Have a friend high up at one of the “Big 3” in this space.
The entire business model is predicated on injecting themselves as the last click for attribution even when they weren’t remotely responsible for the conversion. Cool business, but can’t keep going on forever without someone catching on.
chatmasta · 29d ago
I remember when this was called cookie stuffing, and eBay even sent a guy to jail for doing it with their affiliate program. That’s the same eBay that owned PayPal, which now owns Honey…
kevin_thibedeau · 29d ago
It's totally different you see. This time the fraud was done by a faceless corporation maximizing shareholder returns so this is just an exercise in free speech by an immortal, in the same vein as running an unlicensed lottery.
SamuelAdams · 29d ago
Kind of like how most spyware is now called “employee monitoring tools”. This stuff used to be frowned upon but now I guess the narrative has changed.
brewtide · 29d ago
It was time to go back to the orifice....
chii · 29d ago
if the computer belongs to the company, and you're using it as an employee, you should be told that such spyware is installed and your usage of said machines are monitored. Then there's no qualms about this at all.
It's only an invasion of privacy if the monitoring is done in secret.
kvlh · 29d ago
|It's only an invasion of privacy if the monitoring is done in secret.
Uhhh... that seems very incorrect. If someone pokes their head into your shower session, it's an invasion of privacy - whether or not they let you know they're peepin on ya.
thatguy0900 · 28d ago
The equivalent here is if it's a company shower, and your supposed to be cleaning an office appliance, not yourself. In that context someone poking their head on to see how it's going is fine.
Aside, but NBC’s website is way better executed than I was expecting.
Perhaps it changed recently, or I just never noticed? I was expecting 100MB with back button abuse and retention dark patterns. Instead, it loads fast, has minimal guff, and the footer scrolled into view ending the page within sight of the end of the actual article.
Perhaps this is a reward response to not having to / be able to doom scroll?
walthamstow · 29d ago
It's not great without uBlock but still much better than most others. No video!
chris_wot · 29d ago
Wow, the former Senior Director of Safety and Security was sent to prison for 57 months! That's some great work by eBay.
I remember at the time being less than surprised at the charges. Dunning always felt a little off to me, even though I did enjoy his podcast.
AlexandrB · 29d ago
Do as I say not as I do.
gruez · 29d ago
To be fair Paypal got spun out in 2015, far before they bought Honey, so there actually isn't any point in time where eBay was engaged in cookie stuffing.
unsui · 29d ago
> Cool business
No it isn't. It's predatory (actually, parasitic) by its very nature.
I'm all for innovation, but that's just not cool.
catigula · 29d ago
I think it's cool in the sense that's it a cool concept for a (alleged) scam.
EGreg · 29d ago
Cool URLs dont change
miki123211 · 29d ago
Now what I'd love is an extension that would inject a person of my choosing as the last click.
Amazon et al don't allow you to offer this as an affiliate program partner, not without a special and custom agreement at least, but if the extension was partner-agnostic and released by a party unaffiliated with Amazon in any way, there's nothing they could realistically do about it.
It'd be one way to bring Amazon Smile back, and on many more sites than just Amazon.
EGreg · 29d ago
I always found Amazon Smile weird. Why not just donate, why have people jump through hoops just to prove that you should donate? So you look good but dont spend much money to do it due to user laziness. Ah… got it :)
eru · 29d ago
Well, it's no less weird that store running a promotion saying 'If you buy item X today, we will donate one dollar of the proceeds to charity Y.'
Also not more weird than the British charity thing of "I'm shaving off all my hair, and that's why you should donate to charity Y." (I suspect Brits need an excuse before they are mentally allowed to do something silly. But any excuse will do.)
chihuahua · 29d ago
I've always been baffled by the British charity thing: You want to ride your tricycle from John O'Groats to Ffestiniog? Fine, do it. You want me to donate to this charity? OK, maybe I'll do it. I just don't see the connection between the two. Please explain the connection to me. You don't actually want to ride your tricycle? But if I donate to some third party, you're going to do something you hate? So you're saying I want you to suffer? I'd rather donate if it doesn't cause unnecessary suffering.
alias_neo · 29d ago
It's something we've been raised to do from a young age.
