maybe if you had read every post i have ever made you would have correctly interpreted the tone of my post

KILT IS HERE

George Gavriel, Gaza, 2023.

if you have the Honey browser extension installed, uninstall it immediately. big big story broke on youtube today strongly indicating that Honey has been massively defrauding basically everyone who does any business with them at every level, including influencers, customers, and actual retailers.

the short version of ONE of the alleged crimes is that they've been hijacking referral links and codes. if you have honey installed on your browser at all, and you use any referral code from anyone, there is a high probability honey will swap out the referral link identifier for their own even if they don't provide a coupon at checkout.

they also are just lying to you, and hiding coupons that very much exist. they're completely fraudulent

paypal bought honey in 2019 for 4 billion, so paypal has been strip mining the influencer economy for 5 years now. the amount of money that's been essentially stolen is unfathomable

FAQ:

actually i dont know if these questions are frequently asked because i do not read the notes on posts that blow up as a matter of policy. but if i was coming into this blind, these are the questions that i personally would have about this.

Q: what's the alternative to Honey? i need my treats and deals

A: there are no "alternatives". the Karma extension is the same scam. the Pie extension is the same scam but pretending to be a man-in-the-middle adblocker and also started by the same people who made Honey. just google "[retailer] coupon', you aren't going to do better than the coupons you find that way. do not install coupon extensions or shopping extensions, the ENTIRE BUSINESS MODEL IS A SCAM. any app or browser extension claiming to do what honey does is a scam by design

Q: I don't care about "influencers", they are all evil

A: thats valid. in the context of this case the word "influencer" is applying to a lot of people you would not group with Mr. Beast. honey is stealing referral credits from literally everyone, including you if you just give your friend a DoorDash signup code. if your friend has Honey on their browser, Honey will attempt to hijack the sale/signup during checkout, and you will not get the bonus DoorDash promised you for giving out the signup code. it doesn't matter if youre a professional youtuber or not. also, let's be clear here, your favorite 1000-sub microniche artist cannot make a living any other way anymore. youtube does not pay minimum wage, much less a living wage, unless you get into the upper thirds of viewership by sheer luck. the vast majority of the people acting happy to be there on your screen while you eat cereal are not making ends meet without participating in affiliate marketing

Q: is this actually illegal? are they going to get into trouble?

A: answers to both questions are going to depend on whether anyone goes after them successfully. but if i were a betting man no i would not bet on PayPal Corporation facing any blowback about this whatsoever. im guessing all of this behavior is prominently covered in their TOS which no one reads but everyone agrees to. whether TOSes that no one reads are legally binding or not is a complicated legal question that has only just started to be litigated

Q: what else is going on?

A: the link above will take you to MegaLag's youtube video on this issue, which was released as part 1 of 3. the other videos arent out yet but it also appears Honey has also been running a variation of Yelp Extortion on anyone selling anything (basically a protection racket, Yelp waits for small businesses to get bad reviews [or plants them, its unclear] and then starts calling the business dozens of times a day to "offer" the small business a "membership" which will "allow them to control what appears on their Yelp page". ive worked at two places that were targeted by this one), and also monitoring all shopping carts in every browser where it's installed and stealing employee discount codes and internal-only vendor discount codes and then giving them out to random customers. this has been hinted at but will likely not be addressed until video 2 or 3

Q: why should i care about this when i hate everyone who runs a business of any size, is an influencer, sells stuff online, etc

A: watch the actual video for the explanation but honey is also just hiding coupons from you. i mean it just doesnt work. this is why i never used it. i installed it once, it didnt bring up any coupons i found easily by googling or a newsletter or whatever, and i went "oh this is a scam" and ditched it. it probably worked when it was new, the wedge end of the scams always have to work for a while to get in the door.

