Hacker News Reader

Comment by dizhn | Hacker News Reader

Not a good day to have Honey in the list :)

Was curious so just searched. Apparently Honey would try to get the best coupon codes on the web, but they started partnering with businesses to give (say) 10% off via a Honey-specific discount code (e.g. HONEY10), but Honey would ignore other (possibly greater) discounts, thus lulling users into a false sense of security that they were getting the best deal when they often weren't.

It’s even worse. They steal from other promoters. Say you watch a LTT video and use one of their affiliate links. If you have honey installed they will replace the link with their own affiliate link and cash the promotion bonus without any promotion by themselves.

Of the three bad things they've been accused of, I'd consider that by far the least. Selling tracking data is an invasion of privacy. Deliberately not showing better discounts violates their core value proposition. Replacing deferral links doesn't hurt the user, and isn't much different from blocking ads.

As a user that might use referral links to support the youtube channel, I do feel in an indirect way this does hurt the user

And, they highjacked referral links, ensuring they got referral commission, not the original referrer.

Sigh, and I was just thinking about installing it. Time to find another one, or perhaps it will also fall to Goodhart’s Law.

I’d really like to know what exactly you are looking for? There is no such thing as “free” and no browser extension will give you something for free. You are paying, one way or the other…

> I’d really like to know what exactly you are looking for? There is no such thing as “free” and no browser extension will give you something for free. You are paying, one way or the other…

Sometimes there are really-free things. Old-style open-source software is a collection of such things. Extensions, at their beginning, were too, and some of them still are. As far as I know, for example, there's no 'gotcha' in uBlock Origin (although there is the 'gotcha' of knowing to look for them instead of the myriad other solutions that are non-free).

My thoughts as well. Given their business model, any Honey replacement will be engaging in the same sort of behavior. Never seemed worth it to me.

I want to see and/or collect discount codes for things

Before the rest of these abuses, Honey was blatantly tracking users and selling that data, which I think is a good example of how privacy abuse is often a canary of generally immoral behavior.

I’m actually impressed by honey. They could have either just sold the user data, or only switched the referral links, or just showed their users the “best” coupons.

But they went for all of it. I’d have wanted to be in the room when the higher ups chose this path.

For anyone else outside the loop, MegaLag released a video [1] yesterday exposing the shady practices by Honey

1: https://youtube.com/watch?v=vc4yL3YTwWk

Reply on news.ycombinator.com