I've never thought about it before, but I suppose it's a way for you to provide some commitment from yourself as a condition for those you're crowdsourcing donations from.
If you don't deliver on your part, they don't have to pay.
When I was in high-school we did everything from shaving our heads, to having your legs waxed in front of the whole (boys) school.
I raised thousands of £ for charity this way, more than I could ever raise by myself at that age.
greycol · 28d ago
I'm sure I've seen dunk tanks (throw a baseball, hit the target, person falls in) in plenty of US movies though no idea how common that is in reality.
Regardless, one of the nice things about the practice is does mean people are at least somewhat committed to a cause they are raising funds for before they go soliciting. It also deals with the irrational part of the human psyche and moves the action conceptually from the person begging to the person trading which can have an impact on how people perceive it.
sksksk · 29d ago
The charity you’re raising for sets up the infrastructure to do the activity. Charities, for example, have spots in marathons which are hard to get other wise.
So if you see a friend is trying to do some personal achievement, and you think the charity is a worthwhile one to donate to; why not combine the two and help your friend achieve their goal whilst also raising money for a good cause.
thaumasiotes · 29d ago
I assume the concept is that if you do what the person asks you to do, you get to share in the glory of whatever it is that they do.
maest · 29d ago
Movember.
paulryanrogers · 29d ago
Shame so many creators took the Honey paycheck, even while Honey was taking money out of their pocket by stealing affiliate links. I guess few really vet their sponsors. Not even LTT or MrBeast!
pclmulqdq · 29d ago
You just named the biggest sellouts in their respective spaces. LTT in "tech" youtube and Mr Beast on youtube.
dspillett · 29d ago
LTT did eventually vet what was going on and spot the problem, but didn't have the morals to let anyone else know about the scam. And has since played the victim card (“Mommy, they are saying a nasty thing about us!” and “Other people had the same lack of morals too, why are you picking on us?”) having been called out for not warning others out there that they were being scammed.
cedws · 29d ago
BetterHelp is arguably worse. Everything I've heard about them sounds terrible, but they're all over YouTube and presumably they're getting a lot of vulnerable customers who will never receive the support they need.
The YouTubers that peddle this shit have no morals.
lbarron6868 · 28d ago
Every single podcast I listen to is sponsored by BetterHelp, nearly all of them.
dpig_ · 27d ago
I'd take that as an indictment on those podcasts. All the stuff I listened to / watched that used them in the past has dropped them for more than a year by now.
I think Johnny Harris may still run adverts for them? But I watch him mostly because he's such a suspicious character to begin with.
YuccaGloriosa · 29d ago
When I first heard all this about honey I was shocked, remembering seeing Linus plug them. Of all the people to have the potential ability to see through it. The way I see it is that anyone who sponsors things like YouTube videos as widely as they do is generally a piece of s** company. Normally up to something, that makes it worth their while to spaff money on such things. 80 quid razors, AI driven news classifiers, VPNs, meh...
floydnoel · 29d ago
My more general rule is that anything being advertised to me must be way overpriced or a scam, in order to pay for the expensive advertisements. I won’t buy nearly anything I see advertised. I don’t run into many ads anyway, but some always get through!
jack_pp · 29d ago
Why would Linus have the ability to see through it? He isn't into software, probably can't code at all. His channel is dedicated to hardware
cbozeman · 29d ago
And he's not actually that great at that, if his storage server videos are any indication.
chrisdsaldivar · 29d ago
I haven’t seen the videos and don’t know much about the space. Could your provide any insight into what’s wrong?
cbozeman · 25d ago
Well he brought down his entire storage system. Twice.
I believe one time he had to bring in Wendell Wilson from Wendell Wilson Consulting, but more likely know to the Internet-at-large as the primary figure on Level1Techs YouTube channel.
