Follow up video from MegaLag on the Honey scandal.
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
I hate them too, but that style of thumbnail has been a major YT thing for like a decade. Avoid them like the plague, myself, and even mark them as “not interested”, “don’t recommend channel” for the more annoying ones. Probably ain’t much of an impact, but at least teaching the algo what not to show me.
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.
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 :/
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.
Honestly thats my experience with most codes, in general.
Which is why those deal sites that give you codes are ultimately pointless, especially since they started making super specifically regional codes and other excessively extreme limitations that render it useless for everyone but one random guy that lives in a blue barn to the north east of a pig farm.
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
Oh, another MegaLag video about the honey situation.
Last time this happened, LTT had a psychotic meltdown and sic’d his base on GamersNexus for…reasons?
