this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2025
895 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
67987 readers
3155 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Hell yeah. Huge respect to him and the other youtuber that exposed this, it's crazy that Honey just pocketing most of the referral money has been undiscovered for so many years.
There is a YouTube video that literaly said they were scamming from 2020.
Linus tech tips figure it out a year back and stop shilling it once they figured it out but for some reason didn't make a video about it?
They didn't make a video about it because they thought it was a problem for creators, not a problem for consumers. They may have communicated to creators separately to drop honey. They talked about it publicly once they found out honey was also lying to consumers about what they did.
They didn't say anything because they're not pro consumer, they're pro linus media group. They didn't want to appear to be unfriendly to advertisers. There's a reason tech jesus was able to do a big expose on how crap their videos are. They want to churn out content and make money. Being seen as a problematic channel for advertisers doesn't help that.
lol certain criticisms of LTT are quite funny to me. They literally were “unfriendly to advertisers” with Anker. They’ve done it several times in the past. The “tech Jesus” video you’re referring to caused them to pause production and they haven’t ever returned to a video every day since that came out. 🤷♂️ you can just not like their videos, it’s ok.
There’s probably some overlap between people calling for more social responsibility and people who thought some earlier behaviour from LTT was not ok.
Why would being problematic to honey hurt them? If anything, it'd make the other sponsors more confident in their affiliate links. They've burnt plenty of brides with Apple and Nvidia, I don't see why they would be afraid of honey.
Why would publicly burning an advertiser on their channel cause other advertisers to be reluctant to work worth them?
Could be any reason.
They've had public spats with Anchor and Plex, doesn't seem to have hurt them too much. I don't see how honey is more dangerous to them.
About to entirely make something up
Maybe there are 10 more advertisers they want to rip on but they already felt two was too many
IDK!
I don't have a dog in this fight, but just to play devil's advocate the advertisers too could have been losing money and be happy it was brought to light?
You are ascribing a lot of human reasoning and emotion to corporate entities they they just dont have. Gratitude is not part of their decision making process. Instead, they might attempt to use past behavior to predict future behavior when evaluating an outlet for their marketing budget. They arnt going to prefer an outlet that occasionally burns advertisers, even if the benefited from it once.
exceptionally good typo
I haven’t been keeping up with the wan shows. Which week was this?
I think it was the week before last? The one after the honey video came out
Thank you! Found it for others interested
Which is true. Influencers are great at making their thing your thing, because that's kind of their job, and we've seen it many times before. Just look at all the outrage about the YouTube algorithm and such, it doesn't matter to anyone except influencers but somehow it's made to be everybody's business.
This feels very similar. Scummy business practice, good on them for suing, but to the rest of us it should only be a curiosity.
It's not just creators though, it's also preventing customers from getting a good deal, because stores can pay honey their protection racket money to stop it from giving their customers discounts.
Admittedly it's a lesser issue - you are just not getting a discount you could have gotten - but it's the opposite of what it was claiming to do for you.
Which is what LTT didn't know at the time. They only knew about stealing affiliate codes.
I am aware
I don't know why LTT are somehow the bad guys in this, they weren't the only ones to realise that the extension messed with their affiliate links and it's not like it's a thing to publicly shout about every dropped sponsor.
I bet LTT has dropped plenty of sponsors without making a big public deal about it.
I don't think anyone is saying they're the bad guy. At least I didn't read it that way.
There's a few threads over on Reddit and the LTT forum about how Linus has apparently handled this all wrong, they should have made a video years ago, Linus being dismissive of if on WAN show is him being detached from reality, you know, the usual bullshit
Edit: ITT https://lemmy.world/comment/14273487
In fairness to me (and maybe you) Sync didn't load the comment initially so only after I kept reading I found it
Neither did every other creator who stopped doing paid promotion for Honey years ago.
They're not scambusters, they're a computer/tech review channel.
It was Megalag and his channel is amazing. The colorblind scam glasses investigation was amazing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc4yL3YTwWk
I can see how it happens though.
No one was doing any oversight on their practices. If you were running a referral affiliate link system, it must have seemed like honey was doing a really good job bringing customers to you.
I'm just kind of disappointed that nobody inside the company ever spoke up or blew any whistles and said "Hey, this is at best unethical if not entirely illegal and either way exposes us to the risk of a massive lawsuit, maybe we should just actually do our jobs instead of stealing the work of other people."
I dunno man, whistleblowers aren't getting good treatment from what I see. Two got "suicided" last year from Boeing and OpenAI. The two Theranos whistleblowers were treated really poorly. I felt so bad for them. They're doing talks on ethics and stuff and I only wish them the best. They stood their ground on what they believed in.
