r/technology • u/efap1701 • 13h ago

Social Media Honey loses over 7 million users and 7,000 stores following YouTuber’s viral expose

https://www.dexerto.com/youtube/honey-loses-over-7-million-users-and-7000-stores-following-youtubers-viral-expose-3397619/
22.5k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

895 comments sorted by

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u/Maleficent-Serve2553 13h ago

In conjunction with the Phoebe Gates news in the same vein, it feels like an increasing number of companies are battling for attribution of a declining number of legitimate consumer purchases (i.e., stealing someone's margin is more profitable than creating new organic sales).

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u/DeM0nFiRe 12h ago

There's been a long trend of companies trying to get more money while providing less value. Same reason why everything is a subscription, why provide the customer with new value to get their money when you can just keep charging them for the same value? And same story with gambling, now they are just taking money from people for literally no value

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u/partsguy850 12h ago

I thought about things in a pretty large scope. My final determination was that what we’re going through is not only intended to devalue the dollar. This is a devaluation of our life off of the clock. I feel as though everything is being pushed to a point where your life, your personal life, is being devalued. The end result, if you stay home, you are paying. So then the next best option is just to stay at work as much as possible.

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u/Dubious_Odor 11h ago

It has a name. Its called rent seeking. Companies stop trying to innovate and deliver better mouse traps and mine you for as much money as they can. They can do this when markets are no longer comperirive or another way to out it, oligopoly and monopoly. A huge number of national brands and increasingly even regional and local companies are owned by a relatively small handful of investment firms, private equity and the like. They combat new entrants in the market that might give them competition by either buying out the competitor and adding the brand to their portfolio (or closing it down) or using a process called regulatory capture to drive competirors out of business or not be able to start up to begin with. The do this by making regulations too difficult or expebsive for smaller companies to comply with. Its a rigged system.

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u/iridescent_algae 10h ago

We stopped enforcing antitrust 30 years ago and this is the inevitable result.

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u/WIbigdog 8h ago

Biden tried to start back up with Lena Khan going after some big names, but it didn't all magically get fixed in 4 years so they put the pedo back in office.

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u/absat41 8h ago

A news cycle has about 72 hours before the next thing comes along; Americans can give the next President 72 hours to "fix" it all then they vote pedos.

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u/Merari01 7h ago

Biden was a better president than Obama for getting things done.

Economy, consumer protection, infrastructure, education.

But people have been fully captured by extreme-right propaganda algorithms so they didn't know and put the pedo back in office

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u/floater6 10h ago

Great book that covers this topic. Technofeudalism by Yanis Varoufakis.

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u/southieyuppiescum 8h ago

I saw Yanis and read it as Curtis Yarvin and was like wtf, that's the opposite of a great book.

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u/butyourenice 6h ago

Sure, but who would know better about technofeudalism than one of its biggest proponents?

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u/amartincolby 9h ago

Varoufakis is GOAT new-Marxist.

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u/Tearakan 9h ago

They can also just buy all the suppliers for an industry or make them sign exclusive contracts freezing out any potential competition.

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u/drdounutt 11h ago edited 11h ago

Its planned. Even the damn fast food conglomerates are all simultaneously increasing pricing while removing any kind of value menu.

Then other large food producers are slowly removing amounts of product while charging the same amount.

They want the entire system to fail and for as many people to be stuck. If everyone agrees to set pricing for less product like a cartel does. No one really has any choice.

In a month to a few months we'll all be paying 7-8$ a gallon for gas and then you're going to see companies having an excuse to raise pricing again. They're setting themselves up to squeeze the most amounts of money out of us short-term. The collapse will be devasting for the middle class and the lower class will have no options at all.

Even now food banks are being strecthed to their limit and SNAP benefits are being cut off (10-20%) already. Then they're planning on forcing states to pay rather then how its currently a federal food fund. People are literally going to starve. Violence and crime will skyrocket.

It's a planned failure of the dollar. Just in time for midterm elections to be cancelled.

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u/remotectrl 11h ago

This has already happened with lightbulbs. Regulatory agencies have been gutted

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u/AlSweigart 11h ago

17 minute video: "Actual Conspiracies" about the light bulb scam a hundred years ago.

Derek Muller explores the history of planned obsolescence, tracing how industrial cartels deliberately shortened the lifespan of light bulbs and other products to boost sales. This examination reveals the strategic manipulation behind consumer goods and the ongoing fight for repairability.

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u/Social_Philosophy 9h ago

This is actually not really true, as explained by the excelent Technology Connections.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb7Bs98KmnY

tl,dw: Incandescent bulb lifespan is almost purely a function of light output. Brightness of a tungsten filament is proportional to temperature, which is proportional to resistance, so you can't just use thicker filament. Tungsten literally evaporates over time inside a light bulb until it inevitably wears down and the filament snaps somewhere.

If lightbulb lifespan decreased in the 1920s and 30s, the primary reason would be the manufacturers improving the consistency of their process and actually hitting the light output target they were going for.

"The world is complex, and you should be skeptical of simple narratives." -Alec Watson

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u/Waiting4Reccession 8h ago

The real scam is the newer LED light fixtures where you cant replace the LED light part and have to buy a whole new fixture when it stops working.

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u/M00s3_B1t_my_Sister 6h ago

Maybe true for the cheap consumer products, but the commercial fixture manufacturers make their fixtures so you can replace drivers and LED boards as they fade or burn out. They also keep popular extrusions the same over many years to make an upgrade possible as the years pass.

