I can’t think of anything more “late stage capitalism” than one of the most central internet companies propping up a fake product to steal crumbs from affiliate links of all things.
Considering how central “creators” and entertainment are to Yankee culture, I wouldn’t be surprised if this even led to a Congress hearing lol.
I still don’t understand the mechanism with which hunny ends up modifying the url (with the referral parameter) and the referral cookie. Browsers have been hardened against this kind of deception over the years. I don’t know how opening a new tab in the background then closing it would let them do this.
It’s an extension. It can inject scripts into the page, and change the url parameters and cookie values, which is how referrals are tracked. It’s not hardened against something you’ve given permission to do these things by voluntarily installing an extension.
It opens a new tab with the PayPal affiliate link to set the referral cookie, then reloads the user tab to reflect that change.