This was really wild to watch. Honey is so masterfully crafted to be deceiving. I had it installed years ago, and it intuitively felt like something was scammy, so I uninstalled it. Really incredible work by MegaLag. It seems to be a wholesome trend among creators like Coffeezilla, etc. I hope more of this rot will surface.
Proper old school investigative journalism, and he didn't hold back. Terrific scam, but, y'know, PayPal – I'm an old timer and remember the early days of that outfit. They're still blocked at the firewall from events 25 years ago.
I love how the only historical discussion on the topic he found was a HN discussion from 2019 where at least one person was confidently claiming they don’t steal affiliate commissions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21589273
As someone who has used Honey in the past, while I knew it was taking affiliate commissions in some form or another I had no idea just how insanely deceptive it was.
I was completely unaware that it sneakily overrides any existing affiliate codes, AND does this even if it hasn't found any discount whatsoever.
It's hard to see this as anything other than fraudulent.
As an ex-employee, the overriding affiliate links and setting fix discount rates with merchants is sad to see. The original mission was always to help customers make more informed purchases and save money. Seems like a lot of that was lost post-acquisition, and instead of innovating on the core mission of saving money, they just doubled down on exploiting first click affiliate monetization. They should only make money if customers save money and partner with affiliates but instead they hopped on the gravy train.
What was the original business model that Honey had? I only know of the current Honey approach, inserting themselves into the checkout page, did Honey work differently before? More like a coupon search engine? That’s the only way I can imagine “first click” makes sense.
I feel like this should be up to the affiliate networks to kick Honey out of their programs for TOS violations right? Or Google removing it from the Chrome store?
Most of the merchants seem to be somewhere between indifferent and complicit in what Honey is doing, so there is no problem there (the teaser for part two seems to elude to what happens to the merchants who don't play along).
The Chrome team seems like the one that would be most pissed about this. While some aspects of their management of the extension ecosystem are problematic, they make an effort regarding trust and security. The reason Honey has to be so aggressive in getting you to click a button in that popup window is the browser won't allow it to interact with the page (to swap out the cookies) until the user has affirmatively interacted with the extension on that page. That is intended to prevent extensions from maliciously manipulating third-party sites without user consent.
I would imagine that it’s hard to remove content like that. Is it breaking any T&Cs? Is it illegal? Is it harmful to users? If not it’s hard to draw a line and apply it correctly in such a way that you don’t get sued for things like this.
Alternatively, Manifest v3 is supposed to make things like this a lot harder. Users would need to activate the plugin rather than the plugin popping up all the time if I understand it correctly. Manifest v3 was designed to enforce better privacy practices in the Wild West of browser extensions.
I was thinking the same about why don't they just remove it from the Chrome store, but I'm not sure of the relationship Google and PayPal have.
PayPal is one of the payment methods offered by Google for all kinds of things such as the Play Store, YouTube subscriptions etc. I use it myself for those purposes.
This is absolutely wild. In a just society this would be illegal. Why are we just hearing about this now? this is the most rot economy, rent-seeking behaviour imaginable.
A very timely news for something I've been working on lately.
It goes without saying that there's conflict of interest, but the interesting bit is such conflict arises because of crude thinking from the execs about what makes discount code works.
Discounts is a form of marketing, simple as that. If your company sells products at a discount, it means that you're spending extra marketing cost to sell higher volumes. Anyone in the middle distributing this discount information will charge extra for their service.
Anyone competing to charge companies for marketing can only meaningfully compete on cost and reach. In terms of cost, most discount code websites tend to only give small discounts to consumers as the 'sales' cost is internalised in other forms, e.g. commission, so only a fraction gets passed on to them.
At the end of the day, these kinds of businesses will fight to find any margins possible, however small, to keep the company afloat because competition will erode these margins away through price reductions to these companies.
This is why Honey is the way it is now, because the incentives forces them to do so. It is harmful to end consumers as they have no $$ on the table to influence this large incentives.
Honey doesn't have to do this, but they think they do probably because most companies around them are doing the same, so why not? But there's examples (like x.com) to show that you CAN charge consumers directly, and they'll pay handsomely if your product is good enough.
That's why I'm starting Pence (https://pence.so), where I charge consumers directly for giving them better deals. I don't charge merchants because of long-term incentive alignment for end consumers. The supply of deals comes from marketing emails that you and I receive, and these companies are sending them for almost nothing as email is a free protocol.
Feel free to challenge me, as there's obvious concerns I've anticipated for my product, but I think it's one valid way to think about this issue differently.
