Exposing the Honey Influencer Scam [video] - 253 points by jadyoyster (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42483500)

uBlock Origin GPL code being stolen by team behind honey browser extension - 1057 points by extesy (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42576443)

> "You're convinced you should buy the one recommended in his video so you scroll down and find the affiliate link to that product"

Hold up, that's something people actually would do, click a link in a YouTube description instead of opening a new tab to search for it? Wild.

Yes, most people don't know/care about tracking links or whatever. Moreover even if they do care, most aren't cynical misanthropes who would go out of their way to deny their favorite creator of their affiliate cut.

You trolling or what? Clicking is easier than searching some long ass name or sentence or whatever.

With Amazon, apparently the creator gets a percentage commission on your entire cart. Without the affiliate link, the price to me is exactly the same - Amazon just keeps the money. I assume AmazonSmile was basically using the charity you selected as the “affiliate”, but they shut that program down.

So yeah, it hurts my individual privacy stance, but it’s a drop in the bucket compared to all the data Amazon has about me already. Commission affiliate links at least redirect some of the revenue to the creator themselves.

I hate when people say "I recommend Bubble App" and I need to search for it, I'm always worried that I get some other app with the same or similar name.

https://www.herzindagi.com/society-culture/google-chrome-upd...

Now, if Google suddenly gets a spike in negative reviews, and a lot of them are from Chrome-connected accounts where they can see they've never downloaded that extension, or a lot of them appear to be from users who never used it, then they may have reason to remove or not weight those reviews the same. Just like where an establishment has built up a good reputation, and then something unpopular happens on camera and goes viral & so a bunch of people that have never been there flood the reviews.

What seems most likely to me is that Honey is still a rather popular extension, that what might bother you or the techcentric groups you follow doesn't really matter to a vast majority of users. It may be unfortunate, especially if people are getting misled or Honey is engaged in corruption. If people cared about corruption companies like Comcast/Xfinity would be non-existent IMO. Unfortunately they don't. If people want Google to ban/unfeature Honey, then wouldn't it be better to have a court judgement declaring Honey broke the law, rather than doing it just because it was unpopular to a much smaller group of users than the ones that thought Honey was the greatest cause their favorite influencer told them it was?

Investigation: GamersNexus Files New Lawsuit Against PayPal & Honey https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKbFBgNuEOU

I'll note it's not only unpopular now with a "smaller group of users" but also with influencers too now as they've realized it kills their own revenue by altering referral codes.

Brands pay influencers to promote their products in order to raise brand awareness, it is enough that people know some X or Y product exists so if they need something that X or Y products satisfies they will recall that they heard about X or Y product.

Astroturfing is a kind of manipulation where you mislead people about attribution, so that they associate what you say/do with a group or person of your choice.

For example, say that you really have an axe to grind with the programming language Rust, and are aware that people have a perception or would find it believable that its community is obnoxious, through being pedantic or overzealous.

What you could then do is join in on conversations and start talking as if you were a member of the Rust community, and act pedantic, overzealous, or otherwise obnoxious. Due to the pretense that you're a Rust user yourself, people would attribute this behavior to the Rust community, meaning you succeeded in boosting this negative perception.

Just an example of course.

quoting a definition:

The implication behind the use of the term is that instead of a "true" or "natural" grassroots effort behind the activity in question, there is a "fake" or "artificial" appearance of support. It is increasingly recognized as a problem in social media, e-commerce, and politics. Astroturfing can influence public opinion by flooding platforms like political blogs, news sites, and review websites with manipulated content. Some groups accused of astroturfing argue that they are legitimately helping citizen activists to make their voices heard.

even uses the same verbiage you did originally.

Regardless, this is a distinct claim from score manipulation, which unquestionably did occur.

Is this actually true or just your personal speculation?

Enter Facebook and Google.

It was then found that it also steals all commissions at those checkout points, and instead of finding you a "best deal", it colludes with the merchants, allowing them to control how many people get what kind of "deals", completely defeating the point.

This is how "deals" have always worked, to the extent to the current technology makes it possible. Companies don't issue "deals" to be pro consumer, they do it because it benefits them, and they do it in ways that benefit them. For example, they would mail coupons two a few zip codes but not actually mark down the prices unless you actually possess a coupon. That's just a low-tech version of what you're describing.

I'm honestly surprised that people are surprised by this aspect of Honey. The hijacking of affiliate links is one thing, but coupons have always been a way for businesses to influence consumer behavior. Who did people think Honey's real customer was, given that the extension is free?

