#honey extension

[3liza]

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

[tache-noire]

the really shitty thing about all this Honey business is that I don't think there's actually any legal recourse here. I don't think they were deceptive at all.

I can't remember the exact video (I've been watching/listening to playlists of cooking videos while sick in bed) but in one of Adam Ragusea's older videos, he was sponsored by Honey, and in part of his ad read he EXPLICITLY pointed out that Honey takes a commission from every sale. He pointed it out in the fine print on Honey's website and everything.

HONEY never said "it's free money!!!", influencers did. Honey never said they were providing a free service with no strings attached, influencers did. Honey did not write their ad scripts. If people were led to believe that Honey was a magical free service, that's unfortunately not Honey's fault.

I agree that all of this is unfair, but from a legal perspective, Honey is not in the wrong. They were clear that if you used their service, they would take a commission fee. Period. At no time did they ever say "unless you were referred by someone else".

[theygender]

In case anyone hasn't heard about this yet: don't use Honey or PayPal Rewards. It's stealing your information, scamming you, and misdirecting the sponsorship revenue of creators you try to support to PayPal

Tldw; Honey makes money by:

Receiving payment from businesses to prevent customers from finding better coupons (note that this is the exact opposite of what Honey claims to do)

Sneakily replacing the affiliate links of creators with their own to steal the revenue from those creators' sponsorships (note that this doesn't just apply to creators sponsored by Honey, it affects every creator whose links you interact with while Honey is installed)

Presumably, selling the data they're stealing from you to third parties

[kittydragondraws]

[mousenoseopera]

YouTube Creator Denounces PayPal Browser Extension Honey as a Scam

A video tech investigator detailed evidence and claims Honey systematically steals referral commissions from influencers—including those it pays to promote the app.

https://www.inc.com/bruce-crumley/youtube-creator-denounces-paypal-browser-extension-honey-as-a-scam/91092082

[arctic-hands]

Fuck everything podcasters and youtubers shill EXCEPT Honey. if no other product has me I know Honey has me. Just got a gf bacon and egg burger that cost 13 dollars with a nineteen dollar total once tip and fees were added, for a twelve dollar total, including a five dollar tip.

[enby-dragoon]

The Honey situation has been wild, and I wanted to put my thoughts down on metaphorical paper.

First of all, I wanted to mention that I've never used Honey (more out of a general hatred for advertising than anything else), and the following is a chain of logic formed entirely from the ads everyone gets.

There was a few options for how Honey worked.

Option 1: Honey is a free service made for other people's benefit.

This option isn't actually that weird on it's own. A bunch of browser extensions are made for free, simply to make people's experience better.

The problem, however, is that Honey pays for a lot of ads, so it obviously has money somehow.

Option 2: The creator of Honey, or someone close to them, is independently wealthy and really passionate about it.

This is... not impossible I guess? (again, going just from the ads, if you actually want to know what's happening go find it yourself). But it's improbable to such a degree that it barely even bears considering.

first of all, Honey has a LOT of ads, on pretty large platforms too, which costs a lot of money. And the people who have that much money don't tend to like sharing it.

Second, if they are really passionate about it, why haven't we heard about it elsewhere?

We can likely cross this one out then.

Option 3: Honey doesn't have money on it's own, but some wealthy people are investing in it.

This would solve the money problem, but raise an entirely new one.

Why are people investing in it?

Generally, wealthy people don't invest in things without expecting a return, either in monetary value or more abstract things.

Without actually looking things up this one would be impossible to prove or disprove, but it's very concerning nonetheless.

a maybe.

Option 4: Honey is actually making money somehow.

Surprise, the free browser extensions paying millions of dollars in ads, is getting millions of dollars somehow.

The most likely guess from only the ads would be that Honey is selling your personal data (probably pretty valuable data), rather than the link poaching they're actually doing, but that should honestly be reason enough to stop using it.

This one was the one that actually turned out to be true. Hooray.

A final point I wanted to mention is also this:

Why do companies not care about Honey? Giving you free coupons would get them less profit. Youtube is in a perpetual arms race with adblockers, why isn't every other company doing the same for Honey?

None of this required googling or digging into company records. I didn't really think about any of it sure, but I never used Honey. If you're going to use something you found in an ad, at least think it through. Please.

[sunkissedfawn]

I feel so validated by Markiplier voicing his instinctive and intuitive concerns over Honey and being told he was being crazy and paranoid, only to be 100% right today, 4 years later. The amount of times I’ve had a deep seeded gut feeling about a business practice, a person, other people’s relationships, to being out and about and for some reason not wanting to take my usual route or not wanting to go somewhere yet and instead go to another place and the person or people I was with at the time telling me I’m crazy and paranoid but I ended up being right…

[cyberdragoninfinity]

"kaiba is a furry" "kaiba isnt a furry" "kaiba is an antifurry" i need to say something. Seto Kaiba is this very particular type of Dragon Enthusiast that is sometimes but not always a "furry" in the traditional sense, frequently a sight in furry communities and circles regardless, untethered to "cutesy" anthro dragons or fursuits or what have you, but whole hog extremely invested in the beauty and might and ferocity and aesthetic of feral quadraped dragons. Type of guy who may not have a 'fursona' but usually has anywhere from 2-25 dragon "characters" (i.e. designs they have spent several thousand dollars on either buying or commissioning someone to make for them to their desired specifications) (again, not always a sona either, just A Dragon. Dragons.) The designs are all very realistic and extraordinarily detailed and lovingly rendered with scales and airbrushed polish and lightning breath or blue fire or whatever else features-wise, and if he is commissioning art of them the detail is Necessary to the depiction of the dragon, and if you don't include all of it in the first pass sketch you're probably going to wake up to a several paragraphs long email of requested edits and changes. Seto Kaiba doesn't have a fursona but he Does have a humansona that's just him but with Very Specifically Designed Dragon Armor that matches one of the most special dragon characters' designs. His private unlisted gallery is full of dragon ref sheets that cost $700. He tipped $20 on them.

