alt.hn

3/31/2025 at 6:28:03 PM

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

 https://9to5google.com/2025/03/31/honey-extension-users-dropped-chrome-march-2025/

by tantalor

3/31/2025 at 7:18:15 PM

Related. Others?

PayPal Honey extension has again "featured" flag in Chrome web store - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43298054 - March 2025 (177 comments)

LegalEagle is suing Honey [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42581108 - Jan 2025 (10 comments)

uBlock Origin GPL code being stolen by team behind Honey browser extension - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42576443 - Jan 2025 (444 comments)

Show HN: Open-source and transparent alternative to Honey - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42535274 - Dec 2024 (10 comments)

Exposing the Honey Influencer Scam [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42483500 - Dec 2024 (86 comments)

Amazon says browser extension Honey is a security risk, now that PayPal owns it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22016031 - Jan 2020 (6 comments)

by dang

3/31/2025 at 9:12:55 PM

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.

by elamje

3/31/2025 at 9:14:57 PM

I remember when this was called cookie stuffing, and eBay even sent a guy to jail for doing it with their affiliate program. That’s the same eBay that owned PayPal, which now owns Honey…

by chatmasta

4/1/2025 at 12:31:41 AM

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.

by kevin_thibedeau

4/1/2025 at 12:52:09 AM

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.

by SamuelAdams

4/1/2025 at 3:32:54 AM

It was time to go back to the orifice....

by brewtide

4/1/2025 at 9:26:12 AM

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.

by chii

4/1/2025 at 6:38:04 PM

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

Uhhh... that seems very incorrect. If someone pokes their head into your shower session, it's an invasion of privacy - whether or not they let you know they're peepin on ya.

by kvlh

4/2/2025 at 2:53:36 AM

The equivalent here is if it's a company shower, and your supposed to be cleaning an office appliance, not yourself. In that context someone poking their head on to see how it's going is fine.

by thatguy0900

4/1/2025 at 12:21:56 AM

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...

by maximus-decimus

4/1/2025 at 5:37:16 AM

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?

by gorgoiler

4/1/2025 at 8:24:44 AM

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

by walthamstow

3/31/2025 at 9:30:44 PM

Now they can just avoid paying for affiliate links for anyone who has honey installed

by nightfly

3/31/2025 at 10:09:13 PM

Didn't the guy that ran Skeptoid go to jail for similar?

by stevage

3/31/2025 at 10:28:31 PM

I'm sorry what? Skeptoid the podcast?

Edit: Yes. In 2014. How did I miss that? Used to listen to that podcast, though probably stopped before that.

by nadir_ishiguro

3/31/2025 at 9:17:59 PM

Do as I say not as I do.

by AlexandrB

3/31/2025 at 9:27:58 PM

To be fair Paypal got spun out in 2015, far before they bought Honey, so there actually isn't any point in time where eBay was engaged in cookie stuffing.

by gruez

3/31/2025 at 10:57:35 PM

> Cool business

No it isn't. It's predatory (actually, parasitic) by its very nature.

I'm all for innovation, but that's just not cool.

by unsui

3/31/2025 at 11:30:11 PM

I think it's cool in the sense that's it a cool concept for a (alleged) scam.

by catigula

3/31/2025 at 11:14:40 PM

Cool URLs dont change

by EGreg

3/31/2025 at 10:09:14 PM

Now what I'd love is an extension that would inject a person of my choosing as the last click.

Amazon et al don't allow you to offer this as an affiliate program partner, not without a special and custom agreement at least, but if the extension was partner-agnostic and released by a party unaffiliated with Amazon in any way, there's nothing they could realistically do about it.

It'd be one way to bring Amazon Smile back, and on many more sites than just Amazon.

by miki123211

3/31/2025 at 11:17:30 PM

I always found Amazon Smile weird. Why not just donate, why have people jump through hoops just to prove that you should donate? So you look good but dont spend much money to do it due to user laziness. Ah… got it :)

by EGreg

4/1/2025 at 12:50:57 AM

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.)

by eru

4/1/2025 at 5:20:36 AM

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 want you to suffer? I'd rather donate if it doesn't cause unnecessary suffering.

by chihuahua

4/1/2025 at 6:15:12 AM

It's something we've been raised to do from a young age.

I've never thought about it before, but I suppose it's a way for you to provide some commitment from yourself as a condition for those you're crowdsourcing donations from.

If you don't deliver on your part, they don't have to pay.

When I was in high-school we did everything from shaving our heads, to having your legs waxed in front of the whole (boys) school.

I raised thousands of £ for charity this way, more than I could ever raise by myself at that age.

by alias_neo

4/2/2025 at 3:49:54 AM

I'm sure I've seen dunk tanks (throw a baseball, hit the target, person falls in) in plenty of US movies though no idea how common that is in reality.

Regardless, one of the nice things about the practice is does mean people are at least somewhat committed to a cause they are raising funds for before they go soliciting. It also deals with the irrational part of the human psyche and moves the action conceptually from the person begging to the person trading which can have an impact on how people perceive it.

by greycol

4/1/2025 at 6:05:26 AM

The charity you’re raising for sets up the infrastructure to do the activity. Charities, for example, have spots in marathons which are hard to get other wise.

So if you see a friend is trying to do some personal achievement, and you think the charity is a worthwhile one to donate to; why not combine the two and help your friend achieve their goal whilst also raising money for a good cause.

by sksksk

4/1/2025 at 9:18:14 AM

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.

by thaumasiotes

4/1/2025 at 4:34:35 PM

Movember.

by maest

4/1/2025 at 12:11:31 AM

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!

by paulryanrogers

4/1/2025 at 3:19:02 AM

You just named the biggest sellouts in their respective spaces. LTT in "tech" youtube and Mr Beast on youtube.

by pclmulqdq

4/1/2025 at 10:32:11 AM

LTT did eventually vet what was going on and spot the problem, but didn't have the morals to let anyone else know about the scam. And has since played the victim card (“Mommy, they are saying a nasty thing about us!” and “Other people had the same lack of morals too, why are you picking on us?”) having been called out for not warning others out there that they were being scammed.

by dspillett

4/1/2025 at 6:05:31 AM

BetterHelp is arguably worse. Everything I've heard about them sounds terrible, but they're all over YouTube and presumably they're getting a lot of vulnerable customers who will never receive the support they need.

The YouTubers that peddle this shit have no morals.

by cedws

4/1/2025 at 7:45:53 PM

Every single podcast I listen to is sponsored by BetterHelp, nearly all of them.

by lbarron6868

4/3/2025 at 12:45:49 AM

I'd take that as an indictment on those podcasts. All the stuff I listened to / watched that used them in the past has dropped them for more than a year by now.

I think Johnny Harris may still run adverts for them? But I watch him mostly because he's such a suspicious character to begin with.

by dpig_

4/1/2025 at 12:38:56 AM

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, VPNs, meh...

by YuccaGloriosa

4/1/2025 at 7:07:47 AM

My more general rule is that anything being advertised to me must be way overpriced or a scam, in order to pay for the expensive advertisements. I won’t buy nearly anything I see advertised. I don’t run into many ads anyway, but some always get through!

by floydnoel

4/1/2025 at 3:23:37 AM

Why would Linus have the ability to see through it? He isn't into software, probably can't code at all. His channel is dedicated to hardware

by jack_pp

4/1/2025 at 4:12:33 AM

And he's not actually that great at that, if his storage server videos are any indication.

by cbozeman

4/1/2025 at 6:44:10 PM

I haven’t seen the videos and don’t know much about the space. Could your provide any insight into what’s wrong?

by chrisdsaldivar

4/1/2025 at 8:03:37 AM

Here I have to chime in and say that a certain YouTube razor is one of my favourite purchases ever. But I guess it's rather niche, being a double edged safety razor.

by matejn

4/1/2025 at 9:47:16 AM

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

lol

by blitzar

3/31/2025 at 9:39:17 PM

Marketers monitor the conversion rates very closely. Chances are some people caught on to the shenanigans within 24 hours, but couldn't figure out which part of the lead generation ecosystem was cheating.

What Honey did robbed content publishers of ad revenue, advertisers lead valuations, and end consumer confidence (bait-and-switch.)

I wouldn't want to be in the blast radius of that legal mess... Popcorn ready for when the judge defines the scope of who is liable =3

by Joel_Mckay

3/31/2025 at 11:11:46 PM

It's very hard to figure out as in many instances the affiliate link part of a link is stripped out before clicked.

There's a browser extension for that too.

by justinator

4/1/2025 at 12:41:57 AM

It was very similar to the classic banner substitution malware/adware from the early internet.

Most media people have gone back to unique affiliate discount-coupon-codes instead of clickable URL parameters to track lead referrals.

Unfortunately, this also leads to sampling bias, and campaigns spelunking spam statistics. I'd guess on YT irritating people drives engagement in some twisted way. lol =3

by Joel_Mckay

3/31/2025 at 11:29:19 PM

> 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.

by echelon

4/1/2025 at 1:29:34 AM

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

by dvektor

4/1/2025 at 4:09:41 AM

On HN, you have a significant subset that think it is akshually cool, unironically

Move fast and break things, right?

by unsui

4/1/2025 at 10:01:27 AM

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.

by kome

4/1/2025 at 3:10:43 AM

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

by soulofmischief

3/31/2025 at 9:49:40 PM

> but can’t keep going on forever without someone catching on

But despite a lot of coverage they've only lost about 1/5 of their user base.

by threeseed

4/1/2025 at 12:27:26 AM

Apathy? Communications spin? Lack of technical understanding? I suspect some people installed it on a whim based on the recommendation of someone and then forgot about it.

by whycome

4/1/2025 at 3:47:46 AM

Well, what do the end users care. So long as they get there honey $$. Yes, sucks for the real referer, and youtube creators doing the promoting (though they probably got paid more directly from Honey to do the ad then they would've gotten from there affil links).

Though, like what was exposed, Honey does a poor job for the end user too. There are other cashback sites out there doing what Honey claims/does, but passes on more to the end user. Though they're all taking the referral $$ from the real referer, if there was one.

by wingworks

4/1/2025 at 1:00:14 AM

Scam culture thrives on apathy and ignorance, just count this as yet another win for the bad guys who profit immensely off our increasing societal stupidity

by not_kurt_godel

4/1/2025 at 1:50:12 AM

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.

by anonwebguy

4/1/2025 at 10:46:03 PM

> I had this idea before Honey

AdBlock Plus also had this idea back in 2012/2013.