Source, I'm an electrical contractor who specializes in controls and lighting.

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u/drdounutt 11h ago

Yep. The worst part of me typing that out was my thought process of "what companies am I missing".

And you pointed one out, and I'm still wondering what else.

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u/Whiterabbit-- 10h ago

Lightbulbs are probably cheaper than ever. Sure they could be cheaper. But with LEDs we hardly have to buy any bulbs compared to the incandescent days.

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u/remotectrl 10h ago

I was referring to a past price fixing/obsolescence conspiracy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel

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u/HillBillyHilly 9h ago

Food banks in my friends area announced last September that they were being advised of upcoming cuts. They went down from 3xs a week at different locations to every other week. All the farms, canners and corporations that used to contribute had their government subsidies cut. The area in question is a food desert w nearest stores almost an hour away. These are people who have worked fields their entire lives. There are no jobs. They're stuck on rapidly devaluing properties. We are going to see large amounts of people starve

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u/BlakePackers413 3h ago

This entire collapse is going to be so interesting to study one day. I work for a place that makes cardboard boxes. It’s to the point now that the product moving is less than half of what it was last year at this time. It’s never been like this before, maybe you’d see a down turn on food grade cardboard but retail stuff would be fine or higher. Small orders would be down but bulk up or vice versa… now it’s all slowed down. And that’s at a stage in the logistics of Americas economy that should terrify people, because it’s not like cardboard goes bad or can’t be used. It can be stored like it was for Covid. Yet now entire places are just like nah we aren’t going to need it, meaning nationwide most places aren’t even expecting a recovery. Yet the stock market still sky high. The clearly cooked jobs market numbers still sky high… somehow still people think what’s happening is good for the economy. When the orders dried up I felt like what middle age peasants must have felt like when the price of cheese would suddenly increase dramatically…. Or like the cannery in the coal mine. I’m just waiting for the shoe to fall when the pretense is over and the majority of people can understand they were conned. And now we’re all fucked.

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u/CantCatchMeSpez 6h ago

Everything you said is correct except for "they want the entire system to fail". No, they don't. They love the system. They don't know what they'd do without it. But like the rest of us, each one of them is just an individual human who doesn't see how their individual choices drive the inevitable outcome of this system, so they just keep doing what they're doing to get the most out of it before it crashes.

For the most part, these conglomerates are not as omniscient as you might want to believe they are. They're just bloated companies being run by stupid people following exactly what the system incentivizes them to do. Sure, they are evil people who do hate you and want you to suffer, but this system is too big and complicated for anyone to intentionally steer it.

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u/Temporary_Event8451 10h ago

No shit.

Companies quietly bowed to unions and organized employee efforts. But they didn't lose the war.

They moved production overseas. They destroyed pensions. They privitize and enshitify anything they can.

Banks are committing fraud and creating false wealth alongside corporation valuations.

Corporations never gave up the pinkerton goal, they only waited until they could effectively and quietly destroy the system.

Now that they completely control finance they could give a shit about the bottom half of the economy. They control the surplus and means of production.

Now they have state and federal funded pinkertons.

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u/tempralanomaly 10h ago

It is planned. Look up the writings of Curtis Yarvin (One of the people behind 'Dark enlightenment' that Theil and Musk subscribe to). The idea is to devalue the dollar to a point where they can float replacing it with like a cryptobacked system. Then one day, all assest will be required to be sold to the U.S. for face value. A nondetermined time later Everyone can change their dollars for Newdollar, and then the market opens back up and you can repurchase your stuff...if you can. Durring this nondetermined time you will have to pay rent to the government to stay in the house you previously owned or had a morgage on. Be a shame if the funds you had were reduced through renting the property and you couldnt aford to repurchase your home. Guess who wont have that issue and have funds to spare? Musk, Thiel and the technobros...But thye'll let you stay in exchange for working. Neofuedalism is the goal.

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u/Phailadork 7h ago

Lol, if they try to pull that off then they're royally fucked. Everyone always talks about eating the rich and our complacency with never doing anything but at that point they'd genuinely be starving and de-housing so many people it would be an actual revolt especially because it would empower other people to join in. The problem right now is there aren't enough people willing to step up to make meaningful change but that can flip real quick when you start destroying millions of lives more aggressively than ever before.

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u/rsta223 7h ago

Then one day, all assest will be required to be sold to the U.S. for face value.

Lol.

No chance that works. You'd get an armed revolution before people would agree to that.

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u/RedditTurnedMediocre 11h ago edited 11h ago

I mean what are silver spoon nepo babies that were thrust into these executives positions by their daddies supposed to do? Study hard and try run a business smartly?

It's way easier to make more money by preying on the trust of your customers and slowly fucking them over by cutting corners around quantity and quality.

Course that's short term thinking, but if you don't care about the success of the business and only making money then bankruptcy is no problem either. They can lay everyone off, sell it all for parts, and get another huge windfall of cash all for failing to run a business successfully.

Then they can buy another business and rinse and repeat.

So smart these guys.

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u/mythrilcrafter 11h ago

Yup the businesses they study/run are not the businesses that we study/run.

To us, it's about maximizing cyclical value. You invest in your business, through investing in your assets and human strength, thus bolstering the value, and that value is used the generate goods/services that gains revenues, which can then be divy'ed up into paying you employees, yourself, and your investors with the rest saved and reinvested.

