YSK the original creators of the Honey extension are the ones who designed it that way from the getgo. The important thing is they are also the creators of the new Pie AdBlock extension that is being prolifically advertised on YouTube. And the Pie extension does the same damn things as the Honey extension, despite being an ad blocker.
I reckon if you’re stupid enough to click a thumbnail like that, you’re going to get scammed at some point anyway
Lol damn… yeah those thumbnails are pretty insufferable
Unironically, I have an estension to fix them. (Replaces thumbnails with a random video frame.)
DeArrow?
That’s it. There is also clickbait remover iirc, I used before but switched for some reason I don’t remember.
That thumbnail is for the video exposing honey.
Precisely the thumbnail that would prevent you from getting scammed.
But… ya, that is the worst possible style of thumbnail regardless.
So, what thumbnail do you suggest? Can you post a thumbnail with your ideal design in mind?
The point of a thumbnail is to attract viewers to your video, among the sea of millions of other videos that get posted every day. How do you propose they do that?
I would generally suggest using thumbnails that don’t provoke clicking through annoyance. Anything involving heavily edited human faces, stupid expressions, text that could be inferred from the title, or the classic huge red arrows, is in my opinion either trying to appeal to children or get people annoyed enough to click to see what the video is about.
Source - have spent way, way too much time on YouTube. PS do yourself a favour and install dearrow.
YouTubers seem to experiment with thumbnails and the fact is that more people click these type of thumbnails compared to more traditional ones.
Mr Beast gets lots of views, yet it could be argued all of his content is garbage - getting views is not at all an indicator of quality.
This is true, but it doesn’t change the facts that the channels with good content, which is highly subjective, also want to maximise the viewership.
Think of it like this, there is a subset of people that will click the video based on whether the title seems interesting and don’t care about the thumbnail; these people are always going to click. Then there is a subset who need these kind of thumbnails to drive clicks to their channel.
You can go and find countless YouTubers discussing this topic and how it really does affect the metrics of the channel. Do I like these thumbnails? Not really. Do they annoy me in anyway ? Not really. I care about the content and everything else is just superficial noise.
YouTube even allows A/B testing for thumbnails now so creators can know with far more certainty what style of thumbnail generates more clicks. I’ve even observed the A/B testing occuring as I’ve scrolled past a new video mentally marking it to watch later then later seen the same video with a different thumbnail
It’s not just Honey swapping the affiliate codes. Practically all the major coupon sites do it too. That’s why they require you to click on a coupon code to reveal it. When you click, they usually reveal the coupon code in a new tab, and helpfully redirect the current tab to the store, using their affiliate link.
It’s more obvious when websites do it though, since they can’t auto-close the tab like Honey does. They also don’t automatically pop up at checkout like Honey does.
I imagine some of the other coupon extensions do the exact same thing as Honey though.
No way, big YouTubers are all scumbags? Who would have thunk?
If you’d watched the video, you would know they were one of the ones getting scammed.
The issue is that many YouTubers do no due diligence for the products they promote to their high trust audience.
To be fair, this flew under the radar of most people for a long time, and it doesn’t seem like Honey has been very transparent to the influencers they partner with, either. I don’t think most of them could have possibly known what Honey was doing behind the scenes.
Agreed. I still find idiots trying to promote BetterHelp.
This isn’t reddit, but we also don’t go past the headline/picture here either.
Plz watch video next time so you don’t look like a fool again.
as a consumer why should I care if I still get a discount ?
isn’t this influencer back office bullshit and not my problem ?
it is your problem because they’re stealing your money too.
famous person code gives you 30% off a product. honey tells you it’s 10% and keeps your 20% for its pockets.
at least that’s how I understood it.
Yep and a great question that allows more people to learn. Please stop downvoting real questions
People are downvoting the tone, not the question. Calling it bullshit when it is seriously stealing money from other human beings and calling it “not my problem” under the assumption that it doesn’t matter if it affects others, displays absolute lack of empathy. Devaluing the question and making it a bad faith comment.
The coupons honey applies may not always be the best deal around. Honey works with online shops to only serve you the coupons that specific online shop wants you to see, causing you to be ripped off on occasion.
