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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

#221

Post by josephg »

twostorytower wrote: post #155
josephg wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the video wasn’t perfect. But honey is clearly a shady business. Honourable businesses don’t need to trick their customers and advertisers about how their business works. Honourable businesses don’t make an enemy of the truth.

It was never a secret that shopping extensions monetized through affiliate. Merchants certainly know what they’re signing up for.

> It was never a secret

Their business model was never explained clearly on their website. Now that how it works has become common knowledge, its absolutely wrecked honey's public perception.

Merchants may have known what they were signing up for (if they signed up at all). But the general public had no idea.

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

#223

Post by dvektor »

echelon wrote: post #173
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.

> Cool business Shameful parasitism. The engineers working on this garbage knew what they were doing. I'd question the ethics of anyone who worked on this.

Am I the only one that detected sarcasm? (cool business)

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

#224

Post by bastawhiz »

jahsome wrote: post #183
cbdumas wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw that and I'm not convinced this changes anything. The fact that Honey is inserting itself into the affiliate attribution chain at all when it did literally nothing is still wrong to me.

There's a very reasonable argument to be made a number of shopers wouldn't convert if they didn't feel like they were getting a "deal." So honey is undeniably aiding in the sale. It's not "literally doing nothing" to compile and automatically apply/suggest coupon codes. That's literally doing something. Is it valuable? Objectively, yes, hence the millions upon millions of users. Your statement is either hyperbolic or…

The shopper feeling like they've gotten a deal is uncorrelated with whether Honey makes money from the merchants.

They also collect and sell data about all the purchases users make. I'd be startled if PayPal didn't use this data for selling customers on Braintree or selling ads. Also triple dipping and taking money from the affiliates (besides selling user data and extorting merchants) is downright greedy.

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

#225

Post by anonwebguy »

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.

Hijacking this for visibility.

I had this idea before Honey. When we spoke to our attorney, he instantly told us "that won't fly; you'll get popped for cookie stuffing."

The adware world had been doing similar things forever - injecting fake results into Google, taking over default home pages to show Google look-alikes.

When Honey launched on Reddit and got their first user bump, I started building our prototype. While digging deeper, you discover Honey injects JavaScript from their API, which violates extension store TOS, yet somehow this flies.

Fast forward, they hire the CEO of Commission Junction (CJ) as their CFO and everything becomes gravy.

Try to get offers via CJ, you won't get a response. All affiliate networks (CJ, Rakuten/LinkShare, etc.) have "stand down" policies in their contracts. You're supposed to detect when someone takes action like clicking a coupon site link and "stand down." Honey never did this. We had to demonstrate it was happening, but bring it up to CJ and they won't care.

It's regulatory capture of a borderline illegal business.

All cited studies came from RetailMeNot (since taken down). They claim customers abandon carts for coupons. Sure, some do, but those people will probably convert anyway.

Today, coupons are dying. We're in the world of personalized offers. Most coupon codes don't exist anymore - they're offer links. These systems try to "find you a coupon" which isn't real.

You're not supposed to share personalized coupons. These systems capture your coupons and add them to their list, but they almost never work.

I'd never try this business again. It's dishonest and terrible.

Fun fact: Much of this goes back to adware/search XML feeds from parking pages. IAC had a division called Mindspark Interactive Network (recently closed) - their adware division generating insane profit through Pay-Per-Download scam browser extensions tricking your grandfather, hijacking affiliate link clicks, same playbook.

The affiliate networks don't care as long as referrers look like they match approved pages.

This industry needs to die.

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

#227

Post by eviks »

jahsome wrote: post #183
cbdumas wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw that and I'm not convinced this changes anything. The fact that Honey is inserting itself into the affiliate attribution chain at all when it did literally nothing is still wrong to me.

There's a very reasonable argument to be made a number of shopers wouldn't convert if they didn't feel like they were getting a "deal." So honey is undeniably aiding in the sale. It's not "literally doing nothing" to compile and automatically apply/suggest coupon codes. That's literally doing something. Is it valuable? Objectively, yes, hence the millions upon millions of users. Your statement is either hyperbolic or…

That's how any fraud works - the mark feels like he is getting a good deal. And while the fact that there are millions of marks is an objective fact, it's not an objective indicator of the fraud being valuable to the marks.

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

#228

Post by eviks »

twostorytower wrote: post #155
josephg wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the video wasn’t perfect. But honey is clearly a shady business. Honourable businesses don’t need to trick their customers and advertisers about how their business works. Honourable businesses don’t make an enemy of the truth.

It was never a secret that shopping extensions monetized through affiliate. Merchants certainly know what they’re signing up for.

But the most important group - users- didn't know, and one they learned about the "never a secret" info, a large chunk of them left

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

#229

Post by Spooky23 »

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…

A relative was a high level local political figure. His quip was always “if you want to know what’s important that is going on, look for what isn’t in the newspaper.”

Any issue I’m deeply familiar with that gets reported is almost always missing lots of meaningful information. There isn’t really competition for most news, so there’s no incentive to follow up.

Publishers have biases, and their sources have agendas.

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

#230

Post by soulofmischief »

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.

I'm having a hard time understanding precisely what is cool about the business of defrauding users and creators/businesses.
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