Here’s a (German) article about this:

https://web.archive.org/web/20220817235820/https://www.mobil...

Near the end he mentions the typoRules.js, rules.json, urlfixer stuff and Yieldkit. Apparently, whenever you’ve mis-typed a URL to e.g. amazon, it auto-corrected it and added their own affiliate id (which was then valid for 30 days). And the feature only needed very few changes to get applied even to correct links.

by mbirth

4/1/2025 at 7:03:13 AM

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?

by oivey

4/1/2025 at 8:21:14 AM

Agreed. You can't even trust Wirecutter anymore due to the incentives of affiliate revenue driven content.

While everybody hates display ads, at least they are clearly ads, and aren't usually mistaken for authentic content. Affiliate marketing on the other hand...well that's the entire point! Trick people into thinking the creator has independently recommended a product because it's good, and not because they're getting paid. The content is the ad.

Affiliate marketing is evolving into a giant Tax on the entire internet economy.

To give you an example, in highly competitive software markets (VPNs, CRMs, Project Management, Email tools, Help Desk Software, etc) affiliate payouts reach as high as 50% of recurring revenue in perpetuity.

What do you think that software would cost if it wasn't paying out 50% of revenue (not profit) to influencers and reviewers to push it on unsuspecting people?

On any list of "The Best [thing] for [purpose]" appearing on Search or Youtube, it's smart to just assume it's a descending rank order of the products that offer the highest affiliate payouts. Often with the creator twisting themselves into a psychological pretzel to pretend like their "opinion" wasn't strongly influenced by the $$$.

by pembrook

4/1/2025 at 9:04:09 AM

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

by ChrisRR

4/1/2025 at 1:26:26 PM

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.

by voxic11

3/31/2025 at 9:20:11 PM

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

by dpbriggs

3/31/2025 at 9:26:39 PM

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.

by zonkerdonker

3/31/2025 at 10:20:02 PM

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.

This is a great deal for the retailer, they go from -30% to -21.5%, it's a great deal for Honey because that kind of money on millions of transaction is a lot of money, and it's a great deal for users, as Honey wouldn't even exist without this scheme, and they'd get 0% off instead of 20.

by miki123211

4/1/2025 at 12:16:17 AM

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?).

by MostlyStable

4/1/2025 at 3:37:40 PM

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...

by raxxorraxor

3/31/2025 at 11:30:39 PM

Sounds like the government needs to rip PayPal a new asshole.

by echelon

4/1/2025 at 12:14:25 AM

Given that one of the most powerful people with the US Government right now is a member of a group called the PayPal Mafia

well

sigh

by tyre

4/1/2025 at 1:01:36 AM

Does he still own paypal Stock? Seems unlikely. And he wants X to be a competitor!

by droopyEyelids

4/1/2025 at 7:15:01 PM

Uh Peter Thiel basically owns JD Vance. Musk wasn't meaningful in Paypal.

by mrguyorama

4/1/2025 at 8:09:27 PM

Musk was the largest shareholder in PayPal and it likely wouldn't have been successful without him - not sure how you can argue that isn't meaningful

by 93po

4/1/2025 at 12:21:35 AM

Why stop there? Anybody making deals with Honey is co-conspirator under RICO.

by tantalor

3/31/2025 at 9:33:22 PM

Sounds like more of an issue for the consumer than the retailer? Suppose the best coupon for a retailer is 20% off, and Honey shows that to its users. Retailers want to stem that loss, so they bribe/pay Honey, maybe 5%, to post a 10% coupon in its place. That way the store loses 15% rather than 20%. That might be bad for the consumer, if they thought they were guaranteed the "best" deal, but I'm not sure how the store has any standing to sue. If so, that would put forums like slickdeals at risk.

by gruez

3/31/2025 at 9:43:31 PM

It seems like the whole system would be so much better without coupons. Retailers should charge a single transparent price without having everyone have to go trawling around the Internet for coupon codes which may or may not work, and then being mad because some customers found bigger coupons, which you really didn't want them to find. And other customers using coupon finders who themselves are opaque and sometimes give out good coupons and sometimes don't, and then they use the whole coupon system to do other opaque things to skim money. Good grief! The whole system seems to be set up to reward 1. middlemen and 2. customers willing to deal with a ridiculous system for a discount.

by ryandrake

3/31/2025 at 9:47:48 PM

>The whole system seems to be set up to reward [...] 2. customers willing to deal with a ridiculous system for a discount.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination#Coupons

It's unclear whether banning price discrimination as a whole is a good thing. Is it really a bad thing that people with more money pay more, and people with more time can get a discount?

by gruez

3/31/2025 at 10:10:46 PM

Yeah I think it's fine. I actually like that people who are short of money can put the effort in to knowing where and when all the sales are and live a bit cheaper, and I'm ok with subsidising them.

by stevage

3/31/2025 at 11:38:57 PM

Price discrimination isn't just "rich people pay more." It's also, "Our data shows that people in these demographic locations will pay more."

by a4isms

4/1/2025 at 12:17:25 AM

Nobody claimed it was somehow 100% accurate. After all, it's not like many stores ask for your tax returns before telling you the price (although they might very much would like to). The point holds even if it's approximately true.

by gruez

3/31/2025 at 11:19:07 PM

> 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 so that it doesn't trip people's "this isn't right" detector as easily.

by bigstrat2003

4/1/2025 at 12:01:33 AM

>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)

by rcxdude

4/1/2025 at 5:29:17 PM

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

by autoexec

4/1/2025 at 12:06:25 AM

>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 burger, because McDonalds likes Joe very much for using their app, so they send him offers.

Even if we do grant that charging people different prices is fundamentally "unfair", it leads to all sorts of strange conclusions. For instance if some retailer has some product on discount today only. Is that also "unfair"? I don't see how "buys a fridge on Wednesday rather than Thursday" is a morally justifiable reason to give different prices than say, being able to scout out a coupon or not. Should we ban time limited sales as well?

by gruez

4/1/2025 at 5:37:17 PM

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

by autoexec

4/1/2025 at 7:23:52 PM

The entire point of doing price discrimination is so that you can keep a price high while tamping down any market pressure that would normally encourage you to lower your prices.

If McDonalds had to choose one price for an 8 piece nuggets, they would have to make a choice to either be ultra cheap, and anyone could happily afford those McDonalds nuggets like it was the 80s again, or they could choose to target up market, in which case they would compete with other expensive nuggets and some other business could take the market share for "extremely cheap nuggets"

Price discrimination distorts natural market forces that would otherwise drive competition, create opportunity, or "punish" hostile practices.

by mrguyorama

3/31/2025 at 10:29:08 PM

> The whole system seems to be set up to reward [...] customers willing to deal with a ridiculous system for a discount.

That's not all of what coupons are for.

They're also a form of advertising. If you give them out to an influencer in your niche who can bring you great customers, you can make a lot of extra profits.

Imagine you're making an app for managing hair dressing salons. If there's a particular Youtuber popular among hair dressing salon managers, you can do a deal with them where their viewers get 20% off on the first year of their subscription to your app, and the influencer gets an extra 3% of that revenue.

You do this because you expect that people watching that channel are already hair dressing salon managers, and hence are very likely to become big spenders with your company once they start using your services. It's a great deal for everyone.

Honey turns that on its head by indiscriminately offering that influencer's valuable voucher code to everyone, reglardless of whether they've seen any of their videos.

by miki123211

3/31/2025 at 9:58:57 PM

I think it's fine. For things that aren't too expensive where I am fortunate enough to not have to be price-sensitive, I don't bother with coupons beyond a cursory Google search.

But not everyone is equally fortunate, and for some people the time investment to find the right coupon might be what makes them able to afford a necessity.

by elevatedastalt

3/31/2025 at 9:58:32 PM

> Retailers should charge a single transparent price without having everyone have to go trawling around the Internet for coupon codes which may or may not work.

Then you miss the point of the coupon codes, they're for measuring ad effectiveness. The discount is the incentive for the customer to reveal to the business where they learned about the product and who was responsible for the sale.

by Spivak

3/31/2025 at 11:16:39 PM

Better for you, worse for me.

by umbra07

3/31/2025 at 11:08:17 PM

I may be an idiot - wouldn’t it be cheaper to get rid of the 20% coupon code?

And if the retailer REALLY wants to keep the 20% discount for a particular use-case, make it a targeted discount for certain user accounts?

by MisterSandman

3/31/2025 at 10:39:51 PM

This is not true. In the affiliate marketing space, Honey won many awards for being great business partners. Yes, there are examples of retailers being impacted when Honey picked up on a coupon that was not supposed to be public, but Honey always cooperated at removing such codes whether you partnered with them or not.

by kin

3/31/2025 at 10:44:53 PM

Great business partner providing ... what value?

They're not guiding the user to shop a or shop b, they're

- redirecting the attribution away from the actual affiliate (could hurt shops because their affiliates become unhappy and advertise their competitors)

- automatically applying coupons that decrease the shop's margin.

How are they "great business partners"?

by luckylion

3/31/2025 at 11:42:39 PM

The article I linked supports this but to put it simply, Honey delivers a return on ad spend. Your first point is true, but Honey and other extensions practice "stand down" where if detected, they'll not affiliate tag if there's one already there. It's not a perfect system and there are edge cases to prove the system is not perfect. It's ultimately up to the retailer to decide whether or not to partner with Honey. The data in the report shows that users with Honey have lower cart abandonment and higher purchase rate. Looking at the numbers, retailers like these two things so they choose to partner. Automatically applying coupons can decrease margin, but why have coupons at all? Retailers take this into account when putting out coupons. Users who use Honey are typically users who would look for a coupon elsewhere. Retailers would rather the user not leave their website. Honey keeps users on the checkout page.

In terms of being "great business partners". The affiliate space like other industries requires a team of people on the retailer side and Honey's side talking to each other and establishing a relationship. Here is a random article I just Google'd that sheds a bit of light about that relationship. https://www.advertisepurple.com/affiliate-spotlight-a-conver...

by kin

3/31/2025 at 11:37:24 PM

Remember how NFTs just weren't a thing and then someone got a well-placed article talking about NFTs and all of a sudden they "hot" even though it was just a sham the whole way, before and after "I been hacked. all my apes gone. this just sold please help me"?

