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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

#111

Post by Hikikomori »

babypuncher wrote: post #65
0rzech wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ve…

The problem is Honey was dishonest about how it works. Their marketing claimed that Honey automatically applied coupon codes for various online retailers during the checkout phase. Nobody really had a problem with this. What got found out and landed Honey in hot water, is the affiliate link hijacking behavior which they did not disclose. Basically, any time you follow an affiliate link with Honey installed, it replac…

Shops could also pay Honey to use a lower % off code instead of them finding ones and giving that, so maybe there's a 10% code out there but Honey only gives users a 2% one because they got paid by the shop, and tells the user they tried their best. It's a scam in all directions.

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

#112

Post by throawayonthe »

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…

[dead]

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

#113

Post by al_borland »

dpbriggs wrote: post #84

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

A significant number of users will spend more if they think they're getting a deal. Without a deal, even a fake one, users will go somewhere else or spend less. Or, if they think they're saving 15% on one thing, they'll justify spending 40% more, to get more out of that 15% discount.

This is what happened when Ron Johnson tried to rebrand JC Penny. JC Penny customers were used to "deals" through coupons. He changed the pricing so the prices were lower, across everything, all the time. The classic JC Penny customer hated this. They ultimately pay the same amount, it would be less work for them, but it wasn't a "deal".

Amazon plays on this too with the crossed out inflated "typical price", and then showing the actual price you'll pay. No one ever pays that crossed out price; it can say anything, but lets them put "-40%" so people get excited and buy.

It's all very manipulative. Honey was just another form of the same concept.

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

#114

Post by ThalesX »

quickymonster wrote: post #106
ThalesX wrote: 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…

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 cente…

I think I understand this feature pretty well. What I'm arguing for is taking the common information between all news sources (without having to place them in left / right / center) is much higher signal to noise.

Honestly your paranthesis that "the right is way worse" is already too political for my taste. It makes me feel dumb for even writing this reply. Alas, these are my thoughts. News should be news. What happened and when. Not some attack vector against a group of people or another.

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

#115

Post by Joel_Mckay »

dpbriggs wrote: post #84

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

Online marketing firms already had a credibility problem long before Honey showed up.

The only metric business people care about is whether the lead converts into sales. People often don't want to think about how the hotdog was made at the factory. =3

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

#116

Post by ryandrake »

gruez wrote: post #100
zonkerdonker wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 stor…

It seems like the whole system would be so much better without coupons. Retailers should charge a single transparent price without having everyone have to go trawling around the Internet for coupon codes which may or may not work, and then being mad because some customers found bigger coupons, which you really didn't want them to find. And other customers using coupon finders who themselves are opaque and sometimes give out good coupons and sometimes don't, and then they use the whole coupon system to do other opaque things to skim money. Good grief! The whole system seems to be set up to reward 1. middlemen and 2. customers willing to deal with a ridiculous system for a discount.

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

#117

Post by al_borland »

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 wasn't sure exactly what they were doing, and didn't care enough to look into it, but the fact that it wasn't obvious made me assume it was something shady that I wouldn't like. When I saw that they were doing, it validated my spidey-senses. A similar thing happened with Robinhood.

If it's not obvious how a company is making money, and they don't explain it somewhere... I'm not interested.

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

#118

Post by gruez »

al_borland wrote: post #113
dpbriggs wrote: post #84

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

A significant number of users will spend more if they think they're getting a deal. Without a deal, even a fake one, users will go somewhere else or spend less. Or, if they think they're saving 15% on one thing, they'll justify spending 40% more, to get more out of that 15% discount. This is what happened when Ron Johnson tried to rebrand JC Penny. JC Penny customers were used to "deals" through coupons. He changed t…

Sounds like your ire should be directed at the retailers who created the coupons in the first place, not Honey for letting people know they exist.

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

#119

Post by eisa01 »

AlwaysRock wrote: post #79
mywittyname wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Reminds me of the 777 code on Dreamhost

I set that up on an older web host and got referral credits for a few years :)

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

#120

Post by gruez »

ryandrake wrote: post #116
gruez wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 stor…

It seems like the whole system would be so much better without coupons. Retailers should charge a single transparent price without having everyone have to go trawling around the Internet for coupon codes which may or may not work, and then being mad because some customers found bigger coupons, which you really didn't want them to find. And other customers using coupon finders who themselves are opaque and sometimes g…

>The whole system seems to be set up to reward [...] 2. customers willing to deal with a ridiculous system for a discount.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination#Coupons

It's unclear whether banning price discrimination as a whole is a good thing. Is it really a bad thing that people with more money pay more, and people with more time can get a discount?

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