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Comment by pseudo0 | Hacker News Reader

It is pretty funny how the MegaLag video claimed it was hard to find discussion of this online, and cited a HN thread from over five years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21588663

I suppose it's easy for us to forget how an average person really doesn't think about how cookies and referral links work.

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Not even just questioning how referral links work, but questioning how a company makes money. I never looked into Honey, but since it wasn't obvious how they were making their money, I assumed it was something sketchy and stayed away from it. My assumption was it was the typical data harvesting and selling (once they had the extension in your browser they could track you). While I think the tracking/selling is immoral, what they did instead seems like fraud (IANAL).

I'm pretty surprised that so many YouTube creators pushed Honey without questioning how they were making money off giving away discounts. Did they not ask, or did Honey have a lie for that as well?

https://help.joinhoney.com/article/30-how-does-honey-make-mo...

I guess they say it, but being owned by PayPal I'm guessing there was an assumption that the commissions weren't being stolen from other people, and the codes being provided were organic codes and not ones created for Honey by the merchant to manipulate the user into thinking they were getting the best deal, when they weren't.

> I'm pretty surprised that so many YouTube creators pushed Honey without questioning how they were making money off giving away discounts.

The only thing you can know for sure about an actor, is that their profession is pretending to be something they're not.

I read the HN link after the video though, and it was full of vague misunderstandings of exactly what honey was doing, even if people did understand the technical logistics. Some of the dark patterns honey goes through to get a user to click any link or button is pretty shady.

Yep, it's somethings easy to forget that HN isn't actually mainstream; something being discussed on HN doesn't mean it's well known.

Yeah, as I watched the video all I could think was "what the fuck did you think they were doing?". I'm surprised technical youtube channels were caught by it, although maybe they did the calculation that the money Honey was paying was worth more than the affiliate sales they'd lose. There's also value to getting that money immediately, rather than at some unknown point in the future.

The only part that seemed uncouth to me was setting the referral code when they hadn't actually found any coupons, and collaborating with retailers.

> I'm surprised technical youtube channels were caught by it, although maybe they did the calculation that the money Honey was paying was worth more than the affiliate sales they'd lose.

... and helping to screw everyone else over in the process. That is what makes advertising for Honey so unethical.

From watching the original video sounds like that’s exactly what LinusMedia did. Which doesn’t surprise me, I’ve always been amazed by how many people like that channel.

> as I watched the video all I could think was "what the fuck did you think they were doing?".

Well, not screwing over their partners and customers?

They didn't have to overwrite existing affiliate codes to make lots of money. And the stuff you list in your last sentence is a really big deal.

This is how I keep seeing the discussion going:

1: Honey is doing shady stuff with affiliate links

2: Affiliate links aren't shady, just the stuff they're doing with them

1: So honey is doing shady stuff with affiliate links

Yeah, you're right about them not having to rewrite existing ones. They could've only inserted affiliate codes when there weren't existing ones.

It's less that I think it's OK, more that I'm unsurprised.

> more that I'm unsurprised

Bingo.

You want to stick your lawyers on them and try to punish them and extract as much money as you can out of them? Fine. Whatever.

>> not screwing over their partners and customers?

I wasn't around to organically take in this situation, but being introduced to Honey by seeing this blow up today, I can only say: "...no? I don't think so?"

Take, for example, the wild west days of rampant SEO exploitation (I'm talking like 2000s or 2010s era) and its race to the bottom, and Google's subsequent refinement of the SEO program over the years. Why am I supposed to root for one side over the other, again?

Their bottom line purpose is the revenue stream; this is not a FOSS project that does so much as to not even solicit donations.

I hope the top thread writer from that HN discussion five years ago is having a field day dancing on top of his I-told-you-so mountain :)

No, cross site cookie reading were banned for a reason. A site can only read its own cookies now.

It's a browser extension. It can check the current state of the store page.

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