Tonight on GeekNights, we consider scams. In the news, the first malaria vaccine slashes early childhood mortality, Hookworms used to ravage the southern United States, the statue of the traitor was melted into slag, and Travis Dermott singlehandedly forced the NHL to change a terrible policy.
In case anyone wants to watch my guy Giles’ lecture, mentioned in the show.
Did you re-record the closing credits and blurb?
I’m surprised that you don’t stop listening before the credits play.
I’m also surprised that the new one is so close to the original that you have to ask.
I’m glad that I’m not the only one who noticed the ending blurb was slightly different.
Also, scott expressing shock and surprise at people actually listening to the podcast that he’s been creating for the last 16ish years will always be hilarious to me.
We changed some of the credits and slightly tweaked the descriptions of the different days.
But I also had to re-create the music. It wasn’t just a clip: the original was an edit of different parts of a song together plus some other audio futzing to make it the right length and impact. I made the original in the earliest days of GeekNights and didn’t keep the original file.
If I was the designer of the previous website, I wouldn’t want my name attached to the new one either. 
We probably should talk about the Honey Scam.
TL;DW: Honey is a browser extension which was advertised by a ton of different YouTubers and other influencers for years