Follow up video from MegaLag on the Honey scandal.
He talks about how honey gets access to the codes by scraping every promo code submitted by the users. Doesn’t that mean that someone could automate something to submit false codes by the 100s whenever you are at checkout to fill PayPal with junk data? Making honey useless for everyone for that merchant because it can’t tell the real from the fake. An anti honey extension.
What’s PayPal going to do? Try to sue because the data they are illegally obtaining is being tainted? Obviously the codes wouldn’t work on merchants so they are fine in this.
This is basically already what my experience with honey was. Most of the codes didn’'t work.
I hate this thumbnail image.
I didn’t choose it (not my video).
I’d encourage you to watch it anyway, if you can get past the trauma…
“trauma” is not the point here
The point is that all YouTube videos now have these extremely annoying clickbait thumbnails and titles and that is not a good thing
That alone is enough for me to not watch it.
The thumbnail is satire, the video is from the person who originally exposed the PayPal Honey scam.
Doesn’t change my opinion.
They teach literal children to not judge a book by it’s cover, but I guess you must’ve been out sick that day in kindergarden…
Nah. I just don’t give a fuck and have better things to do with my time. I would rather read a book anyway.
By the looks of it you’ve got enough time to be commenting about not watching the video. I’d question wether you actually have better things to do.
Right? It tickles something in the back of my brain that just makes me angry. I can’t really explain it. By all accounts, it’s a good video, but I just can’t get over the thumbnail.
I mean it has Mr. Beast’s AI-generated face with that disturbing grimace he always has and those creepy fake veneers.
That’s Mr Beast? I’ve never watched anything of his, so I don’t know what he actually looks like. If this is one of his standard video thumbnails I now understand why people hate them/him so much!
It resembles him, that is more or less what he looks like, but it feels incorrect to say an AI generated image is an image of him. Before AI, all his thumbnails included him making stupid faces like this (because it was very effective). Now he, and everyone else, just uses AI images resembling him making stupid faces (because it is unfortunately still somehow effective)
The social media algorithms have turned most people’s brain attention pathways into mush. Sometimes people get a shovel and a mop and start trying to dig their way through properly, but a lot of times they don’t get very far before it starts seeming impossible to make useful progress. It’s usually easier to just swim in the slop.
I mean yes and no. It looks like a AI-generated image of Mr.Beast. Which is what he uses in all his thumbnails because he shills his AI image generation site.
I was thinking exactly that. Like is that really his face or is this GenAI? It has to be GenAI right?
Either that or just terrible Photoshop. Seems to be what everyone is doing these days is just cartoonish Photoshop with bright colors for some reason.
I don’t watch any videos with these stupid faces and I hate when someone I follow suddenly starts doing it. ಠ_ಠ
Yeah, I’m gonna have to hide this post because it’s really creeping me out. It’s not even his video right? No way I’m clicking on that.
No, it’s not my video, and it’s not like I chose the thumbnail.
I’ll just say folks, this has left me with a “people just like to complain” vibes.
The video is excellent, and exposing how the internet is the wild west of companies lying, cheating and stealing.
Maybe you could engage with that, rather than the creator having to make a stupid thumbnail to keep the algorithm happy.
I know it’s not your video, I meant it’s not the creator’s face on the thumbnail, sorry about that. I really can’t stand the thumbnail and I can’t give the click especially for a topic I don’t really care about. Honey sucks. I learned that a while ago.
That being said, thank you very much for sharing the video.
I agree with most of it, but…
If you (a business) want to give out coupons only “internally” (usually only to employees), allowing ANYONE to redeem them is just stupid. That system is designed to be exploited. IMO, this is either a bug or very bad application planning.
And I have an idea for a “honey trap trap”… Whenever someone tries to redeem an “internal” coupon code in your shop, do this: If the person is employee, let them redeem it. If not, display “Attention! You have a dangerous spyware called Honey on your PC. Please uninstall it as soon as possible” with a link to this video…
Yeah, Honey is just exacerbating the inherent flaws in the system, and most of it can be dealt with having a limit of coupon usage and expiration of the coupons.
The thing which really upset me is advertisers pulling money from podcasts which have referral codes because of abuse from Honey. I’m not a fan of advertisements, but the referal codes were a simple solution since there’s no way to accurately measure if an ad was listened to. Honey causing advertisers to pull support for podcasts just pushes podcasts to closed ecosystems with more tracking and analytics, and takes money away from Podcasters.
