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.
Their personal site is also linked in the video description https://www.benedelman.org/honey-detecting-testers/
Obviously Internet affiliate marketing schemes are built on mutual exploitation of asymmetric data collection. This cannot possibly surprise anyone.
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.
- The Honey browser extension inserted their own affiliate link at checkout, depriving others of affiliate revenue.
- Honey collected discount codes entered by users while shopping online, then shook down website owners to have the discount codes removed.
- 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.
Allegedly.
"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 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.
cwal37•1h ago
arionmiles•42m ago
Is it the archive at fault or is the original webpage this way?
kencausey•36m ago
quesera•33m ago