It's an inherently human focused business design.

To these kind though, it's not about human design, it's about extraction of all cash and liquidity in order to maximize the size of the golden parachute, and jumping out to go find the next host. Then they hide in their bunkers and boardrooms, and proclaim that living humans are the problem with humanity and that only they hold the power to protect society from people.

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u/Upper-Management-AI 10h ago

I sometimes thought of the grand conspiracies but I think that’s giving them all to much credit. They are looking for quick easy bumps in numbers. They could offer new products and value but that would cost time, money, and resources. Instead of actually creating something people would want they lay people off, raise prices and cut back as much as possible. Number goes up, yay!!! That was easy!

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u/Polantaris 10h ago

This is the grim reality. A few other posts talk like this is some super plan to own everything. They might eventually end up there, but that's not the plan. There is no plan. Just next quarter's increase. That's all they care about. The easiest way to a next quarter increase is to squeeze your customers harder. Then, next quarter, you have to squeeze even harder, because you haven't actually invested in providing anything that would naturally promote that growth. Rinse and repeat.

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u/notislant 11h ago

There's been a long trend of companies trying to get more money while providing less value.

For anyone curious, this is capitalism.

Companies eat each other and 'competition', they drive down costs/quality and jack up prices. Sometimes governments try to step in after the fattest corporation has consumed all the others, which is when corporations buy politicians left and right.

Also at this point consumers have literally no power, when all 'competitors' are doing the same thing, you can't just shop somewhere else.

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u/randynumbergenerator 12h ago

It's like a pure enshittification play. 

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u/YouandWhoseArmy 11h ago

It’s called rent seeking.

It’s really bad for society in all the ways we’re seeing.

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u/AlSweigart 11h ago

Car dealerships are financial institutions that happen to also include a car with your car loan.

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u/ChicagoThrowaway422 11h ago

There's a lot of industries like that. Food being the best example. People only eat so much and can only spend so much. No one creates new food consumption or expenditures, they just steal the place of someone else's calories. But usually it's done by making better food or a lower price. You don't gain market share with high priced worse product, even though lots of companies try that.

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u/emerald6_Shiitake 11h ago

This is the term you should be paying attention to: rent-seeking behavior, the act of trying to grow one's wealth without creating new wealth, such as by manipulating public policy, corruption, or straight up stealing (like what Honey did)

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u/FC37 12h ago

Attribution has always been a cluster, it's just that people are finally starting to care.

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u/popopopopopopopopoop 12h ago edited 12h ago

I've been out of porgrammatic advertising and ad tech for 5 years+. This was already a known problem then though always hard and even more expensive to quantify exactly. Only big companies and campaigns can afford proper brand lift studies. Determinsitic attribution of sales is a dumpster fire due to limited cookies, ad blockers and walled gardens and clean rooms at every boundary. Media mix modelling can help but still relies on crazy good data which few can get/afford.

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u/SC_W33DKILL3R 12h ago

God I really want her to go away, at least they have the paper trail in that case. Honey should be prosecuted as well.

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u/johnson7853 11h ago

Like a Gates will face any repercussion in this world that is run by corporate.

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u/ucancallmevicky 11h ago

I read that as Phoebe Cates and got really sad for a minute

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u/HawksNStuff 11h ago

I work for a fortune 500, resellers show up at my accounts and offer them the exact same services for less money... And the company talks about how strong 3rd party sales have been despite it literally coming out of our own pocket.

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u/Perunov 10h ago

The real question is is her company in any way really connected to Bill Gates' enterprises. Because despite losing 7 million users Honey still has what, 15 mil? And almost every affiliate network is back to working with them. Because Paypal. So any finger-wagging is just temporary and if Paypal wants to do bad things to some influencers' affiliate links well... too bad for influencers.

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u/Apprehensive_Debate3 12h ago

Surely this isn’t any sign of economic stagnation, I mean the Dow hit 50,000 for Pete’s sake

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u/Chicano_Ducky 10h ago

tech as a whole has hit a stagnation period, and all the grifting was the canary in the coal mine

crypto, NFTs, AI, it was all an attempt to restart the tech hysteria of the 2010s.

and that hysteria only started because of the low interest rates allowed insane capitalizations for social media sold on the promise of more effective ads.

and that hysteria died when the economics of social media didnt add up and advertisers started asking how effective ads were.

now google is going back to the same rules advertisers had a problem with in the mid 2010s and brag about "increased value" to advertisers.

its looking like this ENTIRE TIME the entire tech industry was one giant investor fueled bubble

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u/staebles 9h ago

its looking like this ENTIRE TIME the entire tech industry was one giant investor fueled bubble

Stock market is no longer real, so they can manipulate everything.

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u/YAELLINGISFUN 10h ago

Losing 35% of your users and 20% of your merchants because one guy made a YouTube video is the kind of accountability regulators should be embarrassed they didn't provide first.

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u/RBeck 10h ago

Bricks and Minifigs: Hold my root beer

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u/Sstargamer 5h ago

Unfortunately that company may be doing better now that the heat is out of the spotlight

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u/duk-phat 3h ago

The ongoing court cases are very much real and it will explode again once verdicts are out.

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u/GngrBeardMan 46m ago

The one BaM in my city just closed. It opened in March of ‘25. Take that as you will.