Influence can be bought on the cheap. MrBeast says use Honey, you use Honey. Are you going to not partner with the business that is smart enough to partner with MrBeast?

by bigbuppo

3/31/2025 at 11:17:30 PM

Retailers don’t have to honor discounts, nobody is forcing them to.

by artursapek

4/1/2025 at 10:39:10 AM

> nobody is forcing them to

Other than fear of the court of public opinion, possibly stoked by one or more of their competitors, if they don't…

by dspillett

3/31/2025 at 11:38:39 PM

Why do retailers offer those discounts then? Why not deactivate them instead of allowing honey to give them to their users? Am I misunderstanding what honey does?

by buzzerbetrayed

3/31/2025 at 11:43:47 PM

That would mean deactivating all discounts. Honey actively scrapes for them, so as soon as a discount is available on the internet it will find it. Not an impossible solution, but not a popular one.

You could probably be clever and come up with a more complicated discount scheme that's not so easy for Honey to take advantage of, but that adds complexity for users as well.

by traes

4/1/2025 at 3:43:40 AM

You can do unique discount codes that are one time use or maybe up to 5 times. Common especially if you want tracking like you send out mailers or emails.

by adrr

4/1/2025 at 6:17:30 AM

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.

by arkh

4/1/2025 at 10:45:37 AM

> I can't fathom the love for coupon you all have.

I think for some it taps into the same reward neurons as winning £10 on a lottery after paying £1 in week-in-week-out for years. It feels like a win, and that for many overrides any desire to properly analyse the matter (did I actually save, with the coupon, or save 5% on something that has been marked up 20%? (or buy something I didn't really want at all?!)). Same with BlackFriday, many of Amazon's “prime day” offers, and so forth.

[Also not American, I'm a UKian/ex-EUian, it is not uncommon to see the same here, just not in the big way some Americans tend to go with almost anything]

by dspillett

4/1/2025 at 9:53:31 AM

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.

by blitzar

3/31/2025 at 10:42:32 PM

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-...

by kin

3/31/2025 at 11:13:49 PM

Except many companies came forward during the expose, explaining how honey loses them money, not makes them money.

by TheRealPomax

3/31/2025 at 11:45:28 PM

Sure, and in those cases those retailers may choose not to partner with Honey. However, Honey maintains an active partnership with quite a lot of happy retailers, even after PayPal took over.

by kin

4/2/2025 at 5:41:12 PM

I think you need to watch the original video (again), because it sounds like you're making arguments that aren't grounded in the actual reality of Honey, but are based on what a normal company would do and how businesses interact and stop interacting with those normal companies.

by TheRealPomax

4/1/2025 at 4:23:36 AM

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

by rs186

4/1/2025 at 4:19:47 PM

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.

by kin

4/1/2025 at 9:05:13 AM

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

by ChrisRR

3/31/2025 at 9:43:27 PM

Online marketing firms already had a credibility problem long before Honey showed up.

The only metric business people care about is whether the lead converts into sales. People often don't want to think about how the hotdog was made at the factory. =3

by Joel_Mckay

4/1/2025 at 10:17:04 AM

I read part of a reddit AMA with a cofounder of Honey who no longer works there. According to him honey and services like it increase the likelihood that people will complete a instead of going to a competitor.

Lknk to the AMA: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/s/lEGdq1Sx9d

by lwkl

3/31/2025 at 9:41:43 PM

A significant number of users will spend more if they think they're getting a deal. Without a deal, even a fake one, users will go somewhere else or spend less. Or, if they think they're saving 15% on one thing, they'll justify spending 40% more, to get more out of that 15% discount.

This is what happened when Ron Johnson tried to rebrand JC Penny. JC Penny customers were used to "deals" through coupons. He changed the pricing so the prices were lower, across everything, all the time. The classic JC Penny customer hated this. They ultimately pay the same amount, it would be less work for them, but it wasn't a "deal".

Amazon plays on this too with the crossed out inflated "typical price", and then showing the actual price you'll pay. No one ever pays that crossed out price; it can say anything, but lets them put "-40%" so people get excited and buy.

It's all very manipulative. Honey was just another form of the same concept.

by al_borland

3/31/2025 at 9:45:27 PM

Sounds like your ire should be directed at the retailers who created the coupons in the first place, not Honey for letting people know they exist.

by gruez

3/31/2025 at 9:52:05 PM

The coupon aspect is what pushes companies to sign up. Honey had a page on how to sell to companies, and it was around increased sales, and things of that nature... pretty traditional coupon stuff.

Honey gets additional ire, for what they did beyond that. Coupons are manipulative, but Honey was also lying to pretty much everyone involved in the transactions, as well as their advertising partners.

by al_borland

4/1/2025 at 4:19:23 AM

What do you feel like the lie was?

by kin

4/1/2025 at 11:59:34 AM

The YouTube video linked in the article goes over them in detail.

by al_borland

3/31/2025 at 7:20:02 PM

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.

by magicalhippo

3/31/2025 at 8:20:16 PM

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 seen anything that would indicate that they have any information agenda.

[0] https://ground.news

by willy_k

3/31/2025 at 8:58:44 PM

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 do it like ground.news where I can see left, center, right". This idea turns me off so much. Why would I care if it's deemed left, center or right by some commitee. Just give me the information that's there in most sources and it's probably be going to be close to some objective overview of the situation.

by ThalesX

3/31/2025 at 9:14:58 PM

> Why would I care if it's deemed left, center or right by some commitee.

Because at the day information can be political.

>the information that's there in most sources

While I don't use ground news myself, aggregators and classifiers like them can show you when and where stories are being published in very lopsided manners. When a story is only really being published by one side you can use that as another bit of information.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance

by pixl97

3/31/2025 at 9:33:17 PM

> Why would I care if it's deemed left, center or right by some commitee.

>> Because at the day information can be political.

Umm. Yes. Which is precisely what placing it left / center / right amplifies.

> the information that's there in most sources

>> While I don't use ground news myself, aggregators and classifiers like them can show you when and where stories are being published in very lopsided manners. When a story is only really being published by one side you can use that as another bit of information.

Sure, it's another bit of information. I think more important are the facts. Did this actually happen? If so, what happened? The tl;dr of what happened should give me a pretty good idea, without having to become a reporter myself, especially if covered by both sides.

I think this is more of an issue of an union, than the 'argument to moderation' or 'false balance' might appeal to. If I'm left, and report or something and you don't. That's probably high noise. If you're right and report to something I don't. That's probably high noise. If we both report on something, and we report differently on 80% but we have the same 20%. I'd say that 20% is high signal.

What if we cut out the left / center / right ideas and just take as many sources as we can? Then extract what's common between them. Wouldn't that have some sort of higher signal to noise ratio than any single viewpoint?

Of course, I'm willing to accept I'm wrong. From my personal experience so far, I'm much less inclined to extremes than I was since starting to use this system.

by ThalesX

3/31/2025 at 9:17:13 PM

Ground.news also gives the information that is present in only one side, which is just as high signal – if not higher – as showing the overlap IMO. They have a feed for “stories with equal coverage” and “stories covered mostly in left-leaning sources” and “stories covered mostly in right-leaning sources.”

by chatmasta

3/31/2025 at 9:26:29 PM

I'm seaching for 'equal' on the home page and finding no results, nor for 'feeds'. Could you help me identify those locations? It's always confusing to me when I go to their home page and would appreciate it. I think the equal coverage might be what I'm actually looking for.

by ThalesX

3/31/2025 at 9:39:22 PM

I think they're referring to https://ground.news/blindspot

by 0xCMP

3/31/2025 at 9:50:40 PM

Yes, that’s exactly it (and aptly named).

by chatmasta

3/31/2025 at 9:37:51 PM

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 center.

The publishers are biased, not the news item.

by quickymonster

3/31/2025 at 9:42:09 PM

I think I understand this feature pretty well. What I'm arguing for is taking the common information between all news sources (without having to place them in left / right / center) is much higher signal to noise.

Honestly your paranthesis that "the right is way worse" is already too political for my taste. It makes me feel dumb for even writing this reply. Alas, these are my thoughts. News should be news. What happened and when. Not some attack vector against a group of people or another.

by ThalesX

3/31/2025 at 10:51:11 PM

Given that there are at least as many things happening as there are humans, how do you suggest the people serving as “news sources” avoid editorial judgment when deciding what’s newsworthy and what it means?

by alwa

4/1/2025 at 10:00:47 PM

I don't suggest they avoid editorial judgement. I'm only interested in what happened so that I can draw my own conclusions.

by ThalesX

4/2/2025 at 2:31:57 AM

Let's say that The Rebel Times has a headline "Member of the Imperial Senate on a diplomatic mission boarded and arrested without cause" while the Empire Daily reports that "Leia Organa, part of the Rebel Alliance and a traitor, taken into custody". Following your process, the "what" is just that Leia was arrested.

Then, the Rebel Times says "Moisture farmer with magic powers joins fight against Empire", but the Empire Daily has "Moisture farmer joins fight against Empire". the common whats are just that a moisture farmer joined the Rebel Alliance, which is true, but much less consequential than if he had magic powers.

Later, the Rebel Times says "Secret Empire super-weapon destroyed at the Battle of Yavin", and the Empire Daily publishes... nothing because they don't want to admit defeat. There's no common information between these stories (because there is no second story), so looking for common whats would conclude that nothing happened.

If the process of analysing the news accounted for the fact that the different outlets are interested in presenting different whats, it could conclude that the fact that the Empire Daily published nothing about the third story doesn't mean that it didn't happen. In the second case, if it could account for the Empire wanting to suppress information about the Force, the conclusion would be that Luke joining the Alliance is somewhat more of a big deal than otherwise. Even in the first case, it might realise that the fact that the two sources don't agree about Leia doesn't mean that one side isn't right.

by aorist

3/31/2025 at 10:34:04 PM

> What happened and when.

"What" is often a matter of definition and framing, especially if you also want news to include "to what effect" which is not always black-and-white. "Why" is an answer that also must be answered, but will often come through a political lens. News cannot be free from a political lens if "why" and "to what effect" are considered, and probably can't be free from some element of a political lens even if just sticking to "what".

by HelloMcFly

4/1/2025 at 10:02:36 PM

> if you also want news to include "to what effect"

I don't. I want to be able to draw my own conclusion as to the effect of what happened might be.

> News cannot be free from a political lens if "why" and "to what effect" are considered, and probably can't be free from some element of a political lens even if just sticking to "what".

I have no interest in the "why" and "to what effect". I have an interest into "what" so that I can draw my own conclusions.