Simply put, there might be a 20% off coupon that can be applied to your cart, but because Honey is getting paid by the online shop, they are only going to show you at best the 5% off coupon. This makes Honey redundant, because neither Honey nor the online shop tell you when they are working together, which is why you can never trust honey to actually give you the best deal.
I used honey for a few years. in that time i think it found me a working code like twice.
You mean a free extension that claims to give me discounts seemingly out of the goodness of their hearts that also has access to every website I go to in the browser where it is installed is not exactly on the level? I’m shocked…well…not that shocked.
I tried it in a Firefox container once, while shopping for Xmas gifts. Not only did it want access to absolutely everything, none of the things I was looking to buy got any meaningful discount from it. Surely that would make one question how and why this thing is even still running, unless you don’t ask many questions.
People add extensions and then forget about them immediately, those are the true whales for these companies
I can’t believe that something too good to be true was too good to be true!
If you’re wondering how a browser extension got so much money to pay all these YouTubers for sponsorship, well, they’re not. They are literally stealing the money they paid the YouTubers right back from them by replacing their affiliate code with their own.
For people looking for replacements, Edge’s integratedauto coupon code works well enough. RetailMeNot does the same job and has also been around for a long time.
I am fine with them scamming influencers. I am not fine with them being paid by websites to not give the best deals
Topcashback consistently beats honey and others out (almost all competitors beat honey btw). And they pay out and have customer support. Easily thr best way to sell your personal data to a shadowy data broker
All TopCashback is doing is taking the commission and giving you some of it. They take less of a cut than other sites like Rakuten, which I guess they can do since they have fewer overheads (eg I’ve never seen a TV ad for them). I don’t think they’re selling any user data.
The permissions on their extension allows for them to read site data so they definitely could operate as a data broker. However their tos has no mention of any data sharing so you are likely correct that they just take a commission. Great site imo
I didn’t even realise they have an extension. I just use the site.
I also use CashbackMonitor.com, which lets you look up a site and see a list of all the cashback sites that support it. Sometimes, during promotions (like Black Friday), Rakuten’s cashback is temporarily higher than TopCashback’s.
Your okay with a large corporation stealing from the working class? Why is that? I’m sure only a very few of the make good money.
Maybe because anyone who calls themselves “influencers” are just as bad as corporate execs, but, oftentimes, more insistent/stupid in their shilling so people hate them more.
So you hate sales people in general
I don’t think they said that. However, I am. For the most part they are my enemy.
lol “influencers” are trash
Almost every one who has tried to sell to me yeah.
well, this segment of the working class are selling obvious scams to their audience, so its a funny ironic justice. People like Linus from LTT, only stopped because he found out they are scamming him as well, not just the audience.
Yep. and he decided to let the scam keep happening to everyone else by being absolutely silencio on the subject.
What kind of rat is fine with scammers?
Scamming the scammers is fun
I’m all for scamming scammers, but I’m quite happy to give a tip to YouTubers I watch by way of e-commerce commissions.
So all influencers are scammers…?
Always wondered why YTers were complaining about lack of commissions and this explains most of it
Google had that one browser extension that paid $1 per device type (phone, tablet, and computer, up to $3) per week. I signed up 5 accounts and had $10 every week for Starbucks, Amazon, and a few more but I only ever used it at those places. Especially Starbucks. I loved getting a free coffee and croissant every Friday and also getting points off those 🤣
However that time is over. Do not waste your time with money-making or saving extensions.
If you want extra money use UserTesting or Brandbee. Everything else is a waste of time.
The one Google extension I liked they killed years ago. It was Chrome to Phone. Basically when I was at my computer and saw an article I wanted to read later Id click it and it would send it to a new chrome tab on my phone. And when on break at work I could look at / read whatever it was.
That feature is now built into chrome.
OnePulse is legit too. It won’t make you rich, but you can earn a bit of cash on it. You’re limited to $20 a month, but it’s unlikely you’ll reach that every month
I just assumed it was a scam the moment I saw it. Just thought it was farming data for profit out in the open because everyone else dose that. They went above and beyond and made corpo malware.
Did Amazon kill off their smile thing yet? I don’t order enough on there to notice anymore but I always used to use it when I did
I think Amazon smile got axed in early 2023
I don’t know why they would kill off a tax ride off.