I have no desire, nor inclination to dig through the thousands of videos LMG has produced on YouTube, but it's still up to my knowledge, and watching him fumble about with absolutely no clue is not only painful, but pathetic. Linus suffers from the same affliction many of my Ph.D.-holding friends have, which is that he believes because he knows a lot about putting together computers and electronics that he could handle building a large-scale data storage system.
These systems are complex, and to be well-built and maintained, they require domain-specific knowledge - no different than an OS programmer needs deep knowledge of C and C++, and increasing now, Rust.
It's a series of videos of someone way in over his head who should have brought in an actual expert - like Wendell from Level1Techs, or Patrick from ServeTheHome, from the get-go, instead of trying to do it himself.
matejn · 29d ago
Here I have to chime in and say that a certain YouTube razor is one of my favourite purchases ever. But I guess it's rather niche, being a double edged safety razor.
blitzar · 29d ago
> Of all the people to have the potential ability to see through it.
lol
Joel_Mckay · 29d ago
Marketers monitor the conversion rates very closely. Chances are some people caught on to the shenanigans within 24 hours, but couldn't figure out which part of the lead generation ecosystem was cheating.
What Honey did robbed content publishers of ad revenue, advertisers lead valuations, and end consumer confidence (bait-and-switch.)
I wouldn't want to be in the blast radius of that legal mess... Popcorn ready for when the judge defines the scope of who is liable =3
justinator · 29d ago
It's very hard to figure out as in many instances the affiliate link part of a link is stripped out before clicked.
There's a browser extension for that too.
Joel_Mckay · 29d ago
It was very similar to the classic banner substitution malware/adware from the early internet.
Most media people have gone back to unique affiliate discount-coupon-codes instead of clickable URL parameters to track lead referrals.
Unfortunately, this also leads to sampling bias, and campaigns spelunking spam statistics. I'd guess on YT irritating people drives engagement in some twisted way. lol =3
echelon · 29d ago
> Cool business
Shameful parasitism. The engineers working on this garbage knew what they were doing. I'd question the ethics of anyone who worked on this.
dvektor · 29d ago
Am I the only one that detected sarcasm? (cool business)
unsui · 29d ago
On HN, you have a significant subset that think it is akshually cool, unironically
Move fast and break things, right?
kome · 29d ago
i think you are missing the irony.
but you are also missing the fact that the great part of the industry works in the same way: using open source stuff, in a super parasitic way, to track and control millions of users.
the average googler here is not better here.
p.s.: great nickname btw. and on point.
threeseed · 29d ago
> but can’t keep going on forever without someone catching on
But despite a lot of coverage they've only lost about 1/5 of their user base.
whycome · 29d ago
Apathy? Communications spin? Lack of technical understanding?
I suspect some people installed it on a whim based on the recommendation of someone and then forgot about it.
wingworks · 29d ago
Well, what do the end users care. So long as they get there honey $$. Yes, sucks for the real referer, and youtube creators doing the promoting (though they probably got paid more directly from Honey to do the ad then they would've gotten from there affil links).
Though, like what was exposed, Honey does a poor job for the end user too. There are other cashback sites out there doing what Honey claims/does, but passes on more to the end user. Though they're all taking the referral $$ from the real referer, if there was one.
not_kurt_godel · 29d ago
Scam culture thrives on apathy and ignorance, just count this as yet another win for the bad guys who profit immensely off our increasing societal stupidity
soulofmischief · 29d ago
I'm having a hard time understanding precisely what is cool about the business of defrauding users and creators/businesses.
pbreit · 29d ago
Dumb acquisition by PayPal. It should stick to "above board" financial services. Stuff like this erodes trust.
I had this idea before Honey. When we spoke to our attorney, he instantly told us "that won't fly; you'll get popped for cookie stuffing."
The adware world had been doing similar things forever - injecting fake results into Google, taking over default home pages to show Google look-alikes.
When Honey launched on Reddit and got their first user bump, I started building our prototype. While digging deeper, you discover Honey injects JavaScript from their API, which violates extension store TOS, yet somehow this flies.
