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.
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.
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.
- 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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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-...
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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?
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.
42 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 70.8 ms ] threadYou'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.
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.
- 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.
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).
"Who gets a kickback on this toothbrush" is a much MUCH less important question than "do you pollute the air we are all breathing".
Making a product to explicitly skirt agreements while working for a corporation is ... a choice
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.
Yes, thank you for making the web objectively worse for everyone. Yo should feel bad.
First comes a full stomach, then comes ethics.
“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.
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
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-... )
I mean, fraud in online advertising? Say it ain't so!
The same could be said about yt-dlp. They know what they are doing youtube doesn't like. But yt-dlp itself is legal.
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.
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.
https://www.benedelman.org/applovin-my-disclosures/