These are pretty serious privacy concerns, and underscores why the Honey extension is bad for users. However, I'd say these concerns are almost orthogonal from those raised in the original article, which listed concerns mostly to the other side of the transaction (the retailers, marketers, and YouTube influencers). So basically, it's just garbage from every direction.
The premise of “trust me; I’ll find you the best coupon codes for that product; don’t look yourself” always rubbed me the wrong way. Sad to hear what they’ve done to the people who trusted them.
I mean, some rando's hobby project on github would pre pretty trustworthy in this space because the incentives are aligned. The dev and the contributors have no financial stake except as users who want to pay less for stuff. The moment it becomes a business that needs to make money it (predictably) falls apart. uBO vs ABP.
That's wild. So they just take the affiliate commission for everything when installed?
A lot of people purchase things through affiliate links to knowingly support the affiliate.. But if they have Honey installed it just "steals" the referral..
not sure if that's correct - i think the user has to click on something in the honey popup for them to overwrite the affiliate cookie. outright stealing everything would be too brazen and would probably get noticed by competing programs like rakuten.
however they insert themselves in the checkout page and offer measly honey points in the form of cash back as a cut of the commission they'd get.
there are stand down rules in the affiliate marketing space where you're not supposed to show your popup if someone has already claimed attribution of a purchase but i've heard many extensions don't follow these well.
In 1996, IBM's AIX with the web browser packages installed (NCSA Mosaic or Netscape, I can't recall which) silently sent telemetry back to their mothership without any clear notice or opt-out mechanism. They just sent data back home every few hours without telling their customers what they were up to. I discovered this because it was constantly keeping an ISDN router dialing at all hours, racking up telco bills for a dial-on-demand connection. Fixed by deny listing that particular IP to be un-routable.
This has me wondering if this could be cause for a class action lawsuit by influencers affiliated with Honey or by Consumers who installed the extension.
For the most part, it looks like consumers weren't directly harmed aside from the false promises about "finding the best deal," but consumers weren't paying anything to Honey for that promise.
The harmed parties, the referring affiliates whose links were overwritten, would have to argue that Honey, as a third party, tortiously interfered with them and the merchants paying the affiliate commissions. Third-party claims are challenging, especially when the merchants seem complicit.
My guess any person who shared affiliate links have good grounds for being part in a lawsuit. Not only they did not receive any money from PayPal for promoting Honey they had their affiliates stolen.
Honey will likely try to cop out by claiming the affiliate only changes if the user clicks the button and thats intent.
I am a heavy user of Brave and I would love for you to expand on what you mean.
For those curious, here is the open-code repo of all Chromium changes Brave applies. I have not read every commit myself, so any flagging would be appreciated: https://github.com/brave/brave-core
These browser extensions/add-ons with shady monetization tactics have been around since the 90s. The fact that honey in particular has been around for so long and promoted by popular influencers just proves that there are behind the scenes negotiations taking place that is preventing them from being criminally prosecuted much less immediately banned from these affiliate programs.
How would you even build a better version of this geared towards consumers? I don’t see the incentives lining up unless you start charging for the service.
The same way that uBlock Origin was built. Scams being the only way to make your product "profitable" doesn't validate the scams. That's like saying "I made a business offering to clean people's houses for free. Of course I'm gonna steal their stuff while doing it, how else do you expect me to make money?!"
The consumer never gets the affiliate cut either way. If there are coupon codes, the consumer wins. If there aren't, the customer only loses a bit of privacy about what they're buying, which most people don't care about anyway.
It seems like honey has their claws in almost everything. Correct me if I'm wrong, but would this make affiliate marketing a waste of time for the rest of us?
is there not an opensource alternative? i mean its webscraping which is very established surely it exists. anyways we should bring them traction if they too arent evil
I'm down to contributing to such a project. But there wouldn't even be a need for scraping, just crowdsourcing: people can submit coupons on checkout (perhaps try to detect if they are using one, at least on popular sites) and be offered to share them.
Once shared, they are presented to other users, who can try and validate them, or indicate they don't work (for single-use coupons or expired promotions). "Bad" coupons get removed, good coupons keep getting presented to users.
With more deregulation just beyond the horizon, I wonder how much latitude these companies are going to get with siphoning/stealing from people.
It’s amazing IJ from MegaLag, but what’s do we expect going forward?
Honey was essentially given a
slap on the wrist by a pseudo-regulator, BBB [1]
Yet another slap on the wrist with a civil suit? Honey changes their T&C. Lawyers get their massive cut of the class action settlement while individual consumers, “influencers” get a pittance?