Though thank you for your thoughts, it helps me understand the people calling for political sides better.

by ThalesX

4/2/2025 at 1:05:32 PM

> I don't. I want to be able to draw my own conclusion as to the effect of what happened might be.

That's fair BUT do you see how this is a decision that a) won't always have a clear line of demarcation and b) reflects an internal mental model of news that likely isn't universal?

For example: let's say someone reads a news article that titled "Trump Won't Rule out Military Intervention in Greenland" (god help us, a real story). Maybe you get all the "what" you need from the headline. I would argue though that omitting contextual information about "Why does he want Greenland?" is irresponsible and bad journalism. Many others might argue that in a duty to inform readers, they should collect statements from people who understand international relations to discuss implications of such a stance.

Another example: insurance rates are rising for coastal properties in Florida. That's the "what", but there is no honest, legitimate exploration of the topic if the journalist doesn't explore "why", because the "why" of this story if also a "what" of the many contributing factors. Since that "what" will necessarily include climate-related topics, it is now considered "political" by many. And in this instance, exploring "what effect" this is likely to have on homeowners, renters, and businesses seems a core element of the phenomenon.

by HelloMcFly

4/2/2025 at 7:04:21 PM

> That's fair BUT do you see how this is a decision that a) won't always have a clear line of demarcation and b) reflects an internal mental model of news that likely isn't universal?

a) I think there's a clear line of demarcation to the "what".

b) I can see how this isn't a universal mental model, I just fail to see why the "why" makes for a better one.

> irresponsible and bad journalism

I honestly don't see how left / center / right fixes this. If there's no consensus between tens / hundreds (and I'm in a small country) sources on the actual thing that lead up to the what, I don't see why that should be included. Else the news would just be (for example, not political affirmation) "Trump Won't Rule out Military Intervention in Greenland[...] as loss of key trans-atlantic partners considered less valuable than securing arctic trade route".

> Another example: insurance rates are rising for coastal properties in Florida. That's the "what", but there is no honest, legitimate exploration of the topic if the journalist doesn't explore "why", because the "why" of this story if also a "what" of the many contributing factors. Since that "what" will necessarily include climate-related topics, it is now considered "political" by many. And in this instance, exploring "what effect" this is likely to have on homeowners, renters, and businesses seems a core element of the phenomenon

Honestly it's the same thing, if 80% of covered news sources point out to a why as climate change, sure. If only the left (or right, or center) ones do and they're not a solid majority. I don't particulary care. I care more about the "what".

Again, this might tie into the mental model more than anything but the whole left / center / right divide seems political and high noise to signal ratio to me.

by ThalesX

4/1/2025 at 12:01:22 AM

> Honestly your paranthesis that "the right is way worse" is already too political for my taste.

They're not wrong, though.

by ropable

4/1/2025 at 3:04:47 AM

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.

by Spooky23

3/31/2025 at 9:40:31 PM

[dead]

by throawayonthe

3/31/2025 at 9:00:39 PM

I did see one YouTuber mention Ground News: FriendlyJordies.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=bfHx4CfKFqQ

by mossTechnician

3/31/2025 at 11:17:03 PM

Ground News sponsors a few of the people I watch. Out of the channels I watch I've probably seen them the most on Dr. Becky (an astrophysicist) and Pracical Engineering.

by spauldo

3/31/2025 at 9:15:31 PM

> I wonder if there is some catch

Ground News is a startup that had 3 rounds of funding it total. If it sees significant uptake, it will become a juicy acquisition target for any influence-peddlers you can imagine, in addition to the usual data collection and ad-monetization risks.

by overfeed

3/31/2025 at 9:02:18 PM

>because I can’t imagine that many people sign up for the paid service. I

It's new media, and in the grand scheme of things, youtuber sponsorships are dirt cheap compared to traditional means.

The news model is well established by this point of ads + no-ad premium subscrition, so I don't think there's many potential dark arts here. It also feel everpresent simply because they are smartly targeting youtubers covering politics. And US politics is a burning hot topic right now.

by johnnyanmac

3/31/2025 at 8:39:45 PM

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.

by briffle

4/1/2025 at 10:52:31 AM

> But given how many people I have seen sponsored by them

Given how many parrot exactly the same story, practically word for word, about how they personally find it so useful, is a useful barometer of whether I should trust any recommendation from those channels. It was called astroturfing in my day, I don't consider it any more trustworthy in its new name “influencing”.

by dspillett

3/31/2025 at 9:36:51 PM

The catch is that the premise of the service is faulty.

Their segmentation of news organizations according to bias, can be obviously be biased itself. That's not a problem necessarily, but the service promotes itself as neutral while it's VC funded. You are part of a demographic that will be propagandized in the future to recoup costs.

by totallynothoney

3/31/2025 at 9:27:32 PM

I've found that sponsorship quality varies dramatically by channel.

I never saw a single sponsorship for Honey, but I see a ton for Kiwico and Ground News. I can't speak for Ground News, but Kiwico is a sponsor of basically every educational YouTube channel, and it's actually just that good and totally worth it for kids of the right age.

by lolinder

4/1/2025 at 1:00:05 AM

I think the problem is that in the current political climate, especially in the US, trying to present news qs "unbiased" effectively has a right wing bias because it legitimizes the extreme right by equating it with the predominantly moderate liberal opposition.

by markovs_gun

4/1/2025 at 12:26:12 AM

I bet their investors are willing to pay a lot for a userbase alone.

Get a substantial number of users, and it can be used to extract money from publishers to be part of the service, and the information provided can be swayed to investors objectives.

by londons_explore

3/31/2025 at 9:36:46 PM

I'm curious about answer to this too. I don't use it, but offhand mentioned it to my dad and it took him 30min of scouring before he purchased a subscription. (to my big surprise)

I hope it's just an "good" product that will (like every SaaS) be plagued by enshittification 5 years down the line.

Either case, it's hopefully a silver lining to my dads "don't trust MSM" tendencies. (fortunately he's too academic to go full conspiracy crazy but you never know)

by NalNezumi

3/31/2025 at 9:15:39 PM

If you look into the founding of ground news in 2018 it looks an awful lot like an intelligence agency operation.

by buckle8017

3/31/2025 at 9:30:06 PM

Care to elaborate? Sounds potentially interesting but I doubt many people are going to do a deep research dive based on a vague single sentence post.

by rurp

4/1/2025 at 7:32:32 PM

The catch is that ground news fully accepts and perpetuates the stupidity of American political news interpretation by insisting on "right" vs "left".

It's probably not a nefarious scheme though, they just saw the clear market opening for "News that people think is impartial" from all the liberals that need to keep on top of the narrative that Fox News or New York Post publish but don't want to waste hours a week watching talking heads, and from all the blatant conservatives who need to validate their belief that the general conservative narrative for anything is "not political"

by mrguyorama

3/31/2025 at 9:35:29 PM

Given that the original exposé was meant to be a three-part series, I'm almost certain this is not all that Honey does.

The remaining parts have never been released. In January, MegaLag tweeted to explain what's been going on: https://x.com/MegaLagOfficial/status/1884576211554201671

by Sophira

3/31/2025 at 7:38:53 PM

How did people think honey was making money?

I think a lot of these YouTubers are pretending to be shocked or caught out.

by ChocolateGod

3/31/2025 at 8:23:39 PM

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.

by beAbU

4/1/2025 at 5:54:18 AM

> So these tech tubers were only really upset that Honey was stealing from /them/, they don't give a fuck about their viewers.

Ironically, this is the reason LinusTechTips never did an expose video on this back when they originally learned about Honey doing this years ago - they thought "this only affects us, if we do a video on it the viewers will be like - who cares about your bottom line?"

And now on the contrary, LTT viewers are FURIOUS that they didn't expose it and flaming them in the comments of every tangentially related video...

by kalleboo

3/31/2025 at 8:26:18 PM

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

But wasn't Honey paying them?

by ChocolateGod

3/31/2025 at 9:05:19 PM

> But wasn't Honey paying them?

Yes, but Honey was also stealing from them. Most youtubers make a significant portion of their income via affiliate links.

So, consider the following scenario. I made up these numbers, I don't know if these are accurate:

Honey pays a youtuber $1k for a single ad spot. Due to that ad, many of the youtuber's audience installs the Honey extension. Afterwards, the youtuber's affiliate link income goes down by $2k/month, because all of those affiliate referrals are being stolen by Honey.

Also, Honey never disclosed that they were doing this.

So, of course, you can understand why the youtubers would have grievance. Pretty much nobody would ever agree to give up $2k/month of income forever to get $1k right now. (And it's probably not right now, it's probably more like 90 days when they settle their payables).

by dleary

4/1/2025 at 4:23:54 AM

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 conflicting affiliate links at the time of promotion.

Also, if you work with affiliate links, you should probably know how they work. IMO it'd be condescending if Honey tried to explain to every YouTuber how last click attribution worked.

by kin

4/1/2025 at 5:46:14 AM

> MegaLag posted a VPN example, which was an edge case, but it was enough

Ah, the modern day equivalent to snake oil, where you buy a product that gives your data to a random company in a tax haven over your publicly accountable ISP.

by ChocolateGod

4/1/2025 at 6:21:38 AM

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.

by Ekaros

4/1/2025 at 4:11:07 PM

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.

by kin

4/1/2025 at 4:09:59 AM

Damn Youtubers really make alot from affil links? I think I've only like once or twice used a link in the description. I usually don't bother, because nearly always the links in the description arn't relevant to the video. Just an ad link, and generic, my camera xyz links to some amazon page which usually out of stock/gone.

I always thought Youtubers made the bulk of their money with brand deals (like Honey), and some from youtube ads + light sprinkling on top from afill links.

Maybe I'm not the typical user.

by wingworks

4/1/2025 at 5:58:41 AM

LinusTechTips recently did a video on their revenue sources: 55% from merch, 21% from video sponsors, 12% from YouTube AdSense, 7% from their own video platform, and only 3% from affiliate links.

I guess for creators with a much smaller merch business, affiliate links would be twice as big a portion.

by kalleboo

3/31/2025 at 8:55:42 PM

Paying them initially, but then if they used any affiliate links themselves, honey would rewrite those so honey would get the affiliate $$ instead of the tubers. Get paid once, then they'll steal from you indefinitely.

by QuercusMax

3/31/2025 at 9:10:23 PM

> Anyone who flogs ball shavers, ass wipes or fuckin microwave dinners don't give a shit about their viewers

I mean what’s wrong with selling ball shavers, ass wipes, and fuckin’ microwave dinners? These aren’t really harmful things and they provide actual value to people.

