I used to work for an ad tech company (which I know already makes me the devil to some around here), and even I think that they crossed a line with this. A lot of industry terms are coded in corporate speak to make them sound better (think "revealed preferences" or "enabling personalization"), but I would genuinely like to know what the engineers thought when doing design reviews for a "selective stand down" feature. There doesn't seem to be a legit way to spin it.
Making a product to explicitly skirt agreements while working for a corporation is ... a choice
> what the engineers thought when doing design reviews for a "selective stand down" feature.
Possibly a version of, “I lack the freedom to operate with a moral code at work because I’m probably replaceable, the job market makes me anxious, my family’s well-being and healthcare are tied to having a job, and I don’t believe the government has my back.”
>I used to work for an ad tech company (which I know already makes me the devil to some around here)
everyone sets the bar below what they do
>even I think that they crossed a line with this
everyone sets the bar below what they do
>I would genuinely like to know what the engineers thought when doing design reviews for a "selective stand down" feature. There doesn't seem to be a legit way to spin it.
This is no different, and frankly far less alarming to me, than Uber's project greyball from 2017, which should have tanked a company in a just world. I suppose some companies just promulgate a culture where its acceptable or even lauded to evade law and contracts: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/technology/uber-greyball-...
A nice set of examples can be found in Guido Palazzo's Dark Pattern.
“The Dark Pattern by Guido Palazzo and Ulrich Hoffrage teaches us about the power of context, which is stronger than reason, values, morals, and best intentions. It is an uncomfortable and painful lesson about the root causes of 'corporate infernos.' "
The context matters.
Think of the banality of evil in WW2 Germany.
We are capable of doing almost anything, good or bad, as long as the shoal around does it and pretends it normal.
Uber developed a software tool called "Greyball" to avoid giving rides to known law enforcement officers in areas where its service was illegal such as in Portland, Oregon, Australia, South Korea, and China. The tool identified government officials using geofencing, mining credit card databases, identifying devices, and searches of social media. Uber stated that it only used the tool to identify riders that violated its terms of service, after investigations by the United States Department of Justice, Uber admitted to using the tool to facilitate violations of local regulations by obstructing law enforcement investigations of their illegal operations.
There were no criminal consequences for Uber (however, it reportedly contributed to a 2 year hiatus from London due to rejection of operating license renewal). So Honey may have decided the risk level was acceptable.
Possibly "marketing is all bullshit and hopefully this destroys it faster"
It's not like any crime was committed, and civil liability falls squarely on the business here, not its employees. And the whole dispute is only about which marketing company receives marketing revenue - something where the world would improve if they all disappeared overnight. Doesn't really seem that evil to me. Underhanded, yes.
I think the only reason there's any outrage at all, outside the affiliate marketing "industry", is that some of these marketing companies are YouTube personalities with whom many people have parasocial relationships. Guess what, they just got to learn the hard way why capitalism sucks. What Honey did is a valid move in the game of business. Businesses throughout history have gained success by doing way worse things than this. Amazon's MFN clause is way worse. Uber's Greyball is way worse.
Capitalism is great at washing its hands of evil. I don't know how much slavery went into making the smart phone that I'm posting this from, but I'm sure it's not zero. I'm ethically complicit in the whole scheme. The C in ACAB stands for Capitalists. Which unfortunately, is all of us.
The original site is down for me, so going based on the app I was thinking it was about the actual edible Honey product, not Honey the discount coupon thing.
Over 15 years ago I worked with a telco that had similar affiliate issues. We decided to stop paying any affiliate commission at all and evaluate sales after some time to decide to continue the experiment or not. There was a little decrease in traffic to the site but no measurable decrease in sales of new plans. There were several check moments and data validation after that, but sales numbers remained as they were.
The conclusion was that affiliate marketing claimed a lot of sales in their reporting, but the brand was strong enough (this company was #2 by market share in the country and #1 on most brand metrics) to get those customers without affiliate links.
It started as a clone of the camelcamelcamel Amazon price history site and got kicked out by Amazon for abusing the system. It pivoted to a coupon site and started sucking down user data with the plugin when PayPal paid $4Bil CASH. Honey cost me affiliate marketing commissions.
It's not malware. Marketing companies stealing commission from each other isn't malware. Giving the user less than the best possible deal isn't malware. It doesn't even upload your cookies to see if you're a tester - it does that on the client.
one point of view is why bother with any of this, google knows exactly what honey is doing, they could remove honey from chrome with the stroke of a pen, and that would be that.
there's something seriously wrong with this archived link. It's not staying still for one moment. It's constantly twitching and the text scrolls to weird positions. It's unreadable because of this.
Is it the archive at fault or is the original webpage this way?
Was the VPT site not working for you, so you had to resort to archive.org? Original link https://vptdigital.com/blog/honey-detecting-testers/ . Anyone having trouble -- contact Ben Edelman (easily found by web search) and I will genuinely value the opportunity to get to the bottom of what is wrong.