Nothing ever changes unless C-suite starts going to jail.
For me It was somehow obvious "they need to make money on something", and it doesn't surprise me at all that they are inserting own affiliate links. Would I call this scam? No, I wouldn't. Firstly I thought they started to genuinely deploy malware or some crypto-coin miner.
- Inserts its own affiliate link (even when no discount is found, uses strategies to push for interaction like adding a dismiss/pay with paypal link that adds the affiliate association)
- Adds a very small kickback from the affiliate payment they receive as a rewards program. (Which, while scraps, makes content creators "lose" in economic terms in the affiliate offerings)
- Promises to consumers to find the best discounts available
- Promises to vendors to allow control of the discounts offered and the offer rate of said discounts
- Previous both promises are contradictory yet simultaneously offered
- An extra/upcoming claim around forcing non-affiliated stores to affiliate.
> it doesn't surprise me at all that they are inserting own affiliate links.
I bet it surprises everyone who had their affiliate links quietly swapped out.
> Would I call this scam? No, I wouldn't.
Then your definition of 'scam' needs work.
While we might expect PayPal's Honey to scam people like this, and be less than surprised that they would screw people over in this way, that doesn't mean this doesn't have every element of a scam - deception and trickery (and likely illegality).
yeah I think they can argue that using honey (even if there's no discount) means it's the last thing you interacted with that influenced your decision. With wording like "There's no discounts so you can be confident you got the best price".
matlo|1 year ago
xyst|1 year ago
Honey is a parasite stealing from other parasites.
auxbuss|1 year ago
Remember kids: Marketing is a psychopathy.
sgerenser|1 year ago
eviks|1 year ago
rconti|1 year ago
xyst|1 year ago
[deleted]
2sf5|1 year ago
I was completely unaware that it sneakily overrides any existing affiliate codes, AND does this even if it hasn't found any discount whatsoever.
It's hard to see this as anything other than fraudulent.
rconti|1 year ago
timshel4|1 year ago
windmark|1 year ago
operatingthetan|1 year ago
FateOfNations|1 year ago
The Chrome team seems like the one that would be most pissed about this. While some aspects of their management of the extension ecosystem are problematic, they make an effort regarding trust and security. The reason Honey has to be so aggressive in getting you to click a button in that popup window is the browser won't allow it to interact with the page (to swap out the cookies) until the user has affirmatively interacted with the extension on that page. That is intended to prevent extensions from maliciously manipulating third-party sites without user consent.
antifa|1 year ago
danpalmer|1 year ago
Alternatively, Manifest v3 is supposed to make things like this a lot harder. Users would need to activate the plugin rather than the plugin popping up all the time if I understand it correctly. Manifest v3 was designed to enforce better privacy practices in the Wild West of browser extensions.
jren207|1 year ago
PayPal is one of the payment methods offered by Google for all kinds of things such as the Play Store, YouTube subscriptions etc. I use it myself for those purposes.
It might sour things between them?
Kapura|1 year ago
piva00|1 year ago
It's wild how quickly online businesses went from exciting to shady and scammy.
Feels like 2003-2013 was a golden age for internet services.
loeg|1 year ago
b_money|1 year ago
Kind of insane how they intentionally override existing affiliate codes at checkout even if it doesn't save you money.
I switched to Rakuten for cashback and PriceLasso and Keepa for price tracking.
ImPostingOnHN|1 year ago
birudeghi|1 year ago
It goes without saying that there's conflict of interest, but the interesting bit is such conflict arises because of crude thinking from the execs about what makes discount code works.
Discounts is a form of marketing, simple as that. If your company sells products at a discount, it means that you're spending extra marketing cost to sell higher volumes. Anyone in the middle distributing this discount information will charge extra for their service.
Anyone competing to charge companies for marketing can only meaningfully compete on cost and reach. In terms of cost, most discount code websites tend to only give small discounts to consumers as the 'sales' cost is internalised in other forms, e.g. commission, so only a fraction gets passed on to them.
At the end of the day, these kinds of businesses will fight to find any margins possible, however small, to keep the company afloat because competition will erode these margins away through price reductions to these companies.
This is why Honey is the way it is now, because the incentives forces them to do so. It is harmful to end consumers as they have no $$ on the table to influence this large incentives.
Honey doesn't have to do this, but they think they do probably because most companies around them are doing the same, so why not? But there's examples (like x.com) to show that you CAN charge consumers directly, and they'll pay handsomely if your product is good enough.