Are you just opposed to advertising as a concept?

by LPisGood

3/31/2025 at 9:26:28 PM

Those I have less of a problem with. What I actually have a problem with is the supplement sales, VPN sales, and gambling sales. "Here's a magic multivitamin that will make you feel 1000% better!". "You are so unsafe by not using a VPN, here use our service which also gets to peak at everything you send through it". "Wanna bet on this Ping-Pong championship? Well, grab some crypto and go to this 'not legal in the US but who's watching' website where you can bet on anything!"

Those can actually be harmful things, and a LOT of media producers will advertise them as being the best thing since sliced bread (Usually having personal endorsements required in the copy).

by cogman10

3/31/2025 at 9:39:35 PM

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, though. Closest to a scam was probably those "become a lord" sites that let you "buy a small plot of land in Ireland" or something and a tree gets planted. When the reality is you don't actually own the land through technicalities and it's questionable if the tree is even planted.

by johnnyanmac

3/31/2025 at 10:00:18 PM

> 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". That's simply a boldface lie.

Your security when going through a VPN is from using https. If you are unfortunate and get a less than scrupulous VPN you might end up with them adding themselves as CAs (yes, some VPNs do that). That allows them to crack and access data within the secure stream.

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.

> That's what a security app needs to properly protect you

VPNs aren't anti-virus software and any VPN selling that should be EXTREMELY mistrusted. You are right, they can only provide that sort of service by decrypting your secure payloads. That is where all the scamminess comes into play.

Certainly not every VPN service is bad, but 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.

by cogman10

4/1/2025 at 5:56:40 PM

> 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.

by autoexec

3/31/2025 at 11:20:13 PM

Also these services used to call themselves proxies, which is what they are. At some point they co-opted the term VPN because "Private Network" makes for a good soundbite, even though it has nothing to do with what VPNs are actually used for (a network disconnected from the internet except via the VPN gateway). Of course they'll counter by saying they use VPN tech under the hood (OpenVPN, WireGuard).

by Arnavion

3/31/2025 at 11:25:33 PM

>VPNs aren't anti-virus software and any VPN selling that should be EXTREMELY mistrusted.

My impression is that it makes browsing wifi networks you don't trust safer. I just let it happen, but I have a few friends who really hate having to connect to any public wifi. That seems to track with how most of the marketing goes when it's focused more on interceptions while traveling instead of on your home network. (And yes. I'm aware this is more equivalent to adding a door lock when a competent hacker has a crowbar and a window right next to it. Sometimes it's about preventing the incompetent ones).

I didn't mean to liken it to ant-virus per se. But the concepts are the same. Anything you choose that needs elevated permissions better be something you go through a fine-toothed comb with and have a stellar reputation. But without naming names, it seems a bit overly alarmist to name all VPNs that dare advertise as scams.

>They are getting money from somewhere and I doubt it's from grandmas signing up for the service.

it may very well be that. It's the same old subscription service virtually every company in the world does. "sign on for this super cheap fee!". Then you keep it around and then normal ratea happen after X months. Then you just keep using it or even forget about it and that's easy steady revenue.

It's dishonest, but in an apathetic sort of way. Not a malicious one. The solution is simply for a consumer to actually watch their banking statements.

by johnnyanmac

4/1/2025 at 4:08:34 AM

> My impression is that it makes browsing wifi networks you don't trust safer.

That's why it's problematic. Using a known-good VPN can make it safer.

However by installing some VPN software you are intentionally installing a man in the middle which you now have to trust is legit.

And the promotions tend to vastly exaggerate the risk, something NordVPN got slapped for[1].

[1]: https://www.theregister.com/2019/05/01/nordvpn_tv_ad_rapped_...

by magicalhippo

3/31/2025 at 10:45:11 PM

> What's wrong with VPNs?

Nothing is inherently wrong but I trust my ISP a lot more than some random guys in Switzerland or Israel or whatever tax haven islands they operate from. They lie about what they’re good for which is just hiding things from my ISP. The rest of the benefits are fake

by asdf6969

3/31/2025 at 10:59:06 PM

As you should.

Because a secret you should know about your ISPs is they really don't care (or want to care) about what you are doing with their service. They don't want to add the hardware/software it'd take to spy on your data, that's a huge cost to them with nothing but downsides.

I might distrust a large ISP more just because they have the extra cache to burn. But a smaller more regional ISP will not try and invade your privacy.

by cogman10

4/1/2025 at 5:57:52 PM

In the US ISPs monitor, collect, and sell your browsing history.

by autoexec

3/31/2025 at 11:28:37 PM

>I trust my ISP

I don't really, per se. Especially in my area where they have a monopoly. But VPNs aren't advertising making your home network safer anyway.

by johnnyanmac

4/1/2025 at 4:13:54 AM

Yeah this! The day that casey neistat started advertising nordvpn, I lost a lot of interest in his content.

I personally don't mind creators advertising VPNs, but just be honest about it. Don't pretend like it's your favourite VPN you've always used, and it's the bestest, most secure, will make you super safe..

If they'd say like, I've been paid to advertise xyz VPN, I've tried it for a few days, works as advertised. I can watch my US Netflex while traveling out of the US, or whatever. But keep in mind, instead of just your ISP knowing where you browse, now the VPN providers knows, and is probably selling your data. Like, cut the bs.

by wingworks

3/31/2025 at 8:28:25 PM

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

by jrflowers

3/31/2025 at 9:13:15 PM

It's too late to enter the market now. Let's try for the first mover advantage in influencer-favourite ball wipes and ass shavers.

by thombat

4/1/2025 at 6:21:20 PM

No what we need to aim for at things that soil the balls and fluff up the asses. Synergy.

by jrflowers

3/31/2025 at 9:33:49 PM

So this perspective boils down to "entrepreneurs are evil"? An interesting take to put on a site dedicated to funding entrepreneurs.

by johnnyanmac

3/31/2025 at 11:27:34 PM

Is that really how people view HackerNews? I've always felt the connection to YCombinator to be largely superficial, with the site being mostly for people looking to get news on technology itself, rather than the business thereof.

by barbecue_sauce

3/31/2025 at 11:44:44 PM

Given some of the perspectives here, especially with tech fads, absolutely. They are definitely prolific users here who have that feeling that they support or defend certain ideas in tech as they work on their next project in that area.

As well as just some general sentiments you see from browsing here:

- Strongly anti-copyright and seem fine completely abolishing the idea. One that would remove regulations when it comes to selliing ideas.

- Often defends the idea of private marketplaces and their cuts on developers. Which seems odd on the surface. but it makes sense when you consider it is easier to minmax for one monoplistic storefront than develop endpoints to support multiple stores. Why disrupt something you make steady income from as is?

- There's definietly underlying sentiments towards in work-related topics that come from those leading/managing companies. a stronger skew towards employee productivity and a need to aggressively weed out "low performers". A slight skew supporting business decisions like mass layoffs, even suggesting those laid off were low performers or otherwise just freeloading.

little things you catch here and there as you browse a community for years.

by johnnyanmac

4/1/2025 at 7:42:48 PM

Anyone who has been in a YC batch gets a special magic "Orange" name tag on HN that anyone else with an orange name tag can see, and we, the proles, cannot.

This site is an advertisement for YC, and was built primarily for mindshare. "Growth hacker" types that started YC and built HN and spun off Reddit don't build things "for fun" if there is profit to be made.

by mrguyorama

3/31/2025 at 10:48:15 PM

I'd read it more as "influencers are dishonest and pretend to not be sales professionals".

by luckylion

3/31/2025 at 11:32:44 PM

The ones I subscribe to sure aren't sales professionals. They just want to talk about or interact with media. But some do do it for a living, so it's no surprise they look at what works and what doesn't and adjusts their content for their audience.

It was honestly surprising when one of my subcibed creators (around 400k subs on Youtube) talked a bit about financials and that half their revenue came from sponsors. And this was one who avoids all the typical ads. I imagine the numbers to sell out to yet another RAID ad must easily double that.

by johnnyanmac

3/31/2025 at 8:14:45 PM

I didn't even think about how they could be making money before this came out (I wasn't a user), but I would have put my money on them harvesting your browser history and selling it to advertisers, which seems shady but is kind of normal for the web today. Affiliate link manipulation and coercing websites into paying protection money to hide lucrative coupons would have been low on my list of guesses.

by parsimo2010

3/31/2025 at 8:01:56 PM

I thought Honey sold consumer shopping data.

by xboxnolifes

3/31/2025 at 9:26:56 PM

Same. It seems like very valuable data since they have access to the individual items in the carts across many sites.

by ziml77

3/31/2025 at 9:19:59 PM

[flagged]

by overfeed

3/31/2025 at 9:45:18 PM

I wasn't sure exactly what they were doing, and didn't care enough to look into it, but the fact that it wasn't obvious made me assume it was something shady that I wouldn't like. When I saw that they were doing, it validated my spidey-senses. A similar thing happened with Robinhood.

If it's not obvious how a company is making money, and they don't explain it somewhere... I'm not interested.

by al_borland

3/31/2025 at 7:51:45 PM

A comment on HN in 2019 was explaining how it works, it was accessible through a Google Search

by ttoinou

3/31/2025 at 8:51:52 PM

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.

by Dylan16807

3/31/2025 at 9:15:06 PM

I think the shock for the youtubers was replacing their affiliate "link" (token whatever the correct term is).

Everything else seemed... minor and expected. That was the one that surprised me.

by Taylor_OD

4/1/2025 at 9:39:09 AM

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.

by whywhywhywhy

3/31/2025 at 7:53:17 PM

Yeah I'm torn. I do get that more income means they can invest more and thus grow, leading to more and better content.

But promoting products which have such a high likelihood of being shady like this...

Another one was the app or similar where you scanned your receipts and got some discounts or whatever. Obviously they only make money by selling your data, but they mention none of that during the promotion, just how easily you can save some bucks.

by magicalhippo

3/31/2025 at 9:17:24 PM

pre-paypal when I used it, I thought they were simply cutting deals with the vendors as a middleman for their own affiliate links, like any other influencer would. If you can automate that process of delivering the affiliate links, then it's a big win for that plugin.