Didn't this Honey fraud thing break like a year ago (or longer)? This is the second story I've seen about it in the last couple of days and I guess I'm surprised it's even still around.
I think affiliate links are the most fair/ethical advertisement can be. If i go on a random carpentry or painting blog, i'd rather have affiliate links to product they use rather than random google ads.
As consumer I would love to see lower prices directly. Or at least have available some official store affiliate discount code which would give me same discount which would be win win for everyone.
- The Honey browser extension inserted their own affiliate link at checkout, depriving others of affiliate revenue.
- Honey collected discount codes entered by users while shopping online, then shook down website owners to have the discount codes removed.
- Honey should have "stood down" if an affiliate link was detected, but their algorithm would decide to skip the stand down based on if the user could be the an affiliate representative testing for compliance.
Re the second point, it specifically collected valuable codes that shouldn't be widely shared, e.g. employee discounts.
Re the third point, the algorithm would skip stand down for users who weren't likely to be testers (based on account history and lack of cookies for affiliate marketing admin panels).
Same, and that topic would have been way more interesting (cf. EVOO).
Obviously Internet affiliate marketing schemes are built on mutual exploitation of asymmetric data collection. This cannot possibly surprise anyone.
With that said, this is a good article with excellent data collection and evidence presentation. It's great to have documentation of obviously corrupt practices, even if they are unsurprising.
To be honest, the Megalag video really made it clear what a great product Honey is. It is very explicit about the fact that you, as the consumer, can get extraordinary deals by using the extension.
This also makes me think that the whole campaign is astroturfed. The only "victims" of Honey are influencers and storefronts, who of course will do their part in trying to get their customers to stop using the product, but for the consumer there really are only benefits with using the extension.
The only arguments against Honey is that they are supposedly breaking some internal rules of the advertising industry (and who cares about those? Certainly not me) and that they are offering deals better than the store wants to offer to you, which makes an extremely compelling case for using that extension.
I always considered extensions like Honey to be quite scammy and believed that they offered little benefit, but apparently I was wrong.
Yeah I strongly feel that the best outcome of all of this would be the end of sponsorships and affiliate links, and a general reduction in price discrimination.
Honey promises to businesses to let them control which coupons are available, and promises to customers to always show them the best coupons. At least one of those two promises is a lie.
For quite some time, I have been convinced that all forms of advertising are net negative for society. It seems that affiliate marketing (pay for results, not exposure) is not much better.
the guy that wrote this blog post also recently wrote about AppLovin, a company who he alleges installs apps without user consent. his response to this was... to short their stock?
>And the effort Honey expended, to conceal its behavior from industry insiders, makes it particularly clear that Honey knew it would be in trouble if it was caught.
The same could be said about yt-dlp. They know what they are doing youtube doesn't like. But yt-dlp itself is legal.
It's comparing Honey's behavior to a well-known and comprehended scandal. Simile is a tried and tested way (hah!) to explain otherwise potentially hard to understand or dry content.
It's not about the severity of the impact, its the fact that they were breaking the rules and explicitly coding to actively avoid being caught by testers.
These are the same types who have poisoned the well of information that was the Internet you can actually find things on for the sake of the ad driven model. Far as I'm concerned, the moral injuries are the same even if the physical details are different.
bryan_w|2 months ago
Making a product to explicitly skirt agreements while working for a corporation is ... a choice
Waterluvian|2 months ago
Possibly a version of, “I lack the freedom to operate with a moral code at work because I’m probably replaceable, the job market makes me anxious, my family’s well-being and healthcare are tied to having a job, and I don’t believe the government has my back.”
dogleash|2 months ago
everyone sets the bar below what they do
>even I think that they crossed a line with this
everyone sets the bar below what they do
>I would genuinely like to know what the engineers thought when doing design reviews for a "selective stand down" feature. There doesn't seem to be a legit way to spin it.
everyone sets the bar below what they do
ramraj07|2 months ago
shrubby|2 months ago
“The Dark Pattern by Guido Palazzo and Ulrich Hoffrage teaches us about the power of context, which is stronger than reason, values, morals, and best intentions. It is an uncomfortable and painful lesson about the root causes of 'corporate infernos.' "
The context matters.
Think of the banality of evil in WW2 Germany.
We are capable of doing almost anything, good or bad, as long as the shoal around does it and pretends it normal.
gilrain|2 months ago
croes|2 months ago
First comes a full stomach, then comes ethics.
unknown|1 month ago
[deleted]
nerdsniper|1 month ago
Uber developed a software tool called "Greyball" to avoid giving rides to known law enforcement officers in areas where its service was illegal such as in Portland, Oregon, Australia, South Korea, and China. The tool identified government officials using geofencing, mining credit card databases, identifying devices, and searches of social media. Uber stated that it only used the tool to identify riders that violated its terms of service, after investigations by the United States Department of Justice, Uber admitted to using the tool to facilitate violations of local regulations by obstructing law enforcement investigations of their illegal operations.