and i mean there's "small business owners" and then theres small business owners. i'm a subsistence artist, for a while now i've been studying the youtube economy and cultural shift for artists like myself and concluded i'm going to have to start doing this kind of video stuff to survive. don't make me flash my badge about this, you wont read it anyway, the short version is this referral-hijacking is a way for Actual Evil Megacorporation PayPal to steal money BACK from creators of any size and use everyone who uses Honey as a human battery farm to harvest ad money that you tried to hand to someone else. i dont like that the majority of the subsistence you can even make online is anchored to influencing, referrals, affiliate programs and ads. everyone hates it. no one actually likes Raid Shadow Legends. but you either get paid from advertising or you dont get paid. thats why it matters that PayPal is hijacking affiliate links. it is no different than PayPal walking up and taking the dollar bill you put in the guitar case in front of a busker

Q: how did everyone miss this for so long? A: LinusTechTips apparently knew but didn't bother publicizing it, which is yet another bad look for them. it was apparently "known" iwithin some small online business circles but never blew up for some reason, probably because once you learn anything about how affiliate marketing and ads and clicks and so on actually work, it wouldnt occur to you at all that this was weird, because it's technically not, the entire ad economy works this way basically

so many posts seem to start like "shoutout to people who are lonesome farters. and i don't mean tooters who fit into a certain frame of social acceptability i mean honest to god farters." does anyone truly give a fuck

Horse figure of the day: Herend Tang Horse

THE CASUALNESS OF THAT COLLIE SLIPPING RIGHT OUT OF THEIR COLLAR. That dude is a Willing Participant of this walk and by god everyone else is going to follow the RULES.

im a fan of the moment where the husky is like 'wait you're not authorized to do that' and the collie is like 'THE FUCK IM NOT'

I feel so much for that husky, a true gentleman who slowly and gently wanders a little further away, keeping an eye on his human, not moving at a speed where the human can't easily catch up... only to be yanked and body-slammed by the insane rules maniac collie who has not only made up a whole set of Correct Walk Rules but is determined to make that everyone else's problem. Weird that the notes are full of people saying the husky is stupid. No, the husky is behaving like a normal dog. The border collie is behaving like a total nutter, and the husky deserves praise for being so chill about it.

calm down, they're both behaving like they're supposed to. a border collie is an animal we made to help us corral other animals and keep them safe, of course they feel strongly about this mission. a husky is an animal we made to haul cargo very fast in a straight line for 100 miles at a time and it's a testament to the trainer that this one sticks around off leash so well. breed doesn't determine all behavior but it makes some compelling suggestions

also this entire performance is a rehearsed routine for Engagement Units on social media, for greater or lesser values of "rehearsed"

Can I say it's truly bonkers how people will be like scared of rap. Cause it's racism obviously but the level of exaggeration yknow like the extent of it all is Crazy. People will talk about it like This is some heavy stuff... & dude has like an obviously-for-show supervillain shtick. He's like sampling space ghost. What are you talking about

You see a black guy cosplaying doctor doom & think he's being fucking fr about taking over the world

Maybe I'm media literate georg maybe I know how this works cause I'm into dark wave goth shit but like. Hey ? I'm gonna start explaining this to white people like ok so you know how johnny cash wasn't actually an old west outlaw

if i was roommates with the meatball i would love him and be nice to him. i would not be like the shake.

we joke about the french and the british and canadians and all that but it's damn near 2025 that's all cope. Americans are the worst people on the planet and we all know it

im hearing reports that santa drank all the liqour in my sisters kitchen while everybody was sleeping oh my god why would he do this. And he didnt leave presents. And it wasnt me

If you excuse me I’m very sleepy and need to go send my christmas dm’s to women. I’m sorry that sants ruined christmas like this

ok you caught me. i sent merry christmas to several men. Because of male loneliness

becky randall in exs fetish magazine no. 4

original url http://www.geocities.com/Vienna/Stage/2048/

last modified 2008-09-20 21:38:47

this is imprinting itself on my frontal lobe for all eternity for sure. it a trumpet world…