I can’t tell if you are serious.
American companies get tax breaks for charity and they all exploit the shit out of it.
True but they don’t make money with this, they still have to spend most of the money.
From your link is a great example:
To illustrate, suppose that the American Cancer Society is hosting a formal dance as a fund-raiser (the ACS is a certified charitable organization). Further suppose that the fair market value of a ticket to the dance is $75, and that the donor pays $375 to purchase a ticket. The donor may claim only a $300 deduction, because the amount contributed ($375) is reduced by the amount of the benefit that he received ($75, the fair market value of the ticket). This holds true even if the donor does not actually attend the dance.
The taxable income of the donor is reduced by $300. If the donor’s income was in the 35% income tax bracket both before and after the deduction, the donor’s tax liability (amount of taxes owed to the government) is reduced by $105.
I knew Honey was sketchy, but I just assumed it made it’s money from just data harvesting everything
Yeah I always felt something was off with honey. I never downloaded it for that reason, it was just kinda too good to be real or something. Like how are they making enough money to pay all these YouTubers to promote them? Something wasn’t adding up
how are they making enough money to pay all these YouTubers to promote them? Something wasn’t adding up
- Know average amount of revenue a customer gives you over some period of time
- Figure out what percentage of that you’re willing to lose
- Get a loan
- Use that loan to pay to advertise to get customers you wouldn’t have anyways
- After the period of time (mentioned in step one) passes you’ll have a profit if everything went correctly
It’s not really a mystery.
If you have multiple extensions installed honey always secretly steals the revenue from competitors without asking for consent. Most other extensions will ask if you want to activate cashback. Honey just disables their competitors and steals that affiliate revenue. It should be classified as malware
The thing is I think it’s feasible to do this in a non gross way…it’s essentially a search engine that just looks for promo codes, matches them against brands, and then tries them in rapid succession on the checkout screen. I think they would probably need humans to resolve the many 1-off issues (could work in a crowdsource manner like adblock filters) and a central registry to keep track of which ones fail, but it’s not a hugely complex problem.
Brian Dunning (Skeptoid podcast) went to prison for wire fraud for doing a similar stunt with EBay. Not sure what makes this any different.
What makes it different is that it was perpetrated by Paypal, so nobody will see any consequences whatsoever.
You act like PayPal and eBay aren’t in a codependent relationship. Has that changed? I mean I see PayPal as an option everywhere but I don’t use it because giving money to Paypal is like giving money to ticketmaster.
If anything, I imagine eBay is more dependent on PayPal, than vice versa
Do people not immediately google “How does X make money” or is that just me?
I didn’t Google it. I just figured, if it found me a 10% discount, the vendor would also send Honey some % of what I paid for the product.
I’m that cynical i just avoid anything being shilled by a YouTuber. I assume if they’re pushing it this hard it must be nefarious in some way and I spend no more time thinking about it.
I will drop my subs for channels that shill this stuff though once it becomes evident it’s shady.
I feel like I’ve searched it up for honey, but the search results said the same thing as the YouTubers shilling it. Didn’t download it anyway because of how many people were advertising it. Anyone who uses that much money to advertise can’t be getting their money in a reasonable manner.
The problem is that a lot of these startups don’t make money. The enshittification comes later, first stage is just burning through VC cash to establish market share.
No need to do even that. If a simple piece of software becomes a company, it’s 99% a scam.
I have, for some businesses I’ve wondered about. For example, I use the virtual cycling platform Zwift, which charges a monthly or annual fee to use. The biggest competitor, Rouvy, also charges a fee. Makes sense, it takes money to develop these things, buy and maintain servers, etc. The income and expenses are obvious. (Zwift does offer bike frames and wheels from real world brands; I assume the brands paid something to be included.)
Enter MyWhoosh. Free to use, so the income side is unclear. From some searching, they claim they’ll generate revenue via ads - but I doubt that would generate enough to support the platform.
The company is based out of Abu Dhabi, so I assume it’s really sportswashing - they’re just dumping a bunch of money into it and not really caring that it isn’t making money (at least for now).
I’m sticking with Zwift (in part because I have it working under Linux and Wine).
