Honey has now lost 4M Chrome users after shady tactics were revealed • Hacker News Board

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

#291

Post by voxic11 » Tue, Apr 01, 2025, 1:26 PM UTC

ChrisRR wrote: post #273

oivey wrote: 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

op was complaining about the reviewers failure to disclose their financial conflict of interest. The problem is not that they were advertising a bad product, its that they misrepresented an advertisement as a impartial review.

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

#292

Post by raxxorraxor » Tue, Apr 01, 2025, 3:37 PM UTC

MostlyStable wrote: post #199

miki123211 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

It is _maybe_ a great deal for the average consumer, who might not be putting any effort into finding deals. It's emphatically not a good deal for the (probably small) group of users who _would_ have put in the effort and found the _actual_ best deal, but trusted Honey who said they would provide the best deal and then knowingly gave worse deals (lied, potentially committed fraud?).

It also is a bad deal for those that just want to pay the normal price, because you pay for this financial overhead as well. At least in these cases the competition is often severe...

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

#293

Post by runamok » Tue, Apr 01, 2025, 3:43 PM UTC

chris_wot wrote: post #214

maximus-decimus wrote: post #205

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...

Wow, the former Senior Director of Safety and Security was sent to prison for 57 months! That's some great work by eBay. https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/pr/final-defendant-ebay-cybe...

Now share what happened to the CEO. Behind the bastards did a great 2 part series on the insane tale: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236...

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

#294

Post by kin » Tue, Apr 01, 2025, 4:11 PM UTC

Ekaros wrote: post #265

kin wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YouTubers have no idea how much money they are losing due to last click attribution. They're mad that it could be a lot but in reality it is more likely very little. MegaLag posted a VPN example, which was an edge case, but it was enough to spark outrage. Ironically, there are many YouTubers who have only Amazon affiliate links which Honey never touches. Many YouTubers that Honey sponsored also didn't have conflictin…

The VPN example really made me to take view that these affiliate cuts are scamming me... Without them I could get stuff significantly cheaper. So faster whole system is brought down the better.

Yes, now this I wholeheartedly agree. The system itself is not right and you can definitely credit MegaLag to drawing industry-wide attention to this issue.

People are hating the player when really the majority of the outrage should be pointed towards hating the game.

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

#295

Post by kin » Tue, Apr 01, 2025, 4:19 PM UTC

rs186 wrote: post #245

kin wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Retailers have budget to spend and have that spend deliver a return. It's just a simple return on investment. CJ, one of the biggest affiliate companies even encourages working with shopping extensions. https://junction.cj.com/cj-value-of-browser-extension-study-...

I find it hard to understand -- many of these retailers are struggling, and I doubt affiliate links and cash backs are the best way to spend their market money

Many find it hard to understand which is why affiliate networks create studies, write articles, and post reports with results, similar to the one I posted. Retailers don't go in blind. They test partnerships and continue only if there are positive results.

Yes, many retailers are struggling. Perhaps affiliate links and cash back are not the best way, but it's not the only way that retailers try to be successful.

If you were a suit working at a retailer with budget to spend with the goal of getting a return on investment, maybe you would personally avoid spending the money on affiliate links. But get this, the TOP, BIG, SUCCESSFUL retailers all have data showing that the affiliate system makes the numbers go up. Even if they don't understand the system, they just care about the numbers.

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

#296

Post by maest » Tue, Apr 01, 2025, 4:34 PM UTC

chihuahua wrote: post #254

eru wrote: 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…

Movember.

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

#297

Post by autoexec » Tue, Apr 01, 2025, 5:16 PM UTC

pbreit wrote: post #253

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.

Dumb acquisition by PayPal. It should stick to "above board" financial services. Stuff like this erodes trust.

Paypals entire history should tell you that they can't be trusted. https://web.archive.org/web/20170312164635/http://www.paypal...