That's why I'm starting Pence (https://pence.so), where I charge consumers directly for giving them better deals. I don't charge merchants because of long-term incentive alignment for end consumers. The supply of deals comes from marketing emails that you and I receive, and these companies are sending them for almost nothing as email is a free protocol.
Feel free to challenge me, as there's obvious concerns I've anticipated for my product, but I think it's one valid way to think about this issue differently.
Dotnaught|1 year ago
sgerenser|1 year ago
li_ion|1 year ago
Spivak|1 year ago
Rapzid|1 year ago
A lot of people purchase things through affiliate links to knowingly support the affiliate.. But if they have Honey installed it just "steals" the referral..
Spivak|1 year ago
meestaahjoshee|1 year ago
however they insert themselves in the checkout page and offer measly honey points in the form of cash back as a cut of the commission they'd get.
there are stand down rules in the affiliate marketing space where you're not supposed to show your popup if someone has already claimed attribution of a purchase but i've heard many extensions don't follow these well.
magic_smoke_ee|1 year ago
synapse42|1 year ago
FateOfNations|1 year ago
For the most part, it looks like consumers weren't directly harmed aside from the false promises about "finding the best deal," but consumers weren't paying anything to Honey for that promise.
The harmed parties, the referring affiliates whose links were overwritten, would have to argue that Honey, as a third party, tortiously interfered with them and the merchants paying the affiliate commissions. Third-party claims are challenging, especially when the merchants seem complicit.
guax|1 year ago
Honey will likely try to cop out by claiming the affiliate only changes if the user clicks the button and thats intent.
sushiwang|1 year ago
MiguelX413|1 year ago
cush|1 year ago
olliej|1 year ago
imslavko|1 year ago
For those curious, here is the open-code repo of all Chromium changes Brave applies. I have not read every commit myself, so any flagging would be appreciated: https://github.com/brave/brave-core
allenwhsu|1 year ago
croemer|1 year ago
ilikeboobs|1 year ago
hnfan10|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
sss111|1 year ago
margana|1 year ago
delecti|1 year ago
xyst|1 year ago
Interestingly, RMN did sue over alleged IP infringement in 2018 [1]
[1] https://ia803106.us.archive.org/8/items/gov.uscourts.ded.656...
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
mrmemind|1 year ago
mkbkn|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
linvs|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
muzzgg|1 year ago
arielcostas|1 year ago
Once shared, they are presented to other users, who can try and validate them, or indicate they don't work (for single-use coupons or expired promotions). "Bad" coupons get removed, good coupons keep getting presented to users.
bdavbdav|1 year ago
ilrwbwrkhv|1 year ago
xyst|1 year ago
It’s amazing IJ from MegaLag, but what’s do we expect going forward?
Honey was essentially given a slap on the wrist by a pseudo-regulator, BBB [1]
Yet another slap on the wrist with a civil suit? Honey changes their T&C. Lawyers get their massive cut of the class action settlement while individual consumers, “influencers” get a pittance?
Nothing ever changes unless C-suite starts going to jail.
[1] https://bbbprograms.org/media-center/dd/nad-honey-science-co...
yapyap|1 year ago
fabiomoy18|1 year ago
[deleted]
abdibrokhim|1 year ago
[deleted]
the4anoni|1 year ago
fabianhjr|1 year ago
There are at least the following claims:
- Inserts its own affiliate link (even when no discount is found, uses strategies to push for interaction like adding a dismiss/pay with paypal link that adds the affiliate association)
- Adds a very small kickback from the affiliate payment they receive as a rewards program. (Which, while scraps, makes content creators "lose" in economic terms in the affiliate offerings)
- Promises to consumers to find the best discounts available
- Promises to vendors to allow control of the discounts offered and the offer rate of said discounts
- Previous both promises are contradictory yet simultaneously offered
- An extra/upcoming claim around forcing non-affiliated stores to affiliate.
shufflerofrocks|1 year ago
Honey does the following:
- Stealing the commission from an affiliate link assigned to someone else
- Cutting itself a commission by inserting an affiliate link, when there was none, essentially profiting off you without your consent.
- Gives you the worst discount code possible, while saying it got you the best deal
- Cheating the companies doing the affiliate marketing by taking credit for purchases that happened without honey's involvement
mandmandam|1 year ago
I bet it surprises everyone who had their affiliate links quietly swapped out.
> Would I call this scam? No, I wouldn't.
Then your definition of 'scam' needs work.
While we might expect PayPal's Honey to scam people like this, and be less than surprised that they would screw people over in this way, that doesn't mean this doesn't have every element of a scam - deception and trickery (and likely illegality).
sgerenser|1 year ago
alkatales|1 year ago