Fast forward, they hire the CEO of Commission Junction (CJ) as their CFO and everything becomes gravy.
Try to get offers via CJ, you won't get a response. All affiliate networks (CJ, Rakuten/LinkShare, etc.) have "stand down" policies in their contracts. You're supposed to detect when someone takes action like clicking a coupon site link and "stand down." Honey never did this. We had to demonstrate it was happening, but bring it up to CJ and they won't care.
It's regulatory capture of a borderline illegal business.
All cited studies came from RetailMeNot (since taken down). They claim customers abandon carts for coupons. Sure, some do, but those people will probably convert anyway.
Today, coupons are dying. We're in the world of personalized offers. Most coupon codes don't exist anymore - they're offer links. These systems try to "find you a coupon" which isn't real.
You're not supposed to share personalized coupons. These systems capture your coupons and add them to their list, but they almost never work.
I'd never try this business again. It's dishonest and terrible.
Fun fact: Much of this goes back to adware/search XML feeds from parking pages. IAC had a division called Mindspark Interactive Network (recently closed) - their adware division generating insane profit through Pay-Per-Download scam browser extensions tricking your grandfather, hijacking affiliate link clicks, same playbook.
The affiliate networks don't care as long as referrers look like they match approved pages.
This industry needs to die.
mbirth · 28d ago
> I had this idea before Honey
AdBlock Plus also had this idea back in 2012/2013.
Near the end he mentions the typoRules.js, rules.json, urlfixer stuff and Yieldkit. Apparently, whenever you’ve mis-typed a URL to e.g. amazon, it auto-corrected it and added their own affiliate id (which was then valid for 30 days). And the feature only needed very few changes to get applied even to correct links.
oivey · 29d ago
It’s still shocking to me that in this whole ordeal many reviewers escaped scrutiny. Getting a cut of a sale of a product that you portray yourself as impartially reviewing is insanely immoral. Who cares if these people scammed themselves in the service of scamming me?
pembrook · 29d ago
Agreed. You can't even trust Wirecutter anymore due to the incentives of affiliate revenue driven content.
While everybody hates display ads, at least they are clearly ads, and aren't usually mistaken for authentic content. Affiliate marketing on the other hand...well that's the entire point! Trick people into thinking the creator has independently recommended a product because it's good, and not because they're getting paid. The content is the ad.
Affiliate marketing is evolving into a giant Tax on the entire internet economy.
To give you an example, in highly competitive software markets (VPNs, CRMs, Project Management, Email tools, Help Desk Software, etc) affiliate payouts reach as high as 50% of recurring revenue in perpetuity.
What do you think that software would cost if it wasn't paying out 50% of revenue (not profit) to influencers and reviewers to push it on unsuspecting people?
On any list of "The Best [thing] for [purpose]" appearing on Search or Youtube, it's smart to just assume it's a descending rank order of the products that offer the highest affiliate payouts. Often with the creator twisting themselves into a psychological pretzel to pretend like their "opinion" wasn't strongly influenced by the $$$.
ChrisRR · 29d ago
If people didn't realise that they were peddling something immoral then they're not to blame. They just took money to advertise something that seemed like a useful product at the time
voxic11 · 29d ago
op was complaining about the reviewers failure to disclose their financial conflict of interest. The problem is not that they were advertising a bad product, its that they misrepresented an advertisement as a impartial review.
magicalhippo · 29d ago
A couple of YouTubers I watch promoted this and given what I assumed it did, I'm surprised that's all it does.
If it seems to good to be true, it probably is.
willy_k · 29d ago
Something that has been making the sponsorship rounds now is Ground News[0] which I have found very useful with just the free tier. But given how many people I have seen sponsored by them, I wonder if there is some catch, especially because I can’t imagine that many people sign up for the paid service. I can’t think of what that catch would be though, they do not have unique access to personal data, and I haven’t seen anything that would indicate that they have any information agenda.
