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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 ev
by elamje 1y ago
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.
- chatmasta 1y agoI 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…
- AlexandrB 1y agoDo as I say not as I do.
- gruez 1y agoTo 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.
- cyral 1y agoInteresting, I found an article about it: https://www.businessinsider.com/shawn-hogan-sentenced-in-ebay-affiliate-marketing-scam-2014-5 https://www.businessinsider.com/shawn-hogan-sentenced-in-eba...
- chatmasta 1y agoYeah he was also the owner of DigitalPoint if anyone remembers that forum and era.
- nightfly 1y agoNow they can just avoid paying for affiliate links for anyone who has honey installed
- stevage 1y agoDidn't the guy that ran Skeptoid go to jail for similar?
- nadir_ishiguro 1y agoI'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.
- grumbel 1y agoYes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Dunning_(author)#Wire_fraud_case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Dunning_(author)#Wire_fr...
- technothrasher 1y agoI remember at the time being less than surprised at the charges. Dunning always felt a little off to me, even though I did enjoy his podcast.
- maximus-decimus 1y agoConsidering 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-employees-sent-live-spiders-funeral-wreath-fetal-pi-rcna133543 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ebay-pay-3-million-empl...
- chris_wot 1y agoWow, the former Senior Director of Safety and Security was sent to prison for 57 months! That's some great work by eBay. https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/pr/final-defendant-ebay-cyberstalking-case-sentenced https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/pr/final-defendant-ebay-cybe...
- runamok 1y agoNow share what happened to the CEO. Behind the bastards did a great 2 part series on the insane tale: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/episode/part-one-that-time-ebays-private-211963285/ https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236...
- gorgoiler 1y agoAside, 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?
- walthamstow 1y agoIt's not great without uBlock but still much better than most others. No video!
- kevin_thibedeau 1y agoIt'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.
- SamuelAdams 1y agoKind 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.
- brewtide 1y agoIt was time to go back to the orifice....
- chii 1y agoif 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.
- kvlh 1y ago|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.
- thatguy0900 1y agoThe 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.
- Joel_Mckay 1y agoMarketers 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
- justinator 1y agoIt'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.
- Joel_Mckay 1y agoIt 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
- threeseed 1y ago> 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.
- whycome 1y agoApathy? 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.
- not_kurt_godel 1y agoScam 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
- wingworks 1y agoWell, 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.
- miki123211 1y agoNow 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.
- EGreg 1y agoI 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 :)
- eru 1y agoWell, 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.)
- chihuahua 1y agoI'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.
- sksksk 1y agoThe 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.
- unsui 1y ago> 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.
- echelon 1y ago> 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.
- dvektor 1y agoAm I the only one that detected sarcasm? (cool business)
- unsui 1y agoOn HN, you have a significant subset that think it is akshually cool, unironically Move fast and break things, right?
- kome 1y agoi 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.
- paulryanrogers 1y agoShame 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!
- YuccaGloriosa 1y agoWhen 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...
- jack_pp 1y agoWhy 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
- cbozeman 1y agoAnd he's not actually that great at that, if his storage server videos are any indication.
- chrisdsaldivar 1y agoI haven’t seen the videos and don’t know much about the space. Could your provide any insight into what’s wrong?
- cbozeman 1y agoWell he brought down his entire storage system. Twice. I believe one time he had to bring in Wendell Wilson from Wendell Wilson Consulting, but more likely know to the Internet-at-large as the primary figure on Level1Techs YouTube channel. I have no desire, nor inclination to dig through the thousands of videos LMG has produced on YouTube, but it's still up to my knowledge, and watching him fumble about with absolutely no clue is not only painful, but pathetic. Linus suffers from the same affliction many of my Ph.D.-holding friends have, which is that he believes because he knows a lot about putting together computers and electronics that he could handle building a large-scale data storage system. These systems are complex, and to be well-built and maintained, they require domain-specific knowledge - no different than an OS programmer needs deep knowledge of C and C++, and increasing now, Rust. It's a series of videos of someone way in over his head who should have brought in an actual expert - like Wendell from Level1Techs, or Patrick from ServeTheHome, from the get-go, instead of trying to do it himself.
- anonwebguy 1y agoHijacking 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.
- mbirth 1y ago> 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.mobilegeeks.de/adblock-plus-undercover-einblicke-in-ein-mafioeses-werbenetzwerk/ 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.
- soulofmischief 1y agoI'm having a hard time understanding precisely what is cool about the business of defrauding users and creators/businesses.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- pbreit 1y agoDumb acquisition by PayPal. It should stick to "above board" financial services. Stuff like this erodes trust.
- autoexec 1y agoPaypals entire history should tell you that they can't be trusted. https://web.archive.org/web/20170312164635/http://www.paypalsucks.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20170312164635/http://www.paypal...