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

#298

Post by autoexec » Tue, Apr 01, 2025, 5:29 PM UTC

rcxdude wrote: post #193

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is it really a bad thing that people with more money pay more...? Yes, it is. It is blatantly unfair to charge different people different prices. You can illustrate this with a thought experiment: nobody would think it's ok if I charge Joe $5, but charge Bob $10 because I don't like him very much. Price discrimination is very much the same thing, just with the mechanism obfuscated and dressed up in pretty language…

>nobody would think it's ok if I charge Joe $5, but charge Bob $10 because I don't like him very much Are you sure? People often cheer on this kind of thing if they also think Bob's an asshole. (And there's no rule against it in most places unless you don't like Bob for fairly specific reasons)

People will often cheer on all kinds of disgusting behavior including torture. Our laws should help to discourage the base instincts we haven't grown out of and make our lives more fair and reasonable than it would be if we left things to the whims of angry mobs, robber barons, and bigots

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

#299

Post by autoexec » Tue, Apr 01, 2025, 5:37 PM UTC

gruez wrote: post #195

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is it really a bad thing that people with more money pay more...? Yes, it is. It is blatantly unfair to charge different people different prices. You can illustrate this with a thought experiment: nobody would think it's ok if I charge Joe $5, but charge Bob $10 because I don't like him very much. Price discrimination is very much the same thing, just with the mechanism obfuscated and dressed up in pretty language…

>Yes, it is. It is blatantly unfair to charge different people different prices. You can illustrate this with a thought experiment: nobody would think it's ok if I charge Joe $5, but charge Bob $10 because I don't like him very much. This isn't as airtight proof of "unfair" as you think it is. Moreover this happens all the time without people being outraged. McDonalds might charge Joe $5, and Bob $10 for the same bur…

There's a huge difference between a limited time sale that anyone can take advantage of vs charging higher prices to "the wrong sort of people" which is bigotry or "We'll use facial recognition to ID you, look up how much money you have, and charge a percentage of your income" which is where things are heading right now.

McDonalds gives people deals in their app because it tricks people into installing the app which they use to collect their customer's personal data (even when they aren't using the app) which they can sell or exploit in any way they see fit. It's a terrible deal for the customer, but they don't know any better because they don't get to see how that data is used against them.

Price discrimination leads to exploitation and enables bigotry. We've been being conditioned to accept it because ultimately companies want to abuse it to make more money at your expense. The only thing standing in their way is that most people understand that discriminatory pricing is unfair and dangerous https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41272-019-00224-3

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

#300

Post by autoexec » Tue, Apr 01, 2025, 5:56 PM UTC

cogman10 wrote: post #130

johnnyanmac wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? Seems like the tamest thing to sell in terms of ethical impact. Well, for starters the actual "security" that is often promised from these services is WAY overblown. You are already very secure browsing the internet using https. The TLS standard grants a huge amount of security that doesn't allow for snooping from a MITM. So, when they start saying "everyone needs to do this to be safe". Tha…

> Most of these VPN services are also trying to get you to do DNS with their DNS servers. Again, a major potential privacy leak problem.

The privacy problem is most people using Google's DNS servers in the first place. A VPN is unlikely to keep your browsing history out of Google's hands when you're sending them a record of every domain you visit, when, and how often.

A VPN service is basically saying "Trust us more than you trust Google/your ISP" and that by necessity means giving them your DNS traffic as well.

> I'd have an inherent mistrust in one that has both a cheap fee and the seemingly endless budget to advertise everywhere on youtube. They are getting money from somewhere and I doubt it's from grandmas signing up for the service.

They make a lot of their money from file sharers (some of which are also grandmas). The VPN will keep your ISP off your back and the MPA/RIAA at bay. I assume most VPNs like that are being monitored (if not outright operated) by the NSA or some other three letter agency. It's fine if you're just using the VPN for regular browsing or to torrent TV shows though because they're not going to spoil their honeypot over something so trivial and the VPN's success at keeping pirates safe builds their reputation as a secure service.