“The biggest scam in YouTube history”

  • VerPoilu@sopuli.xyz
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    4 days ago

    I’m struggling to understand how everyone thought Honey made money. I have assumed from the first time I saw an ad for them that this is how they operate. It’s not like it’s difficult to prove or disprove either.

    • theherk@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      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.

      • VerPoilu@sopuli.xyz
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        4 days ago

        Difficult to prove the latter of course, but out of the two, it’s not what most people seem to be complaining the most about.

        You’d need the first one to get big enough to pull up the second one anyways.

        • Railcar8095@lemm.ee
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          4 days ago

          Influencers complain about the latter because it’s a better message for their audiences. If they complain mostly about their share everybody would tell them go to fuck themselves

    • Jimmycakes@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

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

    • geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml
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      4 days ago

      If I remember correctly influencers went out of their way to promise Honey was not doing anything sketchy like selling your data and said they got a small commission from the seller free of charge. Turns out Honey stole others commissions.

    • Static_Rocket@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      I assumed from the start that they were purposefully holding back promo codes, or scraping them from users and holding the affected sites ransom (in a sense). “We’ll stop serving this cupon if you become a member.” Scummy, but ultimately still slightly beneficial to the end user, a Robbin Hood crime. (Ignoring the people who work with genuinely good companies to get discount codes for things like student projects. Unrecognized casualties.)

      It’s the affiliate link stealing that’s become the source of outcry. That was more stealthy and essentially flipped the script. Now everyone publicly in support of it is being burned.

      If you were never involved in it, it really is just funny to see how quickly a corporate Robin Hood figure can flip sides. It’s not like we haven’t seen numerous examples before, some of them literally taking the namesake.