My best guess: the app asks the user whether they're enjoying it, if yes, asks for a review, if no, nothing.

And it's possible (though imo unlikely) that some reviews were removed, perhaps initially at least, due to suspected botting.

Rating can only vary 1-5, so mean and median will always be pretty close . For variables like say wealth that skews the average with outliers is where median is more useful than mean

https://play.google.com/store/apps/dev?id=672084787255366272...

There was a couple of years when people posted demos that only worked in IE^H Chrome but right now everything I need works in Firefox and I don't even see demos that need Chrome anymore.

Firefox's sync for example doesn't sync extension settings, search engines and it fails on Android multiple times per day, with the only solution to logout and login again.

Chrome for Android doesn't support extensions at all, so I'm a bit confused as to how that's a better experience for you.

Which setting is that, DNS over HTTPS?

I switched back to Firefox the other day and this setting was enabled by default but it wasn't done silently. When you first launch Firefox a popup comes up saying it's going to be enabled but you have options to turn it off on the spot or click a link to learn more.

I dont think theres anywhere in google chrome that you can turn off tracking telemetry to google.

(I would argue that Chrome was targeted primarily at IE, though.)

If Chrome had been aimed primarily at IE, they could have continued to fund Firefox, or could have worked with Mozilla to do whatever improvements they wanted. For example, if the objective had been speed, Google had so much clout with Mozilla at the time that I feel pretty certain they could have contributed to building something like v8 into Firefox.

But it wasn't about any of that. It was about owning the browser because they decided it was in their strategic interest. And that's because their business was by that point entirely funded by people's eyeballs in a browser, looking at ads.

In my opinion, either mass reporting, or (unlikely) a manual decision caused them to lose it. And after a while Honey likely applied again, where the reviewer was possibly unaware of past events. Or they were but it's not relevant to the review process. (Having millions of users may have played a part, the bigger exts might be treated differently, though I doubt it). Google doesn't really pay much mind to these things, from what I've seen.

[0] I'm pretty sure there's a dev doc somewhere with this

[1] https://developer.chrome.com/docs/webstore/discovery#feature...

Corporations never change

This observation is of course entirely anecdotal, but manufactured outrage is so fascinating, even if it currently eroding the very foundations of society.

There's people on every forum (and regularly here) that suggest, sometimes explicitly, that we must have elevated anxiety and stress levels in response to specific presented content as a moral imperative.

I think cortisol makes the "content" feel more "important" or relevant at the present moment in time. 72 hours later assuming no other exploits our body systems adjust and the content isn't important. It's weird when we notice it, but most of the time our cortisol is being directed to another topic so we don't notice.

There's a ton written about our dopamine addiction and how it's exploited but not much about cortisol and our negative emotions are being exploited.

It is a completely ineffective method of making a change. I wish they'd stop spreading their anxieties online. I know it makes them feel like they're doing something, but one phone call to a relevant decision-maker is 100x more effective and 100x less destructive to those around them.

This works in simple cases, like spilling your drink: it: it feels bad, the feeling makes you clean it up, and be more careful.

It fails in cases where the immediate effectual action is impossible, or not known. The only reasonable course of action then is to spread the word, because you can't actually fix anything.

And here ingroup / outgroup signaling jumps in! Feeling bad about some issues becomes a signal of group belonging, a kind of virtue signaling. Not feeling bad and not expressing outrage becomes suspicious, if not defiant. This is one of the streams that feeds the outrage machine.

The failure case I see most often is when this thinking is applied to some kind of a wicked problem.

1. The problem is not understood until after the formulation of a solution.

2.Wicked problems have no stopping rule.

3. Solutions to wicked problems are not right or wrong.

4. Every wicked problem is essentially novel and unique.

5. Every solution to a wicked problem is a "one shot operation".

6. Wicked problems have no given alternative solutions.

Source: Dialogue Mapping: Building Shared Understanding of Wicked Problems 2006 Jeffrey Conklin ISBN: 978-0-470-01768-5

The worst thing about it is how it will actually make you less resilient, and a lack of resilience just makes it harder for you to function day to day as each adverse encounter, no matter how trivial, becomes increasingly overwhelming.

To me that feels like a night terror: screaming and shouting about a frightening thing at the end of the bed, but frozen in place and unable to act, unable to fight back. Has to be someone else.

I won’t lie, I think I’ve suffered from this and it’s held me back over the past couple of years as I’d choose flight or avoidance over fight, essentially repeating the cycle until I managed to deal with it and move forward.

