Honey's Dieselgate: Detecting and tricking testers

the_snooze wrote: post #4

Original MegaLag video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCGT_CKGgFE You'd think that if you were an engineer building and maintaing a system like this, you'd have an "are we the baddies?" moment, but guess not.

The original site is down for me, so going based on the app I was thinking it was about the actual edible Honey product, not Honey the discount coupon thing.

Re: Honey's Dieselgate: Detecting and tricking testers

#6

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 10:50 PM UTC

the_snooze wrote: post #4

Original MegaLag video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCGT_CKGgFE You'd think that if you were an engineer building and maintaing a system like this, you'd have an "are we the baddies?" moment, but guess not.

[deleted]

Re: Honey's Dieselgate: Detecting and tricking testers

#7

Post by esafak » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 10:51 PM UTC

I thought this was going to be about honey adulteration, which is a major problem.

Re: Honey's Dieselgate: Detecting and tricking testers

#8

Post by ZoneZealot » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 11:01 PM UTC

the_snooze wrote: post #4

Original MegaLag video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCGT_CKGgFE You'd think that if you were an engineer building and maintaing a system like this, you'd have an "are we the baddies?" moment, but guess not.

For context, Ben Edelman the author of the blog post was in the video at https://youtu.be/qCGT_CKGgFE?t=1980

Their personal site is also linked in the video description https://www.benedelman.org/honey-detecting-testers/

Re: Honey's Dieselgate: Detecting and tricking testers

#9

Post by t0mas88 » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 11:18 PM UTC

Over 15 years ago I worked with a telco that had similar affiliate issues. We decided to stop paying any affiliate commission at all and evaluate sales after some time to decide to continue the experiment or not. There was a little decrease in traffic to the site but no measurable decrease in sales of new plans. There were several check moments and data validation after that, but sales numbers remained as they were.

The conclusion was that affiliate marketing claimed a lot of sales in their reporting, but the brand was strong enough (this company was #2 by market share in the country and #1 on most brand metrics) to get those customers without affiliate links.

Re: Honey's Dieselgate: Detecting and tricking testers

#10

Post by arionmiles » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 11:19 PM UTC

cwal37 wrote: post #2

Archived link: https://web.archive.org/web/20251230214339/https://vptdigita...

there's something seriously wrong with this archived link. It's not staying still for one moment. It's constantly twitching and the text scrolls to weird positions. It's unreadable because of this.

Is it the archive at fault or is the original webpage this way?