Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

9to5google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 336 posts

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

#51

Post by ChocolateGod »

beAbU wrote: post #48
ChocolateGod wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did people think honey was making money? I think a lot of these YouTubers are pretending to be shocked or caught out.

Honey was replacing their affliate links with it's own. So these tech tubers were only really upset that Honey was stealing from /them/, they don't give a fuck about their viewers. Anyone who flogs ball shavers, ass wipes or fuckin microwave dinners don't give a shit about their viewers, and only care about their bottom lines and will shill whatever they can for the right price.

> tech tubers were only really upset that Honey was stealing from /them/

But wasn't Honey paying them?

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

#53

Post by jrflowers »

beAbU wrote: post #48
ChocolateGod wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did people think honey was making money? I think a lot of these YouTubers are pretending to be shocked or caught out.

Honey was replacing their affliate links with it's own. So these tech tubers were only really upset that Honey was stealing from /them/, they don't give a fuck about their viewers. Anyone who flogs ball shavers, ass wipes or fuckin microwave dinners don't give a shit about their viewers, and only care about their bottom lines and will shill whatever they can for the right price.

Seems like a lot of people get value from ball shavers and ass wipes though

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

#55

Post by dceddia »

mywittyname wrote: post #17
Larrikin wrote: post #2

What is the alternative? Is there an open source version that is community curated?

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…

You basically also end up needing a burner phone number for these too nowadays. Feels like every one of these I’ve tried in recent months starts with “sign up for 10% off” with an email input, followed by “one more step, give us your phone number!”

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

#56

Post by briffle »

willy_k wrote: post #45
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.

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…

ground.news is not a plugin to the browser though. its a web site (and app) that aggregate news from multiple sites, and let you see multiple sides to an issue. I don't pay for many apps (I usually detest subscriptions) but pay for this one.

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

#57

Post by cbdumas »

jabroni_salad wrote: post #10

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…

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.

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

#58

Post by Dylan16807 »

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 thought it gathered data and did some affiliate stuff.

An honest extension could have still made piles of cash. They did not need to be so aggressive about taking affiliate revenue and they definitely did not need to lie about coupons.

This was not a "too good to be true" situation.

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

#60

Post by ryandrake »

The whole world of affiliate marketing and lead generation seems so thoroughly and irredeemably scummy, I can't really come up with much sympathy for anyone here. It's just middlemen all the way down, and everything is more expensive because they all have their little fingers in the pie.
Post reply on HN