To elaborate on this, since watching this video I’ve paid attention to how sponsorships provide discounts to viewers of creators, and it’s often via URLs. eg. service.com/creator_name, not with a discount code. That way, a website can track how many people went to the URL, not how many used whatever code is associated with that URL.
As an additional blocking measure, maybe a website could simply create a different listing for the same product instead of relying on discount codes, this different listing only being accessible via the creator links. I’m not sure if Honey would figure out how to navigate that as well or not, swapping the item in the cart or whatever.
I’d totally be interested to hear more on how companies deal with this, and if there are better ideas than the one I came up with as I typed this comment.
To elaborate on this, since watching this video I’ve paid attention to how sponsorships provide discounts to viewers of creators, and it’s often via URLs. eg. service.com/creator_name, not with a discount code. That way, a website can track how many people went to the URL, not how many used whatever code is associated with that URL.
Part 3 of the video series will probably show how Honey f*cked that system up, too. 😄
Finally! I was getting concerned with how long this was taking but see it was well worth the wait.
Somehow even worse than I ever imagined, and there’s still more to come.
I know we’re all jaded nerds on this corner of the internet that are well aware of “if you’re not paying, etc. etc.” but there’s real value in investigations like this. Just look at how massively damaging and long-running this scam has been. The future of cyber security and cyberwarfare can’t just be fought on tech knowledge alone, there’s a huge social component to it and a “You should’ve known; I told you so” attitude won’t help.
Spread the information and reach out to those closest to you to offer sincere and genuine help. Help your friends, family, and coworkers uninstall these extensions and all extensions like them. I feel like we’re really coming to a point where all these tech industries have overextended themselves to a point where they are immensely vulnerable. Capitalism demands line always go up and if we can even slightly slow or possibly reverse that trend it could pop the bubble for a lot of these corporations.
Feels like a historical rhyme to all the toolbars people would install into their browsers, only now it’s extensions.
I know we’re all jaded nerds on this corner of the internet that are well aware of “if you’re not paying, etc. etc.”
Haven’t watched this video but IIRC the real scandal was that the extension would change the cookie to identify Honey as your referrer so the content creators whose referral you actually used didn’t get paid. No matter how jaded you are, you can see that as the theft it is
It’s even worse than all that. The video is worth a watch if you have the time, he gets his hands on the leaked source code via accidental exposure on the Apple store, but then also covers other extensions that exhibit this same behavior as well as Microsoft Edge that just has it built into the browser. That’s right, even Microsoft is getting in on this by having their baseline browser without any extensions hijack the affiliate codes. It’s all so brazen …
I definitely will, I liked the last one! I just wanted to clear up what the scandal was - it wasn’t something anyone could think creators should have seen coming
The new video showcases how Honey extorted small stores into becoming a paying affiliate with Honey in order to be able to keep certain discounts out of Honey’s database.
Another thing even the most cynical person can easily see is extortion!
That was in the previous video
Honey is a great example of corporate greed and enshittification turned to 11. It started as a simple free extension for collecting and trying discount coupons, and turned to a massive greedy scam with enough financial backing to start blackmailing webshops for profit.
What’s worse, is this was the plan all along
Maybe? I do kinda doubt that as the original addon was benign and did exactly what it said on the tin to fix a problem one of the founders had themselves - finding and applying coupons automatically, and there isn’t an obvious way or need to monetise that.
But they gained a massive userbase very quickly, which attracted investors like vultures ready to tear profits from those users. So even if they originally didn’t plan to do much more than scan for coupons, after a few years of venture capital greed and tens of millions of investor money, they definitely were chasing profits by any means necessary. Money corrupts, after all.And by the time Paypal was willing to pay $4 billion for them in 2020, it was blatantly obvious they were doing a lot of shady shit because there just isn’t a way to monetise free users that well while staying above the board.
All of which is a damn shame, because the idea of an addon that scans and tries coupons for you is really simple and very useful :/
I thought honey disappeared like two years ago after some scandal.
This is the continuation of that scandal, from the same creator who documented the initial incident.
And boooyyyy did it get worse haha
such an incredible video. very thorough deep dive further exposing the honey scam.
I really had no intention to start my day with a video, but here I am. Was worth it though.
