Linus considered making a video for a wider audience but was worried he'd get shit on for bringing up an issue that technically only impacted him. Remember: before MegaLeg's video the only thing that was known was the affiliate code ripping, and it wa…

Let's be real, LTT didn't want to bite the hand that feeds him. What future sponsor would sign up if they knew LTT might make an expose about them in future for clicks.

Even something basic like exposing how much these sponsors pay out in commission instead of towards the quality of their products would be hugely negative publicity.

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

#108

Post by Joel_Mckay »

elamje wrote: 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.

Marketers monitor the conversion rates very closely. Chances are some people caught on to the shenanigans within 24 hours, but couldn't figure out which part of the lead generation ecosystem was cheating.

What Honey did robbed content publishers of ad revenue, advertisers lead valuations, and end consumer confidence (bait-and-switch.)

I wouldn't want to be in the blast radius of that legal mess... Popcorn ready for when the judge defines the scope of who is liable =3

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

#109

Post by 0xCMP »

ThalesX wrote: post #90
chatmasta wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.”

I'm seaching for 'equal' on the home page and finding no results, nor for 'feeds'. Could you help me identify those locations? It's always confusing to me when I go to their home page and would appreciate it. I think the equal coverage might be what I'm actually looking for.

I think they're referring to https://ground.news/blindspot

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

#110

Post by johnnyanmac »

cogman10 wrote: post #89
LPisGood wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anyone who flogs ball shavers, ass wipes or fuckin microwave dinners don't give a shit about their viewers I mean what’s wrong with selling ball shavers, ass wipes, and fuckin’ microwave dinners? These aren’t really harmful things and they provide actual value to people. Are you just opposed to advertising as a concept?

Those I have less of a problem with. What I actually have a problem with is the supplement sales, VPN sales, and gambling sales. "Here's a magic multivitamin that will make you feel 1000% better!". "You are so unsafe by not using a VPN, here use our service which also gets to peak at everything you send through it". "Wanna bet on this Ping-Pong championship? Well, grab some crypto and go to this 'not legal in the US…

What's wrong with VPNs? Seems like the tamest thing to sell in terms of ethical impact. any security middleman can be skewed negatively if you phrase it as "they get to peek at everything". That's what a security app needs to properly protect you, and why these apps live and die on credibility (see: Crowdstrike).

Fortunately none of the youtubers I watched ever went full dark horse and pawned off gambling and scams, though. Closest to a scam was probably those "become a lord" sites that let you "buy a small plot of land in Ireland" or something and a tree gets planted. When the reality is you don't actually own the land through technicalities and it's questionable if the tree is even planted.

Post reply on HN