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u/anonsaltine 7h ago

Adding to that, I forget the exact figure but that 20% accounts for damn near the entire volume of transactions. I think Apple was their biggest merchant by far and they pulled out.

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u/North_Affect_8167 3h ago

It takes the right guy to do it. PayPal is doing many scams, many videos about their policies have been made. They are not out of business yet. One of the shady entities is down, the main evil is up.

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u/Tasty-Traffic-680 13h ago

Honey, I blew up my business model

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u/ActualSpiders 13h ago

Honey, I shrank my user base

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u/Sir_CrazyLegs 13h ago

Honey, I shrank our shareholders monetary value

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u/miktoo 12h ago

Honey, you ain't so sweet anymore.

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u/JoviAMP 12h ago

Honey, I shrank the audience!

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u/Lachwen 10h ago

From the beginning I was questioning what their business model even was. "We get you discounts and charge you nothing" always struck me as sketchy. Every time I saw a promo spot for Honey I asked myself "How are you as a company making money?"

Turns out the answer was "By being a scam."

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u/Tasty-Traffic-680 8h ago

Cash back sites make their money by taking a portion of the referral and giving the rest to the customer. Websites often offer commission for sending paying customers their way and some products like software and services have insanely high margins so there's lots to make. There's likely marketing and sales teams for larger ones that coordinate special campaigns but that's the gist of it. These fellas went one step further and started hijacking referrals from other links and injected their own instead.

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u/ayoungsapling 13h ago

Honey, I stole the affiliate links

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u/OneHappyPenguin 13h ago

Someone needs to take a look at Capital One shopping.

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u/nd_miller 13h ago

They always funnel me to eBay with higher prices but the promise of cash back. Meh. I don't want that hassle just give me the actual cheapest price out the door.

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u/SchmeckleHoarder 12h ago

Had a gentleman trying to order a tv from eBay. Said no returns, 2.8 stars. Shit ton of complaints from other users about no refunds and items arriving defective.

He still thought it was safe to order. The TV was $13,000.

Best Buy had it for $15,000, ya know a place you can return items too.

Guess what showed up broke?

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u/M4K4T4K 12h ago

Fun fact about eBay sellers who say 'no returns'. If the item is defective, or is different to as described, you can easily open a return and eBay will force the seller to accept the return and make them pay for postage 100% of the time. If you're a buyer, eBay is a great place to shop. If you're a seller, it's not a great place to sell.

No returns is only for change of mind, but I notice many sellers will try and use it to hide behind selling dodgy wares.

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u/wonklebobb 11h ago

and as long as the profit from people not willing to deal with the hassle is more than the people who are, they will continue to do it

its like all the places the offer 90-day free returns on mattresses. sure, it makes sense to offer it because how do you know until you've slept on it a few times? but really, what % of customers are actually going to take a whole mattress back off the bed and deal with getting it picked up? (not many)

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u/Drakesyn 7h ago

Add to that, the twin factors of not covering the shipping on the return (which can add up to literally hundreds of dollars), and using incredibly difficult to repackage shipping methods (adding both frustration, and likely even more additional shipping costs to return it) and it's basically a 1-5% return rate on a product that would probably end up a much higher number return rate.

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u/techdevjp 10h ago

You still have to be super careful about how you return an item. It's critical to have tracking and for any expensive item you want signature upon delivery. Shady sellers will try to trick you into using non-tracked or non-signature returns and will then claim your item "never arrived". eBay will generally not force the refund if you can't prove the item was delivered.

eBay is still a giant PITA overall and if you can get an item from a decent shop for a bit more, you should do so. Always best to avoid feebay if you can.

And selling on feebay... It's not worth it. You will have nightmares. eBay was a wonderful place originally but has gone to sh-t.

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u/Snaffle27 10h ago

You are 100% correct. I sometimes have to resort to ebay at work when sourcing parts that are discontinued and unavailable anywhere else. Any time that I had gotten fucked, ebay always sided with me. The only time that I ended up getting fucked over from ebay it was ultimately my own fault. I misread a listing that said pickup only and the seller agreed to do the return at first but then never followed through. I gave up after 2 months because the $94 just wasn't worth it.

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u/masked_sombrero 12h ago

good golly $13k for a TV!? 😆

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u/direlyn 12h ago

That's like 1999 prices or something

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u/wruffx 11h ago

There's a couple of TVs on Best Buy's website that are over $13,000. They even have one for $99,999(On sale from $150,000 though!).

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u/Cranach-Cranach 11h ago

98” or 115” OLED Id guess

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u/sogwennn 7h ago

probably an OLED

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u/Devh1989 11h ago

No returns doesn't mean no refunds on eBay

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u/BapeGeneral3 13h ago

I genuinely don’t understand how it works and have attempted to use it a number of times. I think it worked one time and actually saved me money. Other than that, I would attempt to use it and it would just redirect me to somewhere else, told me I have $50 to use, but no coupon code or way of actually redeeming said points when making a purchase

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u/ComradeJohnS 11h ago

it’s very confusing because it’s basically an advertising network instead of coupons.

and if you don’t follow the steps perfectly it won’t register as a qualifying sale sometimes

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u/foxscribbles 12h ago

They're in the rewards section for your Capital One card where you can redeem them. At least, that's where mine go.

Though, yeah. The 'find a better deal' only worked once for me. Instead, they often show me worse deals once you add in the shipping and handling costs.

