TLDW: MegaLag found code and rules in the Honey extension that modifies behaviour specifically to make discovery of non-compliance with affiliate programs and affiliate poaching harder for testers. This behaviour has been in place since 2017 at least.
His Honey videos are hopefully going down in history as one of the greatest fraud discoveries.
When I started watching them (and he isn’t even done yet), I expected it to be bad because of PayPal. It is…so. much. worse.
Absolutely vile practices and I look forward to lawsuits from all angles against them.
Paypal needs to be sued unto oblivion.
I appreciate the TLDW because the thumbnail made me think this was about bee vomit, not a scammy browser plugin
I was going to make a joke about big bee and then remembered actual honey is a huge fraud as well, a significant portion of what’s sold as honey isn’t actually honey. Need a good docu on that too.
Glad it helped. I thought this would need some explaining why I posted it in this community.
I’m resisting my inner Lemmy user desire to shit on this for its thumbnail, but this is a great video, people should know about this. What Honey did is fucked up.
It’s legit offputting, but when you’re on YouTube it makes sense to play that game. Following a thumbnail meta will get your video more engagement, they even allow A/B testing of thumbnails to find the best performing one. YT is as much a thumbnail platform as it is a video one, and I’m only being slightly hyperbolic.
Yeah I kind of roll my eyes at it, but I get it. People have to earn a living and feed themselves, and they can’t do that without clicks.
And really, pulling a dumb face on a thumbnail is a hell of a lot more ethical in terms of driving engagement than some headlines you see that are so misleading they may as well be outright lies.
There are also various browser extensions to show you an image from the middle of the video instead of a thumbnail. I personally prefer that.
The hate for the thumbnail for this video I don’t get, but there is some REALLY egregious thumbnails on YouTube sometimes
It took me days to get around to watching the video because of the thumbnail lol.
I really don’t get the thumbnail hate. It’s something you look at for a second, like a books cover. It’s so irrelevant yet people get hell bent hung up on it.
It’s more of a problem for the younger audience. It’s the gateway for awful cringe shit kids do. All the rise in right wing incel behaviour, online celebrity worship, falling for dubious scams didn’t come out of nowhere.
If you have been around kids using YouTube, they absolutely go for the most outrageous thumbnails, despite being awful video content.
Encouraging that behaviour is just letting things go to shit just because it’s
Great video, more people need to know about this and that paypal is responsible.
Crazy that companies will do this shady stuff with client side code. At least it was slightly obfuscated at first, but that’s just incompetent fraud to leave it so obvious that a self professed non-software engineer (though clearly a smart guy) can read it and deduce what’s happening. Throw a tiny bit of random noise to the stepdown logic and it becomes much harder to find and reproduce as proof.
Things like this happen in client side extension and it can take so long to get to what was happening but some people get defensive when people claim tiktok, facebook, google, microsoft are all listening in on your data.
There are so many ways to obfuscate data we’ll probably never know the extent of the data being collected.