Only thing you can do is step back and get out of your head. Separate all the stuff you can’t action from the stuff you can.

I don't think, the relevant decision makers are open for incoming calls from the internet, but I agree that panic and anxiety solves nothing, but creates just more problems.

The change might not come from them doing something for you, too. They may teach you something you don't know, which can reduce your friction in some situations, too.

For example, people commonly complain about poor consumer protection around the world. But usually, there are already laws against mistreating consumers, and if they were to report the incident to the right organization/inspector, they would get the remedy they want.

The solution is often the two right people getting on a call or talking in a room. In the EU, there are even some summer camps for teens aged 14-18 to learn how to approach government decision-makers. It is doable.

I think you may have some learned helplessness everyone here talks about. But if you give it an earnest try and approach a problem you see from various angles, you'll make some progress on it. Usually, this will be done by talking to a decision-maker.

Not everyone in the EU will listen to you, either. There is a bit of a learning curve. Sometimes, you have to apply pressure through specific channels in specific ways, such as influencing stakeholders. Sometimes, you even have to form an organization for your cause. But not always. Sometimes, it just takes time to find someone who will listen. But effort it does take.

It gets collected and tallied by an intern who probably isn’t even paid. The tally is then reported for the day to an actual staffer who may or may not bother mentioning it to the rep that day.

You are also slowly changing the culture and applying pressure to the societal outlook. This also applies to your decision-makers (whose friends, family, co-workers, and political or corporate partners partake in the broader culture) and future decision-makers raised in the culture you are shaping.

These are all tactics you can use, but some decision-makers are very resistant to societal and stakeholder pressure. They either have a strong negotiating position (like Donald Trump, who offered Americans many things other candidates were not offering for moral reasons), or they may have a model of functioning in the politico-organizational system that insulates them from the ideas of others (they may simply be narcissists or zealots). But if you speak with them and you negotiate in terms relevant to them, they will listen.

To that end, you first have to make the call or get in a room with them.

Man it's as if billions of people were being peddled algorithmic content platforms whose "engagement" metrics benefit from showing you content that promotes overthinking, anxiety, and stress.

Algorithmic social media is severely fucked up.

What I mostly get is indifference or "didoing" ("it's not so bad") - and yes, that indifference spikes my anxiety. Because it feels like this is the same indifference that ultimately lead to "Didn't the Germans know what was happening?". The answer is, they didn't care to look.

Perhaps use the exit, voice, and loyalty (EVL) model. It describes three effective responses that don't involve anxiety. Exit means you remove yourself from the situation — perhaps you move to a state where your rights are better protected or leave your current doctor for an activist doctor. Voice means getting into rooms and on the phone with decision-makers, as well as preparing for this. Loyalty means you stop worrying and remain loyal to an organization but hopeful that things will change. In this model, remaining in the situation and stressing about it is a misguided choice.

Just as you worry about the Third Reich, the EVL model explains the coping strategies of people who were under the regime. Some exited, some dissented, and some chose loyalty. These were very functional strategies.

I'm not going to debate the exaggerated genocide claim. Still, I'd say be careful how you use this specific historical term, as much genocide is happening in the world today, and much has happened in the last several generations. Some readers will have family trauma; it's easy to offend people this way and turn them off to your cause. In general, the more emotional language you use, the less trustworthy you will appear.

Either way, I acknowledge your anxiety is real and that some harm may come your way in the future. I want to be clear: this is not a dismissal of your fears. But I suggest action instead. Whether that action protects you or others in similar circumstances, it will be more effective than worrying.

We've seen bills introduced to consider trans people "misrepresenting" their gender as different from their birth sex as criminal fraud. This isn't too far from the current administration's executive order banning trans people from the military for being "liars", according to the bigots in the administration.

There are also bills trying to make the public visibility of trans people something that is threatening to children based on the bigoted perception of trans people as child rapists. So you'll get things like "public performance" classified as sexualized drag performance so that trans people experience the same limitations on being in or around places with children as sex offenders.

Then, of course, there is all the basic healthcare stuff. The white house put out an executive order (currently delayed by courts) withholding federal funding for hospitals that provide gender affirming care for people age 18 and 19. These are legal adults. If this stands, we'll almost surely start seeing legislation banning gender affirming care for adults in various red states. Criminalizing hormone treatment is forced detransition.

Thanks for writing up this answer. I suspect the commenter you are replying to has never even stopped to consider the experience of a real person and what it would be like.