They do, but then a trusted “insider” youtuber or podcaster who they have a years long parasocial relationship with “signs off” on the product and the person says to themselves, “X person has integrity and they are very smart, they wouldn’t put their name on Y unless they did a lot of homework, so I don’t have to.”
And life is difficult, complicated and overwhelming, so you can’t really blame “normal” folks for putting the same faith they’d put into their tech saavy nephew into these personalities. The influencers should pause though and accept that if they can’t enthusiastically describe the reason a thing is actually legitimate, they should refrain from endorsing it or accept part of the blame for misleading people.
Fuck PayPal and its related entities and all executives past, present and future. And I guess fuck you too now, Will Ferrell - you cosigned Mel Gibson in whatever the fuck that daddy movie series was and now you’re the face of these people? The “PayPal mafia” (cringe) literally just bought the US election. I know you need to bankroll a lot of family trips to Sweden, but you h ave too much obviously dirty money now, Will. Hard to chuckle at your comedies now, and that’s a bummer.
You don’t seem like you’re ok.
Cybertruck breakdown?
It is about Honey hijacking the referrals, which wasn’t known until a youtuber made a video about it (or at least not widely known)
This is why I don’t trust Brave Browser. They did this in the past. Well, I don’t know if they replaced referrals but they added them when they weren’t there.
In the entire time I used Honey, I never once got a valid coupon code for literally anything. Pretty sure they scraped a ton of my browsing data though.
Same here. Newer found a single coupon for me. I uninstalled it a few months ago, not because I thought it was sketchy, but because I figured it must be better at finding discounts for things that I don’t shop for online, like shoes and pizzas or something.
I don’t shop for online, like shoes and pizzas
How do you shop for pizza not-online? Bro still going with pizzas brochures? Respect bro. If you top that off ny ordering by landline, it’d be perfect.
But yeah I had similar thoughts on Honey, never installed and now I think I definitely won’t. Thx 4 i Lemmy
Why would you need to order pizza online? Not everyone wants to pay fees for the “convenience” of paying more for the food and having to type in my credit card info myself. You call them up, you get a better price, and you pay when you get there.
Why would you need to ordering pizza, period?
Food ordering apps aren’t convenient as fuck and I dare you to argued against that.
If you live in a bigger city and have trusty restaurant’s with trusty service, yeah, call em. I do for two of my trusty places, but theyre rather far and expensive from where I now live. And the places around here change like everyone year or two. So yeah.
Most people use apps.
Food ordering apps aren’t convenient as fuck
I agree. Nothing convenient about overpaying to entrust your food to underpaid, unvetted delivery workers
God I hate this new phone the screen is just the tiniest bit too small and I keep hitting the left most suggestion instead of the middle one, turning ares into aren’ts and woulds into wouldn’ts.
I’m sure you know what I meant.
Pretending they aren’t massively popular exactly because they make the whole thing easier and more comfortable (browsing menus you know are up to date, being able to specify allergies as much as you want, etc) would be incredibly naive.
Is capitalism using it aa a possibility to exploit even more? Yes. Does that suck balls? Yes. But does is the tech itself shit? No.
Capitalism enshittifies everything. Automation isn’t cursed at because the current economic system mean that the working classes will get less, and that is a bad thing. The technology isn’t. So the tech isn’t the issue. Capitalism is.
browsing menus you know are up to date
A quick web search shows plenty of anecdotes to the contrary.
being able to specify allergies as much as you want
And you trust that?? If I had a serious food allergy I would absolutely NOT trust that a food delivery service would communicate those effectively given how much they push restaurants around, up to and including adding restaurants without their knowledge or consent.
I suppose in the strictest sense, sure, these apps are convenient, but you sure are paying a lot for it, and some restaurants charge extra for it on top of the fees, and the delivery folks aren’t getting a fair cut of the fees. Most of the fees go to big tech.
I use them only when it’s free (ie someone else is paying for it). I hate them so much. They are not more convenient, they increase the price by 100% and they actively hurt people and small businesses.
Are you aware that there are other chrome extensions that offer more coupons for a ton of online stores? Dontpayfull Automatic Coupons or Retailmenot always have plenty of coupons available. I don’t understand why everyone is stuck on Honey, which has been of very low quality in recent years.
I need to check this out, sounds pretty interesting to me. I never tried Honey because it seemed way too shady!
