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.
Despite being terminally online, I never heard of Honey until this video came out two weeks ago. My new adblocking technique is unstoppable.
Share techniques
- uBlock Origin
- Pi-hole or NextDNS
- Aggressively skip native ads in streaming services
oh this is what i do too, thought there was a new strat for the embedded ads in streaming.
For YouTube, there’s sponsorblock, including YouTube Revanced, but it’s not 100% reliable (specially for less popular or non-English content).
Not that I know of. My comment was in reference to what is now rather ancient lore.
Same here. Never heard of them.
A D V E R T I S I N G S H I T S I N Y O U R H E A D
ADVERTISINGS
Hits in Your Head
vol. 43“All the jingles you wish you never heard but can’t stop hearing”
It’s not even crumbs. Affiliate commissions can be a few tens of percents of the transaction value. No wonder PayPal paid $4B for Honey.
But given how central PayPal and its rotating cast of characters are to the US government, it’s likely that nothing will happen.
I once read that all innovation in internet services is basically figuring out a way to forcibly insert yourself between customers and vendors. This is as prime of an example as it can be.
wow lol. this doesn’t surprise me at all. i had a gut feeling about Honey but couldn’t have guessed it was this insane.
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.
I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