There are plenty of butch cis women who now get harassed in the bathroom for "looking like a man" because these policies have opened up the floodgates for bigots to transvestigate everybody they come across. And if everybody follows the law as written then there will be people using the women's restroom who are indistinguishable from cis men unless you inspect documentation (which nobody is obliged to carry in public) or inspect genitals.

The true outcome (and I believe the true goal, though not typically stated out loud) is that trans people (and people who don't fit rigid and traditional gender presentations) are simply not able to be in public safely.

The regression we've seen in legal rights has been so swift. In 2016 North Carolina tried to pass one of these bills and major organizations like the NCAA and Paypal took serious economic action in order to get it reversed. It felt like a society-wide rejection where it wasn't just left leaning activists pushing back but major organizations without a typical political agenda too.

In the past four years we've seen 13 states pass bathroom bills and more than half the states pass gender affirming care bans for minors largely without a peep from corporations.

There's also some "performance" ban bills that are broad enough that they could classify a trans person existing in public as "drag performance" (the website you didn't read says "However, the language of the laws is so broad that it could extend to performances of Shakespeare.").

Please at least to attempt to "engage curiously" next time, the answers are all here.

If you all feel more comfortable with those words, feel free to replace genocide with all of the above. Does not help with my anxiety being rooted more in indifference to the actions than the actions themselves.

I honestly do not see how, to take one example, athletes only being allowed to compete against others of the same sex is a step on the path to genocide.

This suggestion of genocide does sound very exaggerated, and I believe your anxiety on this is misplaced.

One of the big claim from Honey is that it finds for you the coupons with that make you spend the least amount of money, but that's false if they have an agreement with the seller to only show you certain coupons.

So no, it doesn't affect just influencers, it affects also customers and vendors.

> could broadcast this to a lot of people.

To anyone with a modicum of business savvy, it's not remotely surprising. You literally (don't) get what you literally (don't) pay for.

It was all thoroughly scummy and against the spirit of an affiliate referral.

But I don't understand why YouTubers were so surprised. This thing is clearly generating revenue to pay off all the top shelf YouTubers and it's clearly doing that by inserting affiliate codes to generate revenue. There's no ethical explanation as to where this extra saving and Honey's revenue comes from.

I also wouldn't expect PayPal to recoup this huge marketing investment from very partial purchase data. It'd be nothing compared to what VISA and the other big card companies collect.

I'm particularly annoyed by Twitter lately because I can no longer share anything with my GF because she have already seen it. Our timelines are largely similar, it doesn't matter much who do you follow. Also, the algorithmic discovery being the default is very effective to create this channels(Technology Connections recently made a video about it).

On Twitter it appears like there are few talking points, or "channels", are being pushed based on location and few other things maybe and apparently to get exposure you have to say something that fits the narrative.

Maybe its not intentional, maybe its the result of the algo dividing people in cohorts or something but I'm very annoyed by the potentially destructive effect of the firehose. Everyone being very outraged of something for short period of time or being very excited for short period of time can't be healthy because it lacks depth and continuation.

I call it “outrage porn.” I have a friend that is really politically engaged, and occasionally sends me YouTube links to almost cartoonish vids. I watched the first couple, but ignore them, now. He seems to take them completely seriously, and I’ve learned not to trigger him, when it comes to politics.

This seems to be de rigueur, these days.

The main thing that I do, personally, is not engage in these things. There are some shows, vids, and news sources that I simply avoid, and that seems to have done the trick.

It's like giving up an addiction, though. I felt quite uncomfortable, for a time. I no longer feel uncomfortable, and these once-legitimate (to me) news sources, now seem to be little more than cartoons.

I think we should really be aware that, if tech companies weren't already able to build something like this anyway, with LLMs they are definitely able now.

There is lots of talk about the generative powers of LLMs, but they also have unprecedented analysis powers: You can now easily build something that automatically checks whether a tweet expresses a certain opinion or narrative and automatically upranks or downranks it based on the results.

So if you're the owner of a platform, you can now fully control the appearance of what "people are saying" on the platform, without even having to use bots or fake messages.

(Of course you could use those as well, in addition, if the opinion you want to push is so bad there aren't enough real users to uprank in the first place)

I also notice that "influencers" are also influenced by this. They pick the talking points from real time media like Twitter and then make coherent videos over this stuff and it gets legitimized. People rarely revisit their past works once the firehose is spraying at some other direction and the fake public sentiment becomes the real public sentiment.