[emeraldspiral]

TL;DR

The Honey browser extension not only makes money by poaching affiliate commissions from the very influencers it partners with, even when it doesn't find any coupons, it's guilty of straight-up fraud. It's advertised as scouring the internet to find the best coupons for a given site and when it doesn't find any, assures users that they already have the best price. But in actuality, it lies about there not being any coupons or better coupons than the ones it automatically applied for you, while selling itself to business that it partners with on the basis that it will get them more money by tricking shoppers into not looking for better coupons so they spend more money. The ending of this video seems to be teasing a part 2, but is already strongly implying that Honey also creates unauthorized discounts costing businesses it partners with (likely small independent operations) thousands of dollars in lost revenue.

[booabug]

idk if anyone else is devout Christian but Good Friday has me feeling really raw as im taking the solemnity until Easter really seriously and being contemplative in the meantime

and that led to me having the urge to read today's kissaroo reblog in the context of Christ's sacrifice

im still practicing Roman Catholic, that's what I grew up with and it's still what's most accessible to me… you know, the church infamous for how much they make sin a personal responsibility thing and ramp up the contrition to where i feel like it overtakes the message of joy & life. so that's where im coming from, and i read the "you're not a burden to me" post and im like hold on man im getting misty eyed 😭

ive been scheduling kissaroo posts at 3pm my time forever and only a few months ago realized that's said to be the hour Christ died so it extra stands out to me.

well, anyway. if you're Christian or otherwise observing Good Friday, try reading that post again through the lens of Jesus telling us the entire point of his sacrifice was for us to have life & joy & peace.

so let's not mistake the importance of feeling our feelings for a reason to wallow in sorrow, okay? ik it can be hard, you probably grew up feeling like there's some kind of virtue in guilt, but we gotta ask ourselves if that really feels like Jesus or not. if it doesn't feel like the unconditional love and uplifting grace you get during good prayer, i think it can go!

Jesus said, "Come to me, because my yoke is easy and my requirements are light. You'll be refreshed."

— Gospel of Thomas, Saying 90

[quibbs126]

Do you guys want to hear about this random thing I did

So like, about a week and a half ago, I was wanting to try again with making an OC to ship with Dark Choco (yet again. I know at this point I sound like a broken record, but I haven’t fully made one yet so the desire is still there, it just hasn’t been fulfilled. Because of my own scatterbrained tendencies)

Anyways, so I went back to the method of finding a food that pairs well with dark chocolate, which consisted of me consulting several websites and a few images

Since I know they aren’t always reliable, I went to several (I just totaled up 9) and decided to tally all my sources to see which showed up the most

I only managed to do the tallying today, and these were my results. Or more accurately, the ones that showed up the most, so I count them as such

As you can see, the most common was bananas, with strawberries coming in second

I probably didn’t need to add the 3 time appearers, but I thought a number of the 3s were interesting

I feel like coffee, wine and raspberry showed up a ridiculous amount, and to an extent I was right, though I was surprised by banana being the winner

Honestly what personally annoys me is that most of these have already been made into Cookies, so I’d have to use something else made by them or something

Anyways, so with banana being the winner, I guess that’s what I’m going with. I just need to figure out what banana thing now

And also, I guess take this if you want to make an OC that pairs with dark chocolate. Or if you aren’t on the Cookie Run obsession pipeline like me, shit to eat with dark chocolate. Do what you will with this information

[freyholland]

I have an unbelievable amount of posts about Frey drafted up. I let them out a little at a time so I don’t firehose the dead FS tag and you guys’ dashes

[iwaasfairy]

Sooo, whats your favorite dessert? 🤗

aaAAAA my favorite dessert is probably??? anything with whipped cream and strawberry I could honestly keep eating that until i drop dead from high blood pressure ksjhdgsfus

[kentuckypollinatorresearch]

Want to learn about honey bees? The Varroa destructor mite is a key factor in causing colonies to collapse. These mites lower bee immune responses, act as biological vectors for pathogens, and replicate viruses, increasing the risk of colonies failing. This graphic shows how Varroa move within a colony.

Nurse bees are caretakers for upcoming generations. Nurses and the brood anatomically have larger fat bodies (an organ critical for immune system function). Varroa will climb off the adult nurse bees, into the brood cells, where they will parasitize them, vector viruses all while female mites reproduce within the cells. With mites carrying high viral infection levels, they are likely to carry a variant of Deformed Wing Virus which can have obvious and deadly symptoms.

Graphic from: Mondet et al., “Honey Bee Survival Mechanisms against the Parasite Varroa Destructor: A Systematic Review of Phenotypic and Genomic Research Efforts.”