I suppose post pay that they dug into darker arts, sadly.

by johnnyanmac

3/31/2025 at 8:59:42 PM

No surprise there, engagement is their base of income

by seb1204

3/31/2025 at 10:31:24 PM

I figured it just made money by tracking and selling your browsing history, it's owned by PayPal after all. I was shocked to learn about the cookie-stuffing. That's like, arguably a crime.

by AzzyHN

3/31/2025 at 7:43:51 PM

What about the Capital One extension which was doing the exact same thing?

by Dwedit

3/31/2025 at 8:23:15 PM

Makes me want to switch CC every time I log in and see their dumb banner asking me to install the extension.

by barbazoo

3/31/2025 at 10:54:19 PM

Eno? Up until recently, that was the only way to generate virtual cards. It's a useful feature for retailers that are too small for me to trust their security. I guess I'll need to start using their website now that it is an option.

by MikeKusold

4/1/2025 at 12:40:58 AM

Different extension. The Honey like one is Capital One Shopping.

by aylons

3/31/2025 at 10:32:30 PM

Do you have a source for that? I assume they just sold browsing data, since that's the easiest way to make money in this sort of space (or, I guess, used it to better figure out what kind of credit card you'd consider applying for?)

by AzzyHN

3/31/2025 at 7:51:47 PM

Honestly, I think they don't have many active users. They're offering me $45 to install it as of this week.

by smitty1110

4/1/2025 at 12:41:33 AM

They offered us the same thing, we signed up through it, they never paid out. Uninstalled.

by gameshot911

3/31/2025 at 8:31:41 PM

Likely, how else do they make money.

by thefourthchime

3/31/2025 at 8:27:49 PM

Never trust Paypal. It's simple

by is_true

3/31/2025 at 8:54:01 PM

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.

by ryandrake

4/1/2025 at 12:17:26 AM

I dislike affiliate and ads just like anyone else, but without them, people just will never find your product. At some point you just have to hope some reviewer picks you up and gives you some boost, but even then how will the reviewer find you?

by sureIy

4/1/2025 at 1:03:41 AM

That was the promise of search engines, before SEO came along and kinda ruined that too.

I suppose the ideal solution is a form of search engine that is basically magical and truly personalized. So that I could search for "most comfortable gym shorts" and the top result would be the world's most comfortable gym shorts (for my physique specifically). And if I searched for just "gym shorts", I'd be shown results in my price point which optimize for different things I care about (comfort, durability, etc).

We got part way there with Amazon, but fake reviews and drop-shipping and counterfeits messed that up as well.

Maybe LLMs can help us out with this is a bit, but I'm skeptical given how quickly profit-motive manages to get in the way of UX.

by fastball

3/31/2025 at 11:47:39 PM

This represents a 20% reduction in its Chrome user base (20 to 16 million users).

by pentagrama

4/1/2025 at 2:09:43 AM

Yeah, the article says that.

by loeg

3/31/2025 at 7:14:53 PM

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 there is also a ‘NV_MC_FC’ cookie that stays affiliated with Linus Tech Tips and is NOT changed to Paypal. In this case LC stands for ‘last click’ and FC for ‘first click’. In the video he seems to claim that there is no first click cookie and only a last click cookie - this claim is false.

> In my DM conversation with Jonathon he claimed that he noticed the FC cookie but didn’t think it was relevant and that he was confused by it. I wonder, as an investigative journalist, did he think to ask anyone at NewEgg or the affiliate networks to explain it to him before he threw damning accusations at an industry he didn’t understand?

by jabroni_salad

3/31/2025 at 8:41:07 PM

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.

by cbdumas

4/1/2025 at 4:46:00 AM

That's fair.

But consider a retailer who has budget to spend with the goal of increasing sales. Here's a study one of the largest affiliate networks did on shopping extensions - https://junction.cj.com/article/cj-demystifies-shopping-brow...

It boils down to making numbers go up. Maybe for you, Honey doesn't do much. But add Honey to the picture, and retailers are seeing an increase in sales and a decrease in cart abandonment. So you choose to partner with a coupon company and pay them commission and for some percentage of users, seeing that popup pushed them over the edge to make the purchase.

In the attribution chain, when you compare an initial referral vs. the coupon app, it's fair to say that the initial referral has more impact. So maybe you want the initial referral to take most or all of the credit. But what about when there's no referral? Doesn't the coupon app deserve to be a part of the chain if it is ultimately driving positive return?

by kin

3/31/2025 at 11:41:06 PM

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 disingenuous: the very two things people are accusing honey of doing.

by jahsome

4/1/2025 at 12:18:40 AM

weren't they inserting themselves even in cases where there was no available coupon? Finding the user a deal isn't "doing literally nothing", and the argument for honey inserting itself in that case is at least not crazy. But as I understand it, they inserted themselves in every case even when they very literally did nothing (no deal, nothing).

by MostlyStable

4/1/2025 at 8:56:56 PM

I do agree that's shady, but there's a good chance at least some of those shoppers wouldn't have converted because they thought to themselves "I'll wait to make sure I can get the best deal" whereas someone with honey was in theory "sure" they were getting the best deal because no deals were available and pulled the trigger. Obviously in some cases that wasn't actually the case, but either way honey DID contribute to the sale.

My point is the issue is not honey. The problem is affiliate marketing (specifically last click attribution) as a whole. Don't hate the player. Hate the game.

by jahsome

4/1/2025 at 1:37:14 AM

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.

by bastawhiz

4/1/2025 at 12:18:02 AM

I think they refer to the fact that Honey also sets itself as affiliate when not finding any code.

by LelouBil

4/1/2025 at 2:58:21 AM

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.

by eviks

4/1/2025 at 9:08:26 PM

I fundamentally disagree honey is/was fraudulent. They compiled and distributed coupon codes. The core funtionality exists. It just sucked -- I guess anyway, I was too suspicious and lazy to ever use it myself.

by jahsome

4/2/2025 at 4:09:20 AM

This is also not a contradiction. If I sell you a fake painting that looks the same, "the core visual functionality" exists

by eviks

4/1/2025 at 12:37:18 AM

You're framing this in an extremely slanted way.

> So honey is undeniably aiding in the sale.

First of all, "undeniably" here is hyperbole. At best you could say "possibly, occasionally". You were already brought to site by a content creator, added the item to your cart, and are in the process of checking out. Why would a coupon code aggregator then deserve the commission for that sale?

> It's not "literally doing nothing" to compile and automatically apply/suggest coupon codes.

Even when they don't find a coupon code, they still take the commission for the sale. That is quite literally the definition of getting paid for doing nothing.

> Is it valuable? Objectively, yes, hence the millions upon millions of users.

Well, no. As the investigation revealed, Honey doesn't actually find any coupon code most of the time. In fact, this is intentional - they partner with retailers to limit the coupon codes they provide to shoppers. In other words they are intentionally providing negative value for the end user most of the time (when compared to searching the Web for a coupon code manually).

You clearly either know nothing about the investigation, or are a Honey employee.

by wavemode

4/1/2025 at 8:51:08 PM

Judging by the condescension oozing from that last statement, it seems you're disinterested in a good faith engagement.

That statement is emotionally charged and factually incorrect, multiple times over. I assume the rest of your reply is along the same lines and won't trouble myself reading it.

by jahsome

3/31/2025 at 7:41:13 PM

I got a weird feeling from the MegaLag video, but overall don't think Honey are entirely in the clear either. From the AMA it seems Honey has been in the business of taking some/all affiliate revenue even in cases where it finds no coupons - sounds like the sites are fine/happy with this, but I'm sure people who post affiliate links are not.

by staindk

3/31/2025 at 8:10:41 PM

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.

by josephg

3/31/2025 at 10:58:59 PM

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

by twostorytower

4/1/2025 at 1:26:53 AM

> 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.

by josephg

4/1/2025 at 4:57:40 AM

Actually if you check wayback they've been telling us straight up since 2016 they make money off of commissions. https://web.archive.org/web/20180125135216/http://help.joinh...

Affiliate attribution wasn't explained in full but MegaLag with all his research still didn't accurately explain it since it's pretty complex. The user doesn't need to know this.

Doesn't make sense to explain all the nuts and bolts if it works the same way any other coupon website would.

by kin

4/1/2025 at 3:02:02 AM

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

by eviks

3/31/2025 at 9:15:52 PM

This sounds like a distraction. "seems to claim that there is no first click cookie". He brought that up, it doesn't control the payout and doesn't change the result from what I understand. FC cookie is not relevant, Megalag was focusing on what was important information to impart to viewers. If they clicked on an affiliate link from their favorite creator, using Honey hijacked that action of support without disclosing anything.

by layoric

3/31/2025 at 8:25:24 PM

Why even claim last click attribution while the user is literally on the site?

by jonny_eh

3/31/2025 at 9:20:39 PM

Only a percentage of people on a site will convert. Increasing that percentage is valuable.

by charcircuit

3/31/2025 at 9:26:22 PM

How does displaying a message "Honey didn't find any discounts for your order" on the cart screen, increasing that percentage?

by lozenge

3/31/2025 at 9:34:31 PM

A potential customer could leave the site, spend time searching for a coupon code, not find anything and give up, and then not return to the site to complete the purchase. Honey could keep users on the site moving through the order flow even if it didn't find anything.

by charcircuit

3/31/2025 at 7:35:35 PM

Yeah, somehow I doubt we'll ever see a follow up from MegaLag. Well except that he's probably getting sued into oblivion by Paypal for libel.

by jmuguy

3/31/2025 at 8:18:35 PM

SLAPP at its finest, eh.

It's time libel laws get reformed, so that not only huuuuge ass international newspapers can afford to report shady shit by BigCo.

by mschuster91

4/1/2025 at 4:20:41 AM

Last Click Attribution is the most common model for affiliate revenue, not First Click Attribution. That the First Click Attribution cookie is still being set is mostly a red herring. Most online sales have 100% of the affiliate revenue going to Last Click Attribution.

by kelseydh

3/31/2025 at 8:11:59 PM

He's blatantly ignoring that most affiliate programs only payout to the last-click. Okay...great...the first click attribution is maintained, but if there is no payout for it, then the core issue is still the issue.

by dandesim

3/31/2025 at 10:33:45 PM

What is he blatantly ignoring? He's actually in a comment right above directly addressing mitigating last-click with stand-down policies.

by kin

3/31/2025 at 10:12:23 PM

Ryan here too - will try to respond to some of these with more info.

The two biggest missing pieces from both my discussion and from the video are: 1) stand down rules for affiliate, and 2) cash back to the user.

