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

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271–280 of 336 posts

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

#271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering eBay also had management that harassed people by mailing them live spiders and dead pig fetuses... https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ebay-pay-3-million-empl...

Aside, but NBC’s website is way better executed than I was expecting. Perhaps it changed recently, or I just never noticed? I was expecting 100MB with back button abuse and retention dark patterns. Instead, it loads fast, has minimal guff, and the footer scrolled into view ending the page within sight of the end of the actual article. Perhaps this is a reward response to not having to / be able to doom scroll?

It's not great without uBlock but still much better than most others. No video!

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

#273
post #266

It’s still shocking to me that in this whole ordeal many reviewers escaped scrutiny. Getting a cut of a sale of a product that you portray yourself as impartially reviewing is insanely immoral. Who cares if these people scammed themselves in the service of scamming me?

If people didn't realise that they were peddling something immoral then they're not to blame. They just took money to advertise something that seemed like a useful product at the time

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

#274

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

Because people will buy things if they think they're getting a bargain, even if it's a totally fake discount

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

#275
post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it's no less weird that store running a promotion saying 'If you buy item X today, we will donate one dollar of the proceeds to charity Y.' Also not more weird than the British charity thing of "I'm shaving off all my hair, and that's why you should donate to charity Y." (I suspect Brits need an excuse before they are mentally allowed to do something silly. But any excuse will do.)

I've always been baffled by the British charity thing: You want to ride your tricycle from John O'Groats to Ffestiniog? Fine, do it. You want me to donate to this charity? OK, maybe I'll do it. I just don't see the connection between the two. Please explain the connection to me. You don't actually want to ride your tricycle? But if I donate to some third party, you're going to do something you hate? So you're saying…

I assume the concept is that if you do what the person asks you to do, you get to share in the glory of whatever it is that they do.

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

#276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's totally different you see. This time the fraud was done by a faceless corporation maximizing shareholder returns so this is just an exercise in free speech by an immortal, in the same vein as running an unlicensed lottery.

Kind of like how most spyware is now called “employee monitoring tools”. This stuff used to be frowned upon but now I guess the narrative has changed.

if the computer belongs to the company, and you're using it as an employee, you should be told that such spyware is installed and your usage of said machines are monitored. Then there's no qualms about this at all.

It's only an invasion of privacy if the monitoring is done in secret.

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

#277

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.

The YouTubers acting shocked they were promoting that and that it was taking their affiliate revenue was bizarre, said more about them and their lack of morals and responsibility than it did Honey. Maybe take some responsibility for what you promote instead of pretending you're just a leaf at the whim of the river currents.

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

#278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shame so many creators took the Honey paycheck, even while Honey was taking money out of their pocket by stealing affiliate links. I guess few really vet their sponsors. Not even LTT or MrBeast!

When I first heard all this about honey I was shocked, remembering seeing Linus plug them. Of all the people to have the potential ability to see through it. The way I see it is that anyone who sponsors things like YouTube videos as widely as they do is generally a piece of s** company. Normally up to something, that makes it worth their while to spaff money on such things. 80 quid razors, AI driven news classifiers,…

> Of all the people to have the potential ability to see through it.

lol

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

#279
post #264

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.

As a not an American, I can't fathom the love for coupon you all have. Shit system, shit value for the client, and still it looks like some people would kill for a 5% one-time discount on anything.

5% one-time discount on something that has been marked up by 25%.

People will buy a thing that is 90% off reduced from $99 in preference to buying the identical thing for $5 with no discount.

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

#280
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.

i think you are missing the irony.

but you are also missing the fact that the great part of the industry works in the same way: using open source stuff, in a super parasitic way, to track and control millions of users.

the average googler here is not better here.

p.s.: great nickname btw. and on point.

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