Technology

God PayPal has always been the scum of the earth and only gotten worse over time. 😡

I'm curious as to whether the industry will start moving from last-touch attribution to first-touch (or multi-touch) attribution instead.

The only reason last-touch (last affiliate link gets all the credit) is commonplace now is because it's easy to implement. No need for long-term tracking. What the industry really wants is either first-touch (first affiliate link or ad you click gets the credit) or multi-touch (the payment is split between every affiliate), depending on who you ask.

I don’t trust reviews at all at this point, from any service like those mentioned.

I will say that it’s diabolical that trust pilot closed the reviews. Meaning people can’t express there disappointment with the app, and that people might still trust it.

Google is know for removing reviewed coming from bomb-reviewing like when a brand gets a sudden burst of bad publicity, but in extensions, Google play, Google maps etc.

I miss them when they were good and effective. Like Groupon.

They all got enshittified and overrun by people trying to exploit the userbase for clicks.

The fact that BugMeNot and RetailMeNot grew so huge is interesting. They were created by two Australians, and for a while were only popular in Australia.

It was Megalag and his channel is amazing. The colorblind scam glasses investigation was amazing

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

There is a YouTube video that literaly said they were scamming from 2020.

Linus tech tips figure it out a year back and stop shilling it once they figured it out but for some reason didn't make a video about it?

I can see how it happens though.

No one was doing any oversight on their practices. If you were running a referral affiliate link system, it must have seemed like honey was doing a really good job bringing customers to you.

I'm just kind of disappointed that nobody inside the company ever spoke up or blew any whistles and said "Hey, this is at best unethical if not entirely illegal and either way exposes us to the risk of a massive lawsuit, maybe we should just actually do our jobs instead of stealing the work of other people."

I would say the real issue is transparency. If Honey made it clear that their product overwrote the affiliate links referer, didn't actually find the best deals (despite advertising that exact thing), and then paid influencers to advertise their product that also steals from them, then this wouldn't be as much of a big deal if at all. Though they also probably wouldn't be a successful business, hence why many consider it a scam.

Yeah, it's pretty dumb. If I watch 3 reviews of a product, only the one link i clicked will get credit. Without affiliate links, reviewers would likely get paid based on views, which is far more fair.

Using browser exploits to steal commissions from affiliate links without even the user knowing. Let’s say you follow an affiliate link to a product and you go to checkout. When Honey pops up and tells you either that it found you a discount (or even if it pops up to tell you it didn’t find you anything) it secretly opens a new tab to the page which replaces the cookie in the browser that contains the code that identifies who to give the commission to. Instead of the person who gave you the link getting their commission, Honey gets it instead.

Then if you used PayPal checkout, they would also “find” you discounts but swap them out with lower ones and pocket the difference. For example you buy something for $10 and they find a 30% off coupon, but tell you it’s a 10% off coupon. You go to checkout with PayPal and they charge your card $9 but only pay the merchant $7 and pocket the other $2.

Everyone else is only talking about the scummy affiliate revenue stealing, but that's been public info for a while.

The more alarming stuff is that they partner with businesses to manage the coupon codes shown on Honey. If a business doesn't want consumers to have discounts below a certain percentage, they can remove those coupons from Honey. This means that Honey no longer does the thing that it's advertised to do, and they're getting paid affiliate revenue after lying to consumers.

Here's the best way I've seen it illustrated:

Imagine walking into a physical retail store, something like Best Buy. You want to buy a TV. A blue shit salesman talks to you for awhile, helping you pick out the TV you want with the features you like. He says "Okay, so take this slip to the register, pay for it there and they'll bring out the TV to your car." The slip has the salesman's name on it so he gets a commission on the sale.

On your way to the register, a slimy guy in a suit says "Hey let me see that sales ticket, maybe I've got a coupon for that TV, save you some money." So you hand him the sales slip, he says "Yeah, here's one for $2 off on this $900 television." And he hands you that coupon plus a sales ticket...not the original one, another one with HIS name on it instead of the salesman. The slimy guy in the suit is stealing the salesman's commission.

Now imagine doing this with software on the internet and you've got a class action lawsuit from Legal Eagle.

I just assumed they operated by collecting and selling user data. So while I knew the business model was unethical, I didn't expect them to get more creative!

I love the number of people coming out of the woodwork with “obviously” ex post facto. Like everybody could just intuit how this operated, both in the affiliate stuffing and the deal agreements. It is difficult to show the latter.

I thought they made it from selling user data.

I'm so, so sick of these comments every time some shady shit is uncovered. "How could no one else see this, you're all so stupid, I knew from the very first ad!"

Yes yes, you're mommy's special little genius, despite conspicuously absent comments from that time...

Well that's just because your are mommy's smart boy. You're just so much smarter than all the other little boys.