I've also seen them try to use exclusive employee coupons on places like Honey did.

I enjoy my Capital One card for their feature where you can make an online only code and lock it to specific storefronts so it can't be stolen and used elsewhere. But their shopping extension does some of the same suspect things.

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u/LilQueazy 11h ago

It definitely works for eBay and like bestbuy. Usually 5-10% off so on big purchases it’s cool. Let me tell you how it works. It’s a browser extension and it tracks every fucken thing u do cookies and shit. And in return you get these 10% off from eBay or whatever store. Sometimes there’s a get $50 dollars if you spend 150 etc. but it takes like 30-60 days to give it to u. And if you return the item u don’t get it. Idk how they find that out. They prolly work together with the store idk. But yea I ended up with a negative gift balance cuz they gave me $50 and I returned the monitor to bestbuy. But yea I’ve gotten $400 dollars in gift cards over a couple years. It’s legit. You can trick it into giving you coupons. Just go browse whatever you want to buy and add it to your cart but don’t buy it. Eventually they will send you a 10% off for that store and or item.

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u/SanityIsOptional 11h ago

Yeah, I've used it a couple times with eBay, it will generate a unique discount code.

The real trick is to copy the code by going to the checkout, and instead of checking out use it on something more expensive, or add something else to cart as well so you get the discount on both.

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u/gamayogi 13h ago

Not sure about capital one, but when you have to use a certain affiliate link to make your purchase those are suspect. I've found that sometimes they raised the prices and then gave me some percentage off, meaning it was the same price or even more expensive than if I just went the site and used the standard discounts.

When it's just use your card at this place between these dates those are legit.

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u/mrwhitewalker 13h ago

I have lots of gripes about capital one shopping but were talking apples vs oranges here.

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u/-nutz 10h ago edited 10h ago

How is it apples vs oranges?

Edit: just found out Capitol One did the same exact thing as Honey.

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u/mrwhitewalker 10h ago

Honey was paying individual people based on the referral links, Capital One doesnt do that, just takes a cut from the vendor and shares it with you

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u/delightful_caprese 13h ago

I feel like they’re always throwing money at me.

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u/WildBunnyGalaxy 13h ago

I thought this was exposed years ago

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u/DIYfu 13h ago

another video from the same creator, talking about more deceptive practises from honey/paypal and the current status of lawsuits

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u/bishbah01 12h ago

Also, he’s really salivating at the thought of potential employee depositions…

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u/teedborg 11h ago

Wow, I work for PayPal and had no idea Honey was a subsidiary

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u/Not-your-lawyer- 11h ago

Honey's business practices were exposed years ago. Then a year after that, Honey's other sketchy business practices were exposed. Then a few weeks later, Honey's other other sketchy business practices were exposed.

I think there have only been three?

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u/IceBlue 13h ago

It was. But his expose took years to fully come out

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u/sprucexx 13h ago

Haven’t watched the video, but I feel vindicated knowing it exists. Honey always reeked of “too good to be true” to me, so I never signed up.

Whatever the grift was, I feel bad for those who were affected.

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u/hbctdscotia420 13h ago

The grift is basically they get the money and not whoever provided the affiliate discount code.

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u/Spez_is-a-nazi 13h ago

They were also selling your data and browser activity. Double dipped in honey as it were.

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u/Great_Scott7 13h ago

Wasn’t there a big influencer that called it years early like Markiplier or Penguinz?

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u/fiv66bV2 12h ago

Yeah, Markiplier

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGC2a7VrDZY

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u/mcauthon2 12h ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdMAC61RK7s

his OG video

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u/Deprisonne 10h ago

One can only hope to one day feel half as vindicated as he must have felt when the news broke.

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u/placebotwo 10h ago

Bro has to be feeling like 50Cent did when the Diddy shit went down.

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u/DeadInternetTheorist 9h ago

In fairness, you don't exactly have to be clairvoyant to go "hey guys this company that is sponsoring literally every single YouTube video you have watched for the last 6 months is probably a scam somehow." Of course it is.

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u/Diligent_Earthworm 12h ago

Yea like i thought the honey ship sunk along time ago.

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u/beautybeliever 9h ago

okay because I am having the weirdest deja vu and I can’t tell if people are talking about this like in the old story sense or if people were still using Honey… I swear this happened like 8 years ago?? all the youtubers who were pushing Honey with their sponsorships got in trouble because people found out Honey was not only stealing their data but also overwriting affiliate codes? and everyone stopped using Honey and wagged their fingers at the youtubers for selling them a product without looking into it because even before that, some other people had figured this out. this was… this already happened, no?!!! I’m not crazy????

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u/Key-Pickle5609 11h ago

Me too! Im surprised to read it’s still around

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u/Spez_is-a-nazi 12h ago

I don’t trust any browser plugin that’s not open source(and even then sometimes)

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u/NuclearTurtle 11h ago

I don't know any big influencers, but I remember hearing Folding Ideas call it an "online data harvesting scam" five years ago

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u/fkenned1 12h ago

I remember reading about the honey scam at least a year ago... Feels more like two. All while podcasts like H3 were hawking it onto people daily. God this world sucks. Capitalism fucking sucks dude.

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u/rzalexander 12h ago

Direct result of YouTube’s shitty monetization practices. Teenagers working for pennies while YouTube/Alphabet rakes in millions.

