• cum@lemmy.cafe
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    6 days ago

    I knew Honey was sketchy, but I just assumed it made it’s money from just data harvesting everything

    • Steak@lemmy.ca
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      6 days ago

      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

      • smayonak@lemmy.world
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        6 days ago

        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

      • frayedpickles@lemmy.cafe
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        6 days ago

        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.

      • JackbyDev@programming.dev
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        6 days ago

        how are they making enough money to pay all these YouTubers to promote them? Something wasn’t adding up

        1. Know average amount of revenue a customer gives you over some period of time
        2. Figure out what percentage of that you’re willing to lose
        3. Get a loan
        4. Use that loan to pay to advertise to get customers you wouldn’t have anyways
        5. 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.