I was trying to address the claims he raised in the video specifically and since he didn't mention either I didn't in my reddit post except for a little bit in a couple of the answers.

1) For the case where the store only uses last click (which is most of them) Honey and other browser extensions follow a rule set by the affiliate networks called 'stand down'. This means they attempt to detect when another affiliate link is clicked (e.g. from a creator) and then either fully disable the functionality or at least don't use affiliate links. Only browser extensions are subject to these rules (e.g. if you visit a coupon code website they will use their affiliate link and override the creator).

Detecting this can be a bit tricky across numerous affiliate networks and I suspect the NewEgg example was selected because it used a non-standard way to manage affiliate tagging and therefore wasn't detected by Honey's stand down logic.

fwiw I agree with the sentiment that Honey shouldn't have been tagging on a 'hey we didn't find any codes' or 'use paypal' click and I personally wouldn't have approved that, though it probably technically does meet most of the affiliate network stand down rules (well, at least it did - I'm sure they've been updated which is a good thing).

2) Jonathon's video is completely silent on the other core value proposition of Honey: cash back. Honey, like Rakuten, Capital One Shopping, etc, offers cash back funded by affiliate marketing. The model is not new - Ebates (now Rakuten Rewards) was founded in 1998. Honey added this program in 2015.

When a user is shopping with Honey on a store with affiliate commission, Honey almost always gives the user cash back. There are a limited number of exceptions, generally because of the store's policy, and occasionally because there are so many exclusions to the affiliate program that it makes offering cash back confusing to a user.

A valid question to ask is: if a user clicks a creator affiliate link AND has a cash back tool like Honey or Rakuten should they or should they not be eligible for cash back. Personally I think absolutely yes, the user's preference is the most important. But I've heard reasonable people argue the opposite.

What I don't think is that offering it's users cash back makes Honey a scam and I think Jonathon was negligent in presenting this narrative without even considering this primary use case for what is actually the #1 business model in affiliate marketing.

I'll stop there. Happy to answer a few more questions here.

by ketau

3/31/2025 at 11:33:51 PM

Isn't the problem that none of this was transparent to the user? That honey takes affiliate commissions and MAYBE gives some of that money back to the user? That honey takes credit for the sale and MAYBE stands down in certain circumstances?

I don't think any of this is transparent to the user. That's the scam.

by keoneflick

4/1/2025 at 12:13:11 AM

What would you want to see for transparency?

We always tried to be as transparent to our users as possible in the product, in the faq, in our customer support, etc.

You can see evidence of that approach at 6:17 in Jonathon's video in the response that he got from customer service about how Honey works (even when he intentionally removes critical context). He reads a support email that says:

"If Honey is activated and is the last program used while shopping on a site, it is likely Honey will receive credit for the purchase, and Gold will be earned by the member. However, if your favorite influencer's affiliate link was the last program associated with your purchase during your shopping on the site then they will receive the credit for the purchase. Keep in..."

Notably he stopped reading before the "and Gold will be earned by the member" because it didn't fit his narrative.

I know it flashed on the screen faster than anyone could read and was zoomed so you couldn't see the whole thing on one screen but would you consider this level of transparency adequate if he read the whole thing?

by ketau

4/1/2025 at 3:35:15 AM

> A valid question to ask is: if a user clicks a creator affiliate link AND has a cash back tool like Honey or Rakuten should they or should they not be eligible for cash back. Personally I think absolutely yes, the user's preference is the most important. But I've heard reasonable people argue the opposite.

I'm not very familiar with Honey, it's business model, or the ins and outs of the affiliate program back stage. My impression here is strictly as an observer with no foot in the race.

Should they be eligible for cash back? Sure, if you want to give them cash. I don't see why that entitles Honey a link in the affiliate program chain, though. The cash back offer seems entirely independent from the user's choice to at least get to the point of purchase, with maybe an occassional situation where they would have pulled out if not for a cash back or coupon deal.

It's a benefit you're affording the user, but it's on you to find a way to monetize that without impacting the actual affiliate. If you have a deal with the merchant so that doesn't affect the actual affiliate, great. If you charge your users a monthly fee or something, wonderful. But if you're deciding that you deserve a share of an existing pot, you're in the wrong, and there's no two ways about that. A flawed business model doesn't entitle you to other people's shares.

Again, I'm not familiar with the way the system works at all, and haven't seen Laing's video, so I might be missing context. But from your quote on Reddit:

> On most stores Honey (and others) offer a portion of the commission back to users as cash back.

My understanding is that Honey inserts itself into the affiliate chain, takes Y% of the commission (and reducing the original affiliate's commission by the same amount? Clarification needed), then returns X% back to the user, and keeps Y% minus X% for itself. So what exactly is Honey doing here? Taking a part of the pot because it's giving some portion of the pot back to the user, while otherwise offering nothing of value to either the affiliate or the merchant? Why shouldn't the original affiliate simply be given the ability to offer the user cash back and remove Honey as the middleman? Why should the original affiliate have any loss in their own commission because of a 3rd party's actions?

If Honey's %Y commission is part of a deal you have with the retailer and doesn't affect the original affiliate's commission at all, I apologize, and understand the situation. But if there's any cost to the original affiliate here whatsoever, I don't think you have any justification for imposing that cost on them.

by ysavir

4/1/2025 at 5:01:51 AM

Probably too complex to explain here but tldr; every cash back program is built on top of the affiliate marketing rails since Ebates started it in 1998. Same for coupon websites since those came along.

It is a system design flaw (that maybe will self correct because of this) that multiple advertising models at different points in the value chain are built on the same system. 'Multi-touch' or 'any-click' are the correct direction to solve this problem but introduce their own challenges for retailers which is why most of them have not adopted these systems yet.

You ask "what exactly is Honey doing here?"

Short answer is helping the retailer with conversion and limiting cart abandonment by making the user happy and more likely to transact.

by ketau

4/1/2025 at 1:19:22 PM

I feel like you avoided the substance of my question. Does Honey's intervention negatively impact the original affiliate in any way?

by ysavir

3/31/2025 at 7:06:59 PM

It's ironic that probably the biggest victims were youtubers and other "influencers" who mindlessly promoted this extension to their viewers, for money of course.

by 0rzech

3/31/2025 at 10:03:46 PM

It's actually a trrickle-down system. Smaller youtubers who have never heard of the extension (let alone were approached to advertise) may be hurt the most, because a larger youtuber who took the deal advertised it. e.g. a tech youtuber could be hit a lot if Linus Tech Tips advertise Honey, because they have a strong overlap in subscribers.

It was something a youtuber I was subscribed to was talking about in how he was still seeing his affiliate numbers drop overthe last year or so, and it was actually putting his existing deals in danger. Then as a test after the expose, he asked a few family members who did use his links if they also installed Honey. He definitely never advertised Honey himself.

by johnnyanmac

4/1/2025 at 12:46:14 PM

Hm, you actually may be right. Those, who promoted it, at least got some money back for that promotion. Others lost money without getting anything back from Honey. Damn, that's even worse.

by 0rzech

3/31/2025 at 7:12:17 PM

Genuine question I was wondering when this went down - wasn’t this completely unknown at the time? If that’s the case, I feel like I can’t blame those who promoted it. I don’t have all the info though.

by jjice

3/31/2025 at 9:20:20 PM

LTT found out about the affiliate code changes and dropped Honey as a sponsor. The problem is, when they drop a sponsor it's usually only announced on their forum page. Linus considered making a video for a wider audience but was worried he'd get shit on for bringing up an issue that technically only impacted him.

Remember: before MegaLeg's video the only thing that was known was the affiliate code ripping, and it was only known by a handful of YouTubers warning each other in private.

My personal opinion is that they should have sounded the alarm, even though the only people getting scammed were creators, because it was a broader attack on the whole YouTube ecosystem and not just LTT. Hell, there's even precedent for LTT making self-interested YouTube videos; remember when their Amazon affiliate account got shut down and they had to beg Dread Pirate Bezos to be reinstated? YouTube creators that are pushing people to products and services should be willing and able to completely trash those services if they turn out to be shit - or, at the very least, are being shit to them.

by kmeisthax

3/31/2025 at 9:38:09 PM

Let's be real, LTT didn't want to bite the hand that feeds him. What future sponsor would sign up if they knew LTT might make an expose about them in future for clicks.

Even something basic like exposing how much these sponsors pay out in commission instead of towards the quality of their products would be hugely negative publicity.

by lozenge

3/31/2025 at 10:06:16 PM

> What future sponsor would sign up if they knew LTT might make an expose about them in future for clicks.

ideally, ones that don't want to secretly sap at his revenue stream.

by johnnyanmac

4/1/2025 at 12:01:31 AM

It’s actually quite amusing as LTT used to have viewers bookmark their Amazon affiliate link in place of Amazon.com. Live by the sword…

by hooloovoo_zoo

3/31/2025 at 7:34:48 PM

> wasn’t this completely unknown at the time

I would have thought was obvious from the beginning that Honey was making some of its money from affiliate programs; affiliate programs are the standard thing that "shopping" extensions use to make money, leaving aside the much shadier things that even more malicious extensions do (see the various articles on the offers extension authors receive).

I'd always assumed the people promoting it made more money from the sponsorship than they lost from lost affiliate links. The recent discussions suggest that's not the case.

by JoshTriplett

3/31/2025 at 7:54:13 PM

If they didn't know how it works, then how could they promote it as an awesome tool and something good? I expect people to have some integrity, not "god money above all" mentality.

You can and IMHO actually should blame them for promoting crap. No sympathies on my part towards promoters of Honey, to be honest. Especially the so called "tech" channels. But this time they've tasted their own medicine.

BTW., here's a very interesting comment about the issue with regards to LTT: https://old.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/1hkbtlr/peop... .

by 0rzech

3/31/2025 at 8:58:53 PM

The problem is Honey was dishonest about how it works.

Their marketing claimed that Honey automatically applied coupon codes for various online retailers during the checkout phase. Nobody really had a problem with this.