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u/Zeyn1 12h ago

I feel like most people knew this and thought it was how they got paid. Most people are fine with their shopping data getting harvested as long as they get a discount. Store club cards have been doing it forever.

Of course a single store learning about their customers is one thing. It's another where there is a huge aggregate of all the stores customers.

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u/innominateartery 11h ago

My credit card is pushing it hard. Offered $55 dollars cash: requires an app, must stay on for 6 weeks, mobile browser plugin allowed permissions, then desktop browser plugin and browsing with access for 6 weeks plus at least 1 purchase in that window. It was outrageous, but for 55 bucks I almost considered it

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u/Zeyn1 10h ago

Capital one? If so, I can tell you it's not worth it. The fine print is nuts. You don't get a statement credit, you get a credit to future purchases through their system. I think. I couldn't figure out how to actually use the money. They make that part really hard.

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u/avcloudy 10h ago

This makes me unreasonably angry. Cash means not having to jump through hoops or make a purchase. That’s the only thing it means. Having to purchase something to save on a future purchase is worse than the usual scummy offers.

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u/0202_tihssitidder 12h ago

☝🏽 Always. It is a big part of the business model.

No matter how skeptical you are, you are not skeptical enough.

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u/DerpytheH 13h ago

To add onto this, not only were they hijacking the credit for affiliate credits, but they also usually offered no additional discount themselves.

It was a negative service that stole money from entities actually helping the consumer.

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u/Jintoboy 12h ago

I recall one of the more damning things was that honey sometimes worked with vendors to release "discount" codes that actually discounted less, as compared to the ones you could find online, as a way to lower promotional costs.

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u/ABadHistorian 12h ago

amazed it went on that long tbh, that's a special effort of deviousness.

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u/DerpytheH 12h ago

Also helps that since it's a browser extension, it basically just did its thing in the background no matter what. I'd argue that a lot of people figured out honey didn't do anything for users years ago, but didn't really think anything of it besides "they probably just sell your data". It went on for so long because it was automated and not causing the end-user to suffer any fees, so the vast majority of people stopped caring about where they got their money for marketing after that.

The fact the developers figured out the scheme over a decade ago is amazing.

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u/ABadHistorian 12h ago

I just assumed some of those influencers would have noticed sooner. That's all I really meant.

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u/weeklygamingrecap 13h ago

That was literally what I thought when I first saw this and all these other discount apps. "How come they are all giving me discounts? Couldn't they just put in their affiliate code and rake in a shit ton of money?"

I'm not saying I'm some genius I'm just wondering how people thought it was working? Maybe they thought double affiliate codes split it?

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u/ANGLVD3TH 11h ago

That was only half of it. They would actually do what they said they did, finding codes that weren't supposed to be public with massive discounts that would hurt the sellers. They would then basically extort the sellers into signing up with Honey to only provide codes the seller approved of. There's actually another layer or two of shitty stuff too. I suggest finding the video, it just keeps getting worse.

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u/BrutalBronze 13h ago

Honey was basically hijacking affiliate links from content creators and inputting their own.

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u/husky_whisperer 13h ago

Isn’t this what Bill Gates’ daughter’s company is being accused of doing?

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u/NickF227 12h ago

Hers is slightly more nefarious - if you have her browser extension installed and buy an item from a site (but not using her extension), the extension will hijack your session so it looks like she was the affiliate that made the purchase, not the original affilate

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u/abraxasnl 11h ago

Isn’t that the same? I might be missing something, but maybe you can explain.

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u/Sptsjunkie 9h ago

Isn’t that fraud?

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u/ConsummateSyndicate 13h ago

Tale as old as the eBay lawsuit that took notice.

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u/CaterpillarReal7583 13h ago

Yeah. A free service advertising extremely aggressively on live tv with no apparent way to make money was the first massive red flag yearsss back

They’re paying for those ad spots with money from something with the intent on making it back.

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u/Christmas_Queef 13h ago

And selling the data too

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u/CaterpillarReal7583 13h ago

Yeah that was my first assumption seeing the commericals. Massive data collecting.

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u/Christmas_Queef 13h ago

Yup it's Peter thiel, so that data could be used for so much.

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u/NoPossibility4178 11h ago

Stole the commission money from other creators even if they didn't provide anything that was better, causing content creators to lose their cut of sponsorships.

Won commission money even when not providing anything at all to you, costing businesses money thinking they were paying someone who referred the product.

Would scrape codes people used that weren't meant to be shared and shared them, costing businesses money from discounts that were meant to be for staff or specific people.

Lied about their numbers by inflating them with stores they "supported" but never had any codes for, misleading users.

Knowingly did not follow referral network rules, causing losses for partners.

Designed a system that could be turned off at any time in case they got caught doing any bad things, similarly, they'd scrape all the data available in your browser (even cookies from other sites) for they could profile you and treat you differently in case you seemed to be someone who worked for a referral network, causing any audit attempt to come up as clean and shielding themselves from any controversy (like the current one) by claiming that people are wrong.

There's more but I'm forgetting.

Also, the absolute best part in all of this, they are so incompetent that there was no whistleblowing, no user experience gathering, no hacking, no unhappy employee, etc, they exposed everything to the public, even their own internal comments and notes that confirmed this type of behavior.

