171–180 of 336 posts
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I'm sorry what? Skeptoid the podcast? Edit: Yes . In 2014. How did I miss that? Used to listen to that podcast, though probably stopped before that.
Yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Dunning_(author)#Wire_fr...
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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,…
> What's wrong with VPNs? Nothing is inherently wrong but I trust my ISP a lot more than some random guys in Switzerland or Israel or whatever tax haven islands they operate from. They lie about what they’re good for which is just hiding things from my ISP. The rest of the benefits are fake
I don't really, per se. Especially in my area where they have a monopoly. But VPNs aren't advertising making your home network safer anyway.
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.
Shameful parasitism. The engineers working on this garbage knew what they were doing. I'd question the ethics of anyone who worked on this.
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.
> Cool business No it isn't. It's predatory (actually, parasitic) by its very nature. I'm all for innovation, but that's just not cool.
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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.
And there's presumably also a profit-sharing agreement. E.G. if the retailer normally pays at 300 bps to their affiliates for a particular transaction, Honey may only get 100 or 50 bps. It's a choice between e.g. Honey giving every customer of vendor X a voucher code from a particularly valuable influencer in X's niche, which gives 30% off on first orders, versus giving them a 20% discount and taking 1.5% for itself.…
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So this perspective boils down to "entrepreneurs are evil"? An interesting take to put on a site dedicated to funding entrepreneurs.
I'd read it more as "influencers are dishonest and pretend to not be sales professionals".
It was honestly surprising when one of my subcibed creators (around 400k subs on Youtube) talked a bit about financials and that half their revenue came from sponsors. And this was one who avoids all the typical ads. I imagine the numbers to sell out to yet another RAID ad must easily double that.
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…
Ryan here too - will try to respond to some of these with more info. The two biggest missing pieces from both my discussion and from the video are: 1) stand down rules for affiliate, and 2) cash back to the user. I was trying to address the claims he raised in the video specifically and since he didn't mention either I didn't in my reddit post except for a little bit in a couple of the answers. 1) For the case where…
I don't think any of this is transparent to the user. That's the scam.
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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.
>people who don't realize it's still installed but also don't interact with the extension at all. This is still making Honey money through the hijacking of affiliate links.
This extorts online businesses and steals from content creators. There is no good in this tool whatsoever.
It probably tracks consumers on top of all their other shitty behavior.
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This is not true. In the affiliate marketing space, Honey won many awards for being great business partners. Yes, there are examples of retailers being impacted when Honey picked up on a coupon that was not supposed to be public, but Honey always cooperated at removing such codes whether you partnered with them or not.
Great business partner providing ... what value? They're not guiding the user to shop a or shop b, they're - redirecting the attribution away from the actual affiliate (could hurt shops because their affiliates become unhappy and advertise their competitors) - automatically applying coupons that decrease the shop's margin. How are they "great business partners"?
Influence can be bought on the cheap. MrBeast says use Honey, you use Honey. Are you going to not partner with the business that is smart enough to partner with MrBeast?