There were no criminal consequences for Uber (however, it reportedly contributed to a 2 year hiatus from London due to rejection of operating license renewal). So Honey may have decided the risk level was acceptable.
0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13785564
1: https://archive.is/DzQha ( https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/03/uber-secr... )
2: https://archive.is/tqk3W ( https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/technology/uber-greyball-... )
unknown|2 months ago
[deleted]
immibis|2 months ago
It's not like any crime was committed, and civil liability falls squarely on the business here, not its employees. And the whole dispute is only about which marketing company receives marketing revenue - something where the world would improve if they all disappeared overnight. Doesn't really seem that evil to me. Underhanded, yes.
I think the only reason there's any outrage at all, outside the affiliate marketing "industry", is that some of these marketing companies are YouTube personalities with whom many people have parasocial relationships. Guess what, they just got to learn the hard way why capitalism sucks. What Honey did is a valid move in the game of business. Businesses throughout history have gained success by doing way worse things than this. Amazon's MFN clause is way worse. Uber's Greyball is way worse.
unknown|2 months ago
[deleted]
phoronixrly|2 months ago
Yes, thank you for making the web objectively worse for everyone. Yo should feel bad.
the_snooze|2 months ago
You'd think that if you were an engineer building and maintaing a system like this, you'd have an "are we the baddies?" moment, but guess not.
ZoneZealot|2 months ago
Their personal site is also linked in the video description https://www.benedelman.org/honey-detecting-testers/
unknown|2 months ago
[deleted]
fragmede|2 months ago
paranoidrobot|2 months ago
t0mas88|2 months ago
The conclusion was that affiliate marketing claimed a lot of sales in their reporting, but the brand was strong enough (this company was #2 by market share in the country and #1 on most brand metrics) to get those customers without affiliate links.
gonesilent|2 months ago
throwaway81523|2 months ago
immibis|2 months ago
doctorpangloss|2 months ago
cwal37|2 months ago
arionmiles|2 months ago
Is it the archive at fault or is the original webpage this way?
bedelman|2 months ago
arijun|2 months ago
flkiwi|2 months ago
AkshatJ27|2 months ago
Recently, he released 2 more parts with more new information that paints Honey in a pretty bad light: https://youtu.be/qCGT_CKGgFE https://youtu.be/wwB3FmbcC88
xnx|2 months ago
orwin|2 months ago
Ekaros|2 months ago
a_paddy|2 months ago
- The Honey browser extension inserted their own affiliate link at checkout, depriving others of affiliate revenue.
- Honey collected discount codes entered by users while shopping online, then shook down website owners to have the discount codes removed.
- Honey should have "stood down" if an affiliate link was detected, but their algorithm would decide to skip the stand down based on if the user could be the an affiliate representative testing for compliance.
Allegedly.
Kwpolska|2 months ago
Re the third point, the algorithm would skip stand down for users who weren't likely to be testers (based on account history and lack of cookies for affiliate marketing admin panels).
phpnode|2 months ago
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cookie_stuffing
esafak|2 months ago
quesera|2 months ago
Obviously Internet affiliate marketing schemes are built on mutual exploitation of asymmetric data collection. This cannot possibly surprise anyone.
With that said, this is a good article with excellent data collection and evidence presentation. It's great to have documentation of obviously corrupt practices, even if they are unsurprising.
rfrey|2 months ago
constantcrying|2 months ago
This also makes me think that the whole campaign is astroturfed. The only "victims" of Honey are influencers and storefronts, who of course will do their part in trying to get their customers to stop using the product, but for the consumer there really are only benefits with using the extension.
The only arguments against Honey is that they are supposedly breaking some internal rules of the advertising industry (and who cares about those? Certainly not me) and that they are offering deals better than the store wants to offer to you, which makes an extremely compelling case for using that extension.
I always considered extensions like Honey to be quite scammy and believed that they offered little benefit, but apparently I was wrong.
aezart|2 months ago
TRiG_Ireland|2 months ago
bitlevel|2 months ago
SergeAx|2 months ago
mindslight|2 months ago
fasouto|2 months ago
unknown|2 months ago
[deleted]
bstsb|2 months ago
https://www.benedelman.org/applovin-my-disclosures/
charcircuit|2 months ago
The same could be said about yt-dlp. They know what they are doing youtube doesn't like. But yt-dlp itself is legal.
rundev|2 months ago
cryptonector|2 months ago
janandonly|2 months ago
I hear there is lots of fraud where bees honey is mixed with sugars and sold off as “honey”.
I’m disappointed this is about a browser plugin that no body in their right mind should be using at all.
SiempreViernes|2 months ago
I mean, fraud in online advertising? Say it ain't so!
kubafu|2 months ago
delusional|2 months ago
"Who gets a kickback on this toothbrush" is a much MUCH less important question than "do you pollute the air we are all breathing".
choult|2 months ago
It's not about the severity of the impact, its the fact that they were breaking the rules and explicitly coding to actively avoid being caught by testers.
salawat|2 months ago
unknown|2 months ago
[deleted]