PayPal Honey extension has again "featured" flag in Chrome web store - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43298054 - March 2025 (177 comments)
LegalEagle is suing Honey [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42581108 - Jan 2025 (10 comments)
uBlock Origin GPL code being stolen by team behind Honey browser extension - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42576443 - Jan 2025 (444 comments)
Show HN: Open-source and transparent alternative to Honey - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42535274 - Dec 2024 (10 comments)
Exposing the Honey Influencer Scam [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42483500 - Dec 2024 (86 comments)
Amazon says browser extension Honey is a security risk, now that PayPal owns it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22016031 - Jan 2020 (6 comments)
The entire business model is predicated on injecting themselves as the last click for attribution even when they weren’t remotely responsible for the conversion. Cool business, but can’t keep going on forever without someone catching on.
It's only an invasion of privacy if the monitoring is done in secret.
Uhhh... that seems very incorrect. If someone pokes their head into your shower session, it's an invasion of privacy - whether or not they let you know they're peepin on ya.
Perhaps it changed recently, or I just never noticed? I was expecting 100MB with back button abuse and retention dark patterns. Instead, it loads fast, has minimal guff, and the footer scrolled into view ending the page within sight of the end of the actual article.
Perhaps this is a reward response to not having to / be able to doom scroll?
https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/pr/final-defendant-ebay-cybe...
Edit: Yes. In 2014. How did I miss that? Used to listen to that podcast, though probably stopped before that.
No it isn't. It's predatory (actually, parasitic) by its very nature.
I'm all for innovation, but that's just not cool.
Amazon et al don't allow you to offer this as an affiliate program partner, not without a special and custom agreement at least, but if the extension was partner-agnostic and released by a party unaffiliated with Amazon in any way, there's nothing they could realistically do about it.
It'd be one way to bring Amazon Smile back, and on many more sites than just Amazon.
Also not more weird than the British charity thing of "I'm shaving off all my hair, and that's why you should donate to charity Y." (I suspect Brits need an excuse before they are mentally allowed to do something silly. But any excuse will do.)
I've never thought about it before, but I suppose it's a way for you to provide some commitment from yourself as a condition for those you're crowdsourcing donations from.
If you don't deliver on your part, they don't have to pay.
When I was in high-school we did everything from shaving our heads, to having your legs waxed in front of the whole (boys) school.
I raised thousands of £ for charity this way, more than I could ever raise by myself at that age.
Regardless, one of the nice things about the practice is does mean people are at least somewhat committed to a cause they are raising funds for before they go soliciting. It also deals with the irrational part of the human psyche and moves the action conceptually from the person begging to the person trading which can have an impact on how people perceive it.
So if you see a friend is trying to do some personal achievement, and you think the charity is a worthwhile one to donate to; why not combine the two and help your friend achieve their goal whilst also raising money for a good cause.
The YouTubers that peddle this shit have no morals.
I think Johnny Harris may still run adverts for them? But I watch him mostly because he's such a suspicious character to begin with.
I believe one time he had to bring in Wendell Wilson from Wendell Wilson Consulting, but more likely know to the Internet-at-large as the primary figure on Level1Techs YouTube channel.
I have no desire, nor inclination to dig through the thousands of videos LMG has produced on YouTube, but it's still up to my knowledge, and watching him fumble about with absolutely no clue is not only painful, but pathetic. Linus suffers from the same affliction many of my Ph.D.-holding friends have, which is that he believes because he knows a lot about putting together computers and electronics that he could handle building a large-scale data storage system.
These systems are complex, and to be well-built and maintained, they require domain-specific knowledge - no different than an OS programmer needs deep knowledge of C and C++, and increasing now, Rust.
It's a series of videos of someone way in over his head who should have brought in an actual expert - like Wendell from Level1Techs, or Patrick from ServeTheHome, from the get-go, instead of trying to do it himself.
lol
What Honey did robbed content publishers of ad revenue, advertisers lead valuations, and end consumer confidence (bait-and-switch.)
I wouldn't want to be in the blast radius of that legal mess... Popcorn ready for when the judge defines the scope of who is liable =3
There's a browser extension for that too.