What got found out and landed Honey in hot water, is the affiliate link hijacking behavior which they did not disclose. Basically, any time you follow an affiliate link with Honey installed, it replaces the original affiliate code with their own. Leading to this flow:

1. YouTuber takes Honey Sponsorship and their followers install Honey.

2. YouTuber posts new content, with affiliate links for equipment or parts.

3. YouTuber sees their affiliate links aren't getting near the amount of traffic they used to despite their videos performing just as well as before.

by babypuncher

3/31/2025 at 9:40:29 PM

Shops could also pay Honey to use a lower % off code instead of them finding ones and giving that, so maybe there's a 10% code out there but Honey only gives users a 2% one because they got paid by the shop, and tells the user they tried their best. It's a scam in all directions.

by Hikikomori

3/31/2025 at 9:21:36 PM

I thi k that's the issue though. The YouTubers promoting Honey weren't really telling us what they personally felt about honey, they were telling us what Honey wanted them to say.

by polishdude20

3/31/2025 at 7:17:10 PM

I believe there were some rumors that it was happenning, but not too public.

I think I remember seeing a blogpost about Honey extension being a very bad idea from security perspective way before the public outcry and it might had mentioned the attribution(right term?) too.

by VTimofeenko

3/31/2025 at 7:49:22 PM

There is a post on here from a few years ago talking about it. When the scandal broke out people linked it but I can't find it now. We might understand how it works, being tech people, but the vast majority of people most likely have no idea.

by pests

3/31/2025 at 7:42:40 PM

It was no secret, but perhaps not well known. I was a bit surprised when I saw all the recent discussion about it blowing up as I was already aware that's how it worked, but maybe it didn't get enough attention until the right people talked about it.

by OGWhales

4/1/2025 at 9:00:04 AM

They lost me years back when they never actually seemed to have any codes anyway

by ChrisRR

3/31/2025 at 10:59:35 PM

Why haven’t they just been shutdown?

by daft_pink

4/1/2025 at 10:24:01 AM

Probably still making plenty of money. Its only a 20% drop in users.

by aembleton

4/1/2025 at 5:27:40 AM

But ublock, etc, is harmful...

by ibejoeb

3/31/2025 at 6:52:07 PM

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

by Larrikin

3/31/2025 at 7:25:23 PM

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're going to be a target for their tricks. If you click on a link or add something to your cart, they are going to send you reminders and even more discounts to get you to buy that item.

Personally, I've been happy with this setup. I only see the promo spam when I want to. And my email becomes a personalized coupon code search engine that contains much better deals than you could get by using retailmenot or similar sites.

by mywittyname

3/31/2025 at 8:36:22 PM

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!”

by dceddia

3/31/2025 at 9:17:12 PM

I toss "10OFF" into almost every promo box when I buy something. Works at least 25% of the time. When it does I try "20OFF" and that works as well like 5% of the time.

by Taylor_OD

3/31/2025 at 9:46:40 PM

Reminds me of the 777 code on Dreamhost

I set that up on an older web host and got referral credits for a few years :)

by eisa01

3/31/2025 at 11:23:47 PM

Also the current year can yield results sometimes (ie: 2025).

by dabbz

3/31/2025 at 8:58:17 PM

I know it’s better to do this sort of thing yourself (or just set up a domain forwarder) but honestly, iCloud’s Hide My Email feature is so nice for this. Of course Apple can still link your spoof addresses to your parent iCloud account, but less-reputable marketing data companies don’t have visibility into that.

by GuinansEyebrows

3/31/2025 at 9:33:11 PM

Another tip that works especially well on Shopify sites is to add the item to your cart and then abandon the page. You'll usually get an email or text (depending on your Shopify settings) for some discount code to entice you to finish the purchase.

by noboostforyou

3/31/2025 at 7:08:08 PM

The alternative to a company that is hiding real coupon codes and stealing affiliate marketing dollars?

Honestly, there's no good answer here because most of the work is manual, not automated, and there are a lot of opportunities for bad actors. It's just a bad model in general.

by ebiester

3/31/2025 at 7:44:46 PM

There are legit communities which already collect that information in structured ways. For example https://www.ozbargain.com.au/ is quite Australia-oriented, but could be turned into an extension bringing up the coupon codes automatically.

by viraptor

3/31/2025 at 7:26:39 PM

I don't think it exists today, but someone could make a crowdsourced extension like SponsorBlock. That also eliminate the concern about hiding promo codes for companies who pay.

by phantom784

3/31/2025 at 9:57:20 PM

We've been working on a product called Ketch AI that does some similar things but hopefully adds more value further up the chain.

We track sales from retailers, and use historic sales information to recommend if the sale is good or not (ex some retailers always have XX% off, so you only want to jump on sales that are better than that). In addition, we'll let you sign up for digest alerts, so ideally you get 1 notification a day with all the good sales across all the brands you shop at, rather than hundreds of spammy marketing emails a day.

We don't clickjack affiliate links like Honey, and don't have deals with retailers incentivizing us to promote deals that are worse for the consumer.

Check us out at https://getketch.ai, or start browsing brands at https://members.getketch.ai/brands to get a feel for the product if you're interested

by wabledoodle

4/1/2025 at 3:34:06 AM

> We don't clickjack affiliate links like Honey, and don't have deals with retailers incentivizing us to promote deals that are worse for the consumer.

So where is your revenue planned to come from?

by zahlman

3/31/2025 at 8:25:39 PM

To be honest? The majority of discount culture is a disgusting trap where retailers inflate default MSRPs and manipulate price histories so they can put big percent signs on the products to bring them down to normal and FOMO/gouge anyone with time constraints.

T-shirts and vacuums aren't perishable. Make everything cheaper all the time, adjust the cost to reflect actual supply/demand, and stop the wiggling banners and big signs and calculations every time I want to buy anything.

It's like an app for finding out the minimum you have to tip for a waitress to be able to survive. Maybe that's not the solution.

But I'm also just a grouch these days...

by Tadpole9181

3/31/2025 at 9:55:04 PM

>Make everything cheaper all the time, adjust the cost to reflect actual supply/demand, and stop the wiggling banners and big signs and calculations every time I want to buy anything.

Ahh, so you're JC Penney:

https://www.choicehacking.com/2022/11/24/the-psychological-f...

sadly, in some ways engaged customers want to feel like their efforts pay off in "smarter" deals. and that mind game overcomes any genuine attempts to lay everything up front.

by johnnyanmac

3/31/2025 at 6:53:47 PM

You'd think there would be a market for something OSS here. It would be problematic to keep clean/useful...

by w0m

3/31/2025 at 8:05:45 PM

This is why I’m keeping it for now. I am still better off than not having it.

by throwawaysleep

3/31/2025 at 7:00:26 PM

Retailmenot.com

by Whatarethese

3/31/2025 at 7:04:43 PM

I want to like RetailMeNot but every time I try it, I very seldom come across functioning coupon codes. I don't understand what incentivizes people to submit bogus codes.

by redserk

3/31/2025 at 7:41:08 PM

The codes are probably legit. There's just no incentive for anyone to clean up dead codes nor submit fresh ones except for the coupon providers themselves who might see retailmenot as a marketing angle, which seems to be very few.

by hombre_fatal

4/1/2025 at 11:21:18 PM

Except they often come with “added today”, “verified today” BS.

Just like travel sites where you can book some remote roadside run of the mill in Wyoming for mid week, winter next year, and be told “14 people have booked this hotel today, hurry”.

No, they haven’t. Or certainly not for that date.

by FireBeyond

3/31/2025 at 7:18:26 PM

Perhaps they are expired codes, or if it's a link (and not something to copy-and-paste) — affiliate marketing.

by RandomBacon

3/31/2025 at 9:49:41 PM

I think nowadays some codes may even be limited in usage precisely because of such communities. they don't want millions to use a good deal with no payoff, so they limit certain codes to X000 and they die quickly. The library paradox.

by johnnyanmac

3/31/2025 at 7:35:40 PM

It feels like it has been ruined by greed and grift like RottenTomatoes and generally everything on the internet.

by Mistletoe

3/31/2025 at 8:13:09 PM

They inject their affiliate code just like Honey does. Why do you think they open a new tab that loads the retailer's site when you click to show the coupon code?

by jonas21

3/31/2025 at 7:08:21 PM

"down from its peak of 20 million."

by cyb_

3/31/2025 at 7:23:07 PM

important context! surprisingly more than i expected! 20% loss of userbase is devastating for an extension, although no doubt not enough for any long-term change in strategy... :)

by Melonai

3/31/2025 at 7:34:56 PM

I had the opposite reaction ... they still have 16 million users ...

by DataDive

3/31/2025 at 7:57:39 PM

Losing 4M is pretty significant considering that's 4M people who actively decided to uninstall something. A majority of the 16M might be dead users (installed on an old browser) or people who don't realize it's still installed but also don't interact with the extension at all.

by xmprt

3/31/2025 at 8:22:43 PM

>people who don't realize it's still installed but also don't interact with the extension at all.

This is still making Honey money through the hijacking of affiliate links.

by skyyler

3/31/2025 at 11:35:25 PM

The DOJ should fine PayPal for racketeering. This seems like it should be beyond illegal and land people in jail.

This extorts online businesses and steals from content creators. There is no good in this tool whatsoever.

It probably tracks consumers on top of all their other shitty behavior.

by echelon

3/31/2025 at 11:49:07 PM

What about it is (or should be) illegal? They're playing by the exact same rules as every affiliate marketer in existence.

I have a dozen or so rhetorical questions I'm not going to bother with, because I doubt there's any progress to be made.

Honey is just capitalism incarnate, baby.

by jahsome

4/1/2025 at 4:57:03 AM

Hmm maybe tricking your users into using your product is not a good way to achieve product market fit.

by nimish

4/1/2025 at 4:29:25 AM

"purchased by PayPal in 2020 for $4 billion" ... holy hell, how is it worth that much???

by abrookewood

4/1/2025 at 7:05:52 AM

Do people still use PayPal?

by DeathArrow

4/1/2025 at 10:30:13 AM

Yes, I do.

by aembleton

3/31/2025 at 11:31:57 PM

Surprised they didn’t just close it down frankly. It’s just a PR liability now

by Havoc

3/31/2025 at 8:55:34 PM

And yet it still have "featured" flag and 4.6*

by dvh

4/1/2025 at 12:04:15 AM

You’re saying this business built on scamming businesses is scamming its customers? I’m shocked, shocked.

by skywhopper

4/1/2025 at 1:27:53 AM

should we just call the Chattel and not users? They're just there to make capitalists capital.

by cyanydeez

4/2/2025 at 11:23:48 PM

[dead]

by NatalieKrylova

4/2/2025 at 11:24:47 PM

[dead]

by NatalieKrylova

3/31/2025 at 7:43:32 PM

[flagged]

by pmarreck