You Should Know

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

That's just one issue, there's also the fact that they partner with stores to give worse coupons than are actually available, by letting them get affiliate money when doing so. And then advertising that they ALWAYS give you the best codes, while getting paid by stores not to do so....

Theres also another video coming up with stores that have been screwed over by Honey getting hold of codes that are supposed to be hidden/limited. (though that's honestly on the store, make your limited coupons actually limited to avoid this..) But he only teased this, there might be something wkse/more.

not a tldw

• Change affiliate tokens to their own
• Use clickbait and dark patterns to hide changing the tokens
• Have deals with vendors so they can set the max discount percentage
• Steal unknown discount codes from people entering them (Allegedly. I read it will be revealed in part 2 of that video)

Reductive take that doesn't really summarize

What kind of rat is fine with scammers?

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.

What makes it different is that it was perpetrated by Paypal, so nobody will see any consequences whatsoever.