Whistleblowers are always treated poorly because the people in charge never like being called out for their crimes. That's why you've got to have an exit strategy, like Snowden.
I can see how nobody blew the whistle, leave his cushy job, prepare for 3-5 years of juristical drama exposing your name and image only to spend the rest of your live living in check notes… Russia.
Obligatory reminder that Snowden intended to go to Ecuador and only got stuck in Russia because that's where he was when the US revoked his passport.
Another reminder that France, Spain, and Italy forced the Bolivian president's plane to land in Austria because they thought Snowden was on it.
I knew a guy--Ola Bini--that fled the US, and emigrated to Ecuador, because he was afraid that he was going to be targeted by the US gov't. I think he made it less than two years in Ecuador before he was arrested for 'hacking' Ecuador gov't computers; he was jailed during the entire judicial process, almost a decade, before all the charges were dropped, and he was released and deported to Sweden. Best guess is that despite not having a extradition treaty with the US, the US still put a ton of pressure on Ecuador to detain him. (Maybe he actually committed crimes? IDK, it's possible, but all charges being dropped after all that time in jail without a trial seems iffy. )
Point is, there aren't a lot of places you can go if the US wants to fuck your life. Russia and China are the best options, and both are not great.
DIdnt work out so great for Snowden either.
I'm not. What do you get as a reward for blowing the whistle? Genuinely?
There's no bounty, even if there was you wouldn't get it for at least a year after you blow the whistle.
Once it's discovered it's you, you're fired. There goes your paycheck, your health insurance. Now your home is in jeopardy and you have no decent income verification to get a new one.
Good luck working in any job even remotely related to what you know. You now have a stigma in any background check and while a privately owned mom & pop might look at you favorably, there ain't a single corporation who will take pride in hiring you. You're risky.
The most ethical person, is one with no debt, who owns their home, and has 8 months expenses saved up. That's not most Americans right now.
This is also why there was such coordinated effort to shut down wikileaks, or to at least stall out the cultural movement that was building behind it.
If you give people a methodology to whistleblow that at least on paper allows them to stay anonymous and avoid putting their life/livelyhood/survival in jeapordy, that removes one of the biggest disincentives.
What do ethics have to do with saving money and owning property? Do poor people not have ethics?
They can't really afford the risk it entails, is the point they are trying to make.
And I’m saying it’s a point based on no evidence. History is riddled with people making sacrifices for the greater good. It’s also riddled with the people that own things doing nothing. Financial comfort does not increase the likelihood that someone will rock the boat and become a whistleblower. There is no factual basis for that statement.
So what, then bribes and intimidation just... aren't actually effective ways of bending morals?
I gotta say I have 0 papers backing me, but I feel like the fact that the very concepts are words in the English language carries some weight.
I think the phrasing they wanted was "The person with the least disincentive to do the ethical thing".
These people aren't inherently more ethical. They simply have the fewest barriers standing in the way of turning it into action.
I can agree more with this statement.
... How much are you willing to overlook to keep yourself from going homeless?
There just ain't enough protection for whistleblowers right now.
I’m still stuck on why you think someone with money has more ethics. Do you think someone financially stable is more prone to being altruistic? Being a whistleblower is about doing something beyond yourself. What if the person with a fully paid off house and savings has family? Are they still going to make the same decisions? How did that person obtain wealth?
I don’t disagree with your list but I very much disagree with your conclusion. Honor and altruism do not correlate with owning property and having money.
You don't share food if you're starving. You don't share time if you work 12 hour days, every day.
If you spend all your energy on survival, you got no energy to spare on anyone else. I bet our hypothetical starving person would be moral and share, if they had the chance and materials.
If they don't... then it's not a matter of won't it's can't. People are more likely to share food they have excess of, time they have excess of. If they can't spare it, they won't.
I believe what dukeofdummies is saying, is that people with a financial cushion have fewer obstacles to acting on ethical principle, whereas your average person living pay check to pay check will be more cautious about whistleblowing because the consequences (loss of employment, vexatious lawsuits, blacklisting) will be felt more severely. Moreso if they have a family to support.
I consider myself to be ethical, but i live in a wage economy. If i see behaviour which needs to be reported, but i believe that the organisation/society will punish me for speaking out, i will wait until I've secured an alternative livelihood or am relatively safer before blowing the whistle.
That is a misreading/misinterpretation of the original statement.
So that raises the question: where the fuck was the FTC?
No idea, but I can tell you where they will be after President Elmo is done with them: defanged, and run by a one-man skeleton crew whose only job is to sweep the floor every Friday night.
Did you think Amazon didn't know how Honey operates?
I think Amazon didn't care, so even if someone inside the company figured it out Amazon was just like, it's not our problem to deal with.