Most media people have gone back to unique affiliate discount-coupon-codes instead of clickable URL parameters to track lead referrals.
Unfortunately, this also leads to sampling bias, and campaigns spelunking spam statistics. I'd guess on YT irritating people drives engagement in some twisted way. lol =3
Shameful parasitism. The engineers working on this garbage knew what they were doing. I'd question the ethics of anyone who worked on this.
Move fast and break things, right?
but you are also missing the fact that the great part of the industry works in the same way: using open source stuff, in a super parasitic way, to track and control millions of users.
the average googler here is not better here.
p.s.: great nickname btw. and on point.
But despite a lot of coverage they've only lost about 1/5 of their user base.
Though, like what was exposed, Honey does a poor job for the end user too. There are other cashback sites out there doing what Honey claims/does, but passes on more to the end user. Though they're all taking the referral $$ from the real referer, if there was one.
I had this idea before Honey. When we spoke to our attorney, he instantly told us "that won't fly; you'll get popped for cookie stuffing."
The adware world had been doing similar things forever - injecting fake results into Google, taking over default home pages to show Google look-alikes.
When Honey launched on Reddit and got their first user bump, I started building our prototype. While digging deeper, you discover Honey injects JavaScript from their API, which violates extension store TOS, yet somehow this flies.
Fast forward, they hire the CEO of Commission Junction (CJ) as their CFO and everything becomes gravy.
Try to get offers via CJ, you won't get a response. All affiliate networks (CJ, Rakuten/LinkShare, etc.) have "stand down" policies in their contracts. You're supposed to detect when someone takes action like clicking a coupon site link and "stand down." Honey never did this. We had to demonstrate it was happening, but bring it up to CJ and they won't care.
It's regulatory capture of a borderline illegal business.
All cited studies came from RetailMeNot (since taken down). They claim customers abandon carts for coupons. Sure, some do, but those people will probably convert anyway.
Today, coupons are dying. We're in the world of personalized offers. Most coupon codes don't exist anymore - they're offer links. These systems try to "find you a coupon" which isn't real.
You're not supposed to share personalized coupons. These systems capture your coupons and add them to their list, but they almost never work.
I'd never try this business again. It's dishonest and terrible.
Fun fact: Much of this goes back to adware/search XML feeds from parking pages. IAC had a division called Mindspark Interactive Network (recently closed) - their adware division generating insane profit through Pay-Per-Download scam browser extensions tricking your grandfather, hijacking affiliate link clicks, same playbook.
The affiliate networks don't care as long as referrers look like they match approved pages.
This industry needs to die.
AdBlock Plus also had this idea back in 2012/2013.
Here’s a (German) article about this:
https://web.archive.org/web/20220817235820/https://www.mobil...
Near the end he mentions the typoRules.js, rules.json, urlfixer stuff and Yieldkit. Apparently, whenever you’ve mis-typed a URL to e.g. amazon, it auto-corrected it and added their own affiliate id (which was then valid for 30 days). And the feature only needed very few changes to get applied even to correct links.
While everybody hates display ads, at least they are clearly ads, and aren't usually mistaken for authentic content. Affiliate marketing on the other hand...well that's the entire point! Trick people into thinking the creator has independently recommended a product because it's good, and not because they're getting paid. The content is the ad.
Affiliate marketing is evolving into a giant Tax on the entire internet economy.
To give you an example, in highly competitive software markets (VPNs, CRMs, Project Management, Email tools, Help Desk Software, etc) affiliate payouts reach as high as 50% of recurring revenue in perpetuity.
What do you think that software would cost if it wasn't paying out 50% of revenue (not profit) to influencers and reviewers to push it on unsuspecting people?
On any list of "The Best [thing] for [purpose]" appearing on Search or Youtube, it's smart to just assume it's a descending rank order of the products that offer the highest affiliate payouts. Often with the creator twisting themselves into a psychological pretzel to pretend like their "opinion" wasn't strongly influenced by the $$$.
If it seems to good to be true, it probably is.
[0] https://ground.news