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.<p>Making a product to explicitly skirt agreements while working for a corporation is ... a choice
> what the engineers thought when doing design reviews for a "selective stand down" feature.<p>Possibly a version of, “I lack the freedom to operate with a moral code at work because I’m probably replaceable, the job market makes me anxious, my family’s well-being and healthcare are tied to having a job, and I don’t believe the government has my back.”
Original MegaLag video: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCGT_CKGgFE" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCGT_CKGgFE</a><p>You'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.
For context, Ben Edelman the author of the blog post was in the video at <a href="https://youtu.be/qCGT_CKGgFE?t=1980" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/qCGT_CKGgFE?t=1980</a><p>Their personal site is also linked in the video description <a href="https://www.benedelman.org/honey-detecting-testers/" rel="nofollow">https://www.benedelman.org/honey-detecting-testers/</a>
The original site is down for me, so going based on the app I was thinking it was about the actual edible Honey product, not Honey the discount coupon thing.
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.
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.
The youtuber MegaLag released part 1 of his investigation roughly 1 year ago: <a href="https://youtu.be/vc4yL3YTwWk" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/vc4yL3YTwWk</a><p>Recently, he released 2 more parts with more new information that paints Honey in a pretty bad light: <a href="https://youtu.be/qCGT_CKGgFE" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/qCGT_CKGgFE</a> <a href="https://youtu.be/wwB3FmbcC88" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/wwB3FmbcC88</a>
Archived link: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20251230214339/https://vptdigital.com/blog/honey-detecting-testers/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20251230214339/https://vptdigita...</a>
Apparently this thing got approved for the chrome store, which confirms that "store" approvals are near worthless for malware filtering.
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.<p>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.
I thought this was going to be about honey adulteration, which is a major problem.
Same, and that <i>topic</i> would have been way more interesting (cf. EVOO).<p>Obviously Internet affiliate marketing schemes are built on mutual exploitation of asymmetric data collection. This cannot possibly surprise anyone.<p>With that said, this is a good article with excellent data collection and evidence presentation. It's great to have documentation of obviously corrupt practices, even if they are unsurprising.
TLDR;<p>- The Honey browser extension inserted their own affiliate link at checkout, depriving others of affiliate revenue.<p>- Honey collected discount codes entered by users while shopping online, then shook down website owners to have the discount codes removed.<p>- 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.<p>Allegedly.
No honor among thieves, eh?
Likening any of this to Volkswagen emissions compliance scandal does a huge disservice by treating "Affiliate Marketing" as far too important.<p>"Who gets a kickback on this toothbrush" is a much MUCH less important question than "do you pollute the air we are all breathing".
It's comparing Honey's behavior to a well-known and comprehended scandal. Simile is a tried and tested way (hah!) to explain otherwise potentially hard to understand or dry content.<p>It's not about the severity of the impact, its the fact that they were breaking the rules and explicitly coding to actively avoid being caught by testers.