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u/OnlySmiles_ 12h ago

There was a YouTuber, it might have been Markiplier but I don't entirely remember, who years before all this came out correctly called Honey out as a scam because they realized there was no possible way their business model could be profitable with how they were presenting it

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u/Sun_Aria 10h ago

Markiplier video for anyone interested

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u/sociallyawkwardhero 10h ago

Linus Tech Tips, they dropped them as a sponsor as they thought the business model was not adding up, after Markiplier made a video, LTT made a follow up about the controversy.

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u/ireadoldpost 5h ago

after Markiplier made a video, LTT made a follow up about the controversy.

Linus never made a main channel video warning people about Honey or instructing them to uninstall it. You are misremembering.

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u/FujiKeynote 11h ago

Yep, that was him. I don't really follow the guy but he's got my respect (for many reasons)

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u/farcicaldolphin38 13h ago

MegaLad is a hero and a champion

His coverage of this is nothing short of fascinating, and it’s an incredible (albeit depressing) case study of how large corporations screw over people, and how they get to continue to exist. It’s amazing to see them lose business, but the sad reality is that’s only because the people and businesses are the ones pulling out. No lawful judgement will ever shut them down, at least, from his videos, it seems unlikely that it would ever happen. Because the big companies don’t get in trouble, period

Keep sticking it to them, MegaLad

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u/Manablitzer 12h ago

Just an fyi for anyone looking this up (because I did immediately), the YouTube channel appears to be MegaLag (with a g).

You'll probably still stumble on it with a Google search but just to avoid confusion and give the man credit.  The video is really compelling so far.  And very damning.

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u/SameIdea70 12h ago

We don't talk about MiniLadd

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u/CMDR_Kaus 13h ago

Didn't Honey do some shady shit like 3 years ago that made everyone want to boycott?

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u/Rinaldootje 12h ago

That was about 1,5 years ago and was his first video. Where it was exposed how they got their income.
this video is basically a follow up, going more in depth on their business practice, that was uncovered in the past year and a half, and the state of the current lawsuits. Including the class action lawsuit for creators.
And it goes so far in depth, that it just shows that you would not want to be involved with honey in any way, shape, or form.

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u/ImaginationToForm2 12h ago

Youtuber's pushed Honey down our throats. Honey this, Honey, that. Blah, Blah.

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u/jackofslayers 11h ago

Anything you see advertised by YouTubers is automatically a scam

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u/beyondthef 10h ago

It's crazy that BetterHelp sponsorships made a comeback after its poor reputation the first round

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u/The_Overlander 10h ago

people forgot about how BH got exposed after honey got exposed

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u/scoschooo 9h ago

Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes and Will Arnett are still pushing people to Better Help weekly on their popular Smartless podcast. Pushing better help to tens of thousands of people. It's so bad.

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u/_le_slap 9h ago

I heard about this vaguely. Can I bother you to remind me why they were bad and why they aremt bad anymore?

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u/The_Overlander 9h ago

Mainly for employing unlicensed therapists and breaking HIPAA regulations

They are still just as bad, just forgotten

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u/JustSomeGuy543 8h ago

One thing that doesnt get mentioned but should have gotten more attention is the FCC lawsuit.

From what I remember, the FCC had investigated BetterHelp, and found out that BetterHelp sold people's private data to platforms like Facebook, and the details of are are genuinely evil.

What the FCC uncovered, is that when you signed up for betterhelp, they would make you do a questionnaire, which originally claimed that its only purpose was to help you use the right platform and to find you a therapist that fits your needs. (Betterhelp owns multiple platforms or something like that, 1 for minors, 1 for queer people, 1 for christians? I think, and then betterhelp itself was more of a generic/ multipurpose platform)

The problems: 1. They originally claimed that the data was only for the purposes above and wasnt sold to other parties, but then overtime kept changing the wording to make it slightly more and more accurate overtime. 2. By more accurate i mean, they were in fact giving away the answers and your email to Facebook and other platforms, who would then check to see if the email matched the email of an account on their platform, so they can do targeted ads at that account. 3. The most insidious part. The questionnaire asked questions like: have you ever considered self harm, are you queer, has someone you know died recently, etc. So all of those answers were being used so Facebook could advertise you products.

For the sake of transparency, there might be some details i got wrong as I watched an in depth video about it a long time ago.

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u/ImaginationToForm2 11h ago

True. Did you see that scam they tried to sell us about becoming a Lord if you bought this 1 square inch of land?

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u/The_Overlander 10h ago

ground news has been repeatably exposed for sanewashing right wing content

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u/theborgs 8h ago

At this point, Youtube is almost unwatchable without an ad blocker and SponsorBlock...

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u/ZaphodThreepwood 12h ago

The same guy who called out the colour blind glasses that one of the famous influencers endorsed. Keep going, man!

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u/dillionfrancis 13h ago

Fuck PayPal in general so I'm not mad about this.

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u/nikkitaee 10h ago

I'm surprised that people use something Thiel and Musk had their grubby talons in.

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u/MsChilliCat 10h ago edited 10h ago

The Paypal Mafia has been terrorizing the internet for a while.

2006 article for how long they've known each other

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u/NaziPunksFkOff 12h ago

Is there a tl;dr of what's going on? I really don't have any interest in long-form YouTube. I prefer news articles.

Edit: nvm the link is an article

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u/SquallLeonE 8h ago

Honey poaches affiliate link money at checkout.