There was a whole scandal at Twitter about this around 2020 or 21. People came forward and said there were secret departments that would suppress certain ideas or keep certain stories from trending.

Today it's dramatically more splintered than that. Still central wells, but the amount of content is many orders of magnitude larger and everyone has their own tailored feed.

I disagree, today there are just a few platforms and on Twitter at least everyone sees about same things. I say this because the feed of my girlfriend is very similar to mine, also I see the pretty much same stuff shared on WhatsApp groups of unrelated(related only because of some interest, not having social interaction beyond the group) people.

The total number of content is much larger, probably the absolute number of topics is also much larger, but in my opinion, the diversity of topics is getting smaller and it is directed by the platforms. People’s attention spans and time is limited and the platforms are choosing what they are going to fill it up with and what would be the main topics.

What more would you want?

Average viewers are largely unaffected, so it’s not a topic that makes for great content.

In this particular case the creators were also harmed the most - the users didn't strictly get the "best" deals with Honey, but something is still better than nothing.

I watch an embarrassing amount of YouTube and it was virtually all I heard about for 72 hours and then any mention at all vanished.

Anger is a temporary motivator so bad actors use it as a way to increase the likelihood of swarm behavior like brigading.

There are also some people who enjoy being part of brigades because it makes them feel like they have a social group that does important things. That's why the same people often go from cause to cause without ever making a noticeable change beyond complaining.

It kind of sucks because they feel like they're special and march to their own tune but often they're being played by whichever piper is in town.

There are definitely many things to be said about the irresponsible use of this power.

The Honey business model was the same as every other coupon website that has launched over the last two decades.

Providing coupons in return for affiliate cookies

Before the media outrage how did people assume they made money?

There's no reason to believe that this wasn't just people being impulsive as normal. The Honey debacle left my mind all the same, because life goes on.

If you have any evidence of this having been a manufactured outrage, please do post it. Otherwise, this is just a conspiracy theory, and I'm getting awfully tired of those.

It's possible larger extensions (1+ mil) have some sway/means to contact internally, but imo Google really doesn't pay much heed to "controversial"/topical things (perhaps apart from ublock). Or developers in general.

It becomes evident when you read some extensive related articles by Wladimir Palant (https://palant.info) [0] who does some pretty deep dives on the Chrome Store. I think he even developed Adblock Plus (the open-source version).

[0] I'm unaffiliated, just a reader.

The ones getting "scammed" out of a few referral sales are the ones advertising shitty products with no care whatsoever. Maybe they should have read the fine prints? Maybe the real lesson here is to do your due diligence before pushing garbage products to your fans?

But it doesn't. What it says it does (or at least used to, maybe they've changed it) is "find the best coupons" for you in that database. Instead, they collude with merchants, and do not necessarily give you the best coupons they're aware of, or even falsely claim they do not have any coupons in their database at all.

> The ones getting "scammed" out of a few referral sales are the ones advertising shitty products with no care whatsoever

You're unable to know this / this is an opinion.

> Maybe they should have read the fine prints?

What fine prints are you referring to?

> Maybe the real lesson here is to do your due diligence before pushing garbage products to your fans?

In the original reporting there was another similar extension featured that did not use to do this, but has since started engaging in this same behavior. For all anyone knows, this could have happened to Honey as well.

Honey does not touch Amazon affiliate links (you can test this) and yet many enraged influencers just use Amazon affiliate links.

Did you ever test for yourself to see that Honey was not finding you the best coupon? You can test this too. There’s a reason the second video is taking so long.

Yes, some codes are requested to be removed by merchants. You’ll find that these typically are of the friends and family variety with steep discounts. In my experience, if the coupon is public, Honey will try to use it.

No. I further did not examine the extension's codebase or followed back its entire revision history. I also do not have access to their infrastructure, particularly their database of coupon codes, and any server side code. I also did not read through the multiple class action lawsuit documents. Not only that, but I also did not perform deeper examination of all the evidence provided. This would include:

- I did not reproduce his tests

- I did not listen to the hours of podcasts mentioned

- I did not independently research his claims

- I did not reach out to merchants for comments

- I did not try to gain insider information

- etc.

Instead, as you noticed, I'm discussing the points published by MegaLag and others, under the assumption that they're true, which the OP didn't claim otherwise - they instead were not even familiar with what was published seemingly. So whether what was published or not is actually true is actually a separate concern from my perspective.

Even if it's not a huge deal in the scheme of things it's definitely a case of false advertising