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LegalEagle Suing PayPal's Honey (youtu.be)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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"The biggest scam in YouTube history"

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[–] 275 points 2 years ago (63 children)

Hell yeah. Huge respect to him and the other youtuber that exposed this, it's crazy that Honey just pocketing most of the referral money has been undiscovered for so many years.

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  • [+] 80 points 2 years ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (25 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 67 points 2 years ago (17 children)

    They didn't make a video about it because they thought it was a problem for creators, not a problem for consumers. They may have communicated to creators separately to drop honey. They talked about it publicly once they found out honey was also lying to consumers about what they did.

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  • [–] 62 points 2 years ago (9 children)

    They didn't say anything because they're not pro consumer, they're pro linus media group. They didn't want to appear to be unfriendly to advertisers. There's a reason tech jesus was able to do a big expose on how crap their videos are. They want to churn out content and make money. Being seen as a problematic channel for advertisers doesn't help that.

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  • [–] 19 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    lol certain criticisms of LTT are quite funny to me. They literally were “unfriendly to advertisers” with Anker. They’ve done it several times in the past. The “tech Jesus” video you’re referring to caused them to pause production and they haven’t ever returned to a video every day since that came out. 🤷‍♂️ you can just not like their videos, it’s ok.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    I haven’t been keeping up with the wan shows. Which week was this?

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    They didn't make a video about it because they thought it was a problem for creators, not a problem for consumers.

    Which is true. Influencers are great at making their thing your thing, because that's kind of their job, and we've seen it many times before. Just look at all the outrage about the YouTube algorithm and such, it doesn't matter to anyone except influencers but somehow it's made to be everybody's business.

    This feels very similar. Scummy business practice, good on them for suing, but to the rest of us it should only be a curiosity.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    It's not just creators though, it's also preventing customers from getting a good deal, because stores can pay honey their protection racket money to stop it from giving their customers discounts.

    Admittedly it's a lesser issue - you are just not getting a discount you could have gotten - but it's the opposite of what it was claiming to do for you.

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  • [–] 61 points 2 years ago (8 children)

    It was Megalag and his channel is amazing. The colorblind scam glasses investigation was amazing

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc4yL3YTwWk

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  • [–] 21 points 2 years ago (7 children)

    I don't get how anyone thought they would work. If your color blind they obviously don't magically alter the receptors in your eyes.

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  • [–] 21 points 2 years ago*

    Colourblindness knows many types, most can still see color. Some types even see more or shifted colors.

    At least on paper it seems plausible to measure the colour detection cones per iris and then build a filter to strengthen color per eye for which detection is lacking.

    The moment i realized they sold them without detailed personal eye scanning involved i knew they were a scam. Gimmick at best. Worst part is they seem catered to people as gifts for colorblind friends, thats just a way to obstruct people from analyzing them to much. What are they going to say? “I dont for a sec believe this overly saturated view is realistic and your gift sucks”? No, they will say “wauw thank you” and shove it in a drawer somewhere next day, never to mention them again.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    If they had worked they might have done so by some sort of contrast enhancement or edge detection, but I don't think either are possible with just optics

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Yes you could absolutely do it with a camera and a computer screen and some software but I can't see how glass or plastic lenses could possibly be expected to do it

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago

    I just watched the megalag videos on the glasses — the first episode of three — and the claim is they cut out confusing areas of colour that abnormal chromats see.

    So if it worked, it only works for people with abnormal versions of one of the three normal colour vision sensors, and only if their deficiency is in green, and then only if it's the correct degree of deficient

    But it doesn't work anyway.

    The glasses help people see the number in some sheets in the colourblindness test, but hide the number in others. Their colour blindness would appear slightly worse than reality.

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  • [–] 55 points 2 years ago (27 children)

    I can see how it happens though.

    No one was doing any oversight on their practices. If you were running a referral affiliate link system, it must have seemed like honey was doing a really good job bringing customers to you.

    I'm just kind of disappointed that nobody inside the company ever spoke up or blew any whistles and said "Hey, this is at best unethical if not entirely illegal and either way exposes us to the risk of a massive lawsuit, maybe we should just actually do our jobs instead of stealing the work of other people."

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  • [–] 66 points 2 years ago (7 children)

    I dunno man, whistleblowers aren't getting good treatment from what I see. Two got "suicided" last year from Boeing and OpenAI. The two Theranos whistleblowers were treated really poorly. I felt so bad for them. They're doing talks on ethics and stuff and I only wish them the best. They stood their ground on what they believed in.

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  • [–] 44 points 2 years ago (6 children)

    Whistleblowers are always treated poorly because the people in charge never like being called out for their crimes. That's why you've got to have an exit strategy, like Snowden.

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  • [–] 27 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    I can see how nobody blew the whistle, leave his cushy job, prepare for 3-5 years of juristical drama exposing your name and image only to spend the rest of your live living in check notes… Russia.

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  • [–] 26 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Obligatory reminder that Snowden intended to go to Ecuador and only got stuck in Russia because that's where he was when the US revoked his passport.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago

    I knew a guy--Ola Bini--that fled the US, and emigrated to Ecuador, because he was afraid that he was going to be targeted by the US gov't. I think he made it less than two years in Ecuador before he was arrested for 'hacking' Ecuador gov't computers; he was jailed during the entire judicial process, almost a decade, before all the charges were dropped, and he was released and deported to Sweden. Best guess is that despite not having a extradition treaty with the US, the US still put a ton of pressure on Ecuador to detain him. (Maybe he actually committed crimes? IDK, it's possible, but all charges being dropped after all that time in jail without a trial seems iffy. )

    Point is, there aren't a lot of places you can go if the US wants to fuck your life. Russia and China are the best options, and both are not great.

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  • [–] 35 points 2 years ago (14 children)

    I'm not. What do you get as a reward for blowing the whistle? Genuinely?

    1. There's no bounty, even if there was you wouldn't get it for at least a year after you blow the whistle.

    2. Once it's discovered it's you, you're fired. There goes your paycheck, your health insurance. Now your home is in jeopardy and you have no decent income verification to get a new one.

    3. Good luck working in any job even remotely related to what you know. You now have a stigma in any background check and while a privately owned mom & pop might look at you favorably, there ain't a single corporation who will take pride in hiring you. You're risky.

    The most ethical person, is one with no debt, who owns their home, and has 8 months expenses saved up. That's not most Americans right now.

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  • [–] 11 points 2 years ago

    This is also why there was such coordinated effort to shut down wikileaks, or to at least stall out the cultural movement that was building behind it.

    If you give people a methodology to whistleblow that at least on paper allows them to stay anonymous and avoid putting their life/livelyhood/survival in jeapordy, that removes one of the biggest disincentives.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    No one was doing any oversight on their practices.

    So that raises the question: where the fuck was the FTC?

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