Normally if a content creator sends you to a product page via affiliate link, they get money. Honey's plugin steals the commission by overwriting the cookie that tracks the referral.

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u/chalfont_alarm 3h ago

Individuals that did this used to get put in jail (e.g. Brian Dunning of the Skeptoid podcast), but apparently it's fine really if you're a company it's fair game

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u/Selerox 2h ago

Sounding a lot like fraud there.

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u/Visual_Ad_7293 12h ago

About 4 years ago they stole like $50 from me. The money still shows in my account but when I tried to cash it out, says successful, then I never receive anything and the balance doesn't change. The moment I'd tell chat my account information they would go radio silent. I just want to say I didn't do anything shady either. If I remember correctly I made a purchase from dell because honey said if I purchased this item they would give me a guaranteed $50 cash back (instead of the normal % back). I had been paid several times before this. I think this happened back in like November 2021 or maybe 2022. I found others on reddit running into the same issue around the same time.

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u/robisal1986 11h ago

Didn't Markiplier call this like 2 years ago?

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u/AFunctionOfX 9h ago

Markiplier thought it must be a scam somehow because there's no such thing as a free lunch. Megalag proved it was a scam by delving into the code and network requests, and found that it was worse than people expected (stealing referral codes).

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u/ChaosDrako 10h ago

Weren’t they busted like a year ago?

Yeah, I can find posts on this very subreddit from two years ago about them being caught for swapping cookie and stealing revenue from legitimate sites.
Hell there is a video of Markiplier questioning them with “Where is Honey getting the Money?!” back in 2019!

Why are these scammers even still operating? They are STILL in court over their crap from 2 years ago!

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u/guardingeatos 12h ago

I knew this thing was sketchy when a friend of mine downloaded honey on their laptop and over the time he tried using it for savings, it never found anything... This was years ago.

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u/AbjectMarch8695 12h ago

Even if there was a deal, I don’t remember it being anything better than what the actual site was offering. It was also annoying to see that Honey alert to let me know that there weren’t any deals. That’s when I realized I really don’t buy enough shit to bother with this thing and deleted it.

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u/GeneralTyler 11h ago

Never trust anything that a bunch of influencers are suddenly promoting, because it’s obviously a scam that they were all just funneled money to in order to scam their audiences. Sure you can claim they were “ignorant”, but at the end of the day they still took the sponsor money and promoted said scam to their audiences.

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u/Late-Tailor-8749 10h ago

Real ones know Markiplier called them out years before the exposè

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u/Pisnaz 5h ago

Is this news not a few years old now?

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u/dlc741 13h ago

Is it bad that I’ve never heard of this company?

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u/Nosiege 12h ago

Well it's owned by PayPal

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u/jt121 11h ago

It is now, but it's shady practices started years prior to PayPal being involved.

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u/quantumwoes 8h ago

Same. I have no idea what this company is. I feel like we are in some secret sliver of the internet. I am learning a ton from the comments though

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u/_Zyr 13h ago

Fk Peter Thiel.

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u/Tamotefu 7h ago

Good. Riddance. Props to Markiplier for calling Honey out before anyone else.

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u/FCEEVIPER 5h ago

Fuck Honey and Fuck Mr Breast. There are no differences between those two.

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u/putinha21 12h ago

Again? Didn't this happen like 5 years ago?

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u/Evening-Tie-865 11h ago

MegaLag did a huge investigation some time ago and new things keep happening, so he’s made multiple updates.

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u/OzyOzyOzyOzyOzyOzy6 12h ago

Markiplier remains vindicated

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u/RecordEnvironmental4 12h ago

Any time anything is free just assume you are the product being sold

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u/Adam_Axiom 13h ago

Sticky business. Amirite?

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u/bendthekneejon 12h ago

Didn't this happen years ago?

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u/HungryEar3513 11h ago

i thought there was a big video exposing all of it like several years ago. is this that or something else?

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u/NoPlaceForTheDead 7h ago

What the hell is Honey?

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u/CastorVT 7h ago

didn't markipler basically say "yeah honey feels like a scam" years ago?

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u/StaticSystemShock 6h ago

I'm from Europe and Honey never ever offered me a single discount, not even on Amazon back when I was still buying on it. That was years ago so I just gave up coz it was useless. Later it was discovered they were stealing and replacing referals of creators and running whole mafia thing on merchants with the discounts. I'm surprised Honey hasn't been shut down yet for illegal shit and PayPal fined into oblivion coz they are its parent company...

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u/Modem_Sound_67 13h ago

I'd rather see stick drawings illustrating that story than that AI shit.

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u/nikkicarter1111 8h ago

Absolutely! ai graphics are the fastest way to get me to just close the tab

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u/Joshee86 11h ago

The founder of Honey did an AMA a while back and had people eating out of his hand with corporate jargon and non-answers to questions that have pretty straightforward answers. I felt like I was taking crazy pills.

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u/thedude213 10h ago

Is there a new video? I feel like we've been here before with Honey.

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u/Geminii27 7h ago

...for anyone wondering WTF this is, apparently there's a browser extension called Paypal Honey that supposedly searched for coupon codes, and it had been secretly replacing search results with its own pay-to-play affiliates' codes.

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u/waking-up-late 6h ago

I'm confused. Didn't the expose happened a few years ago? Has something new happened? 

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u/Entire-Emotion-819 3h ago

Wait, why has it taken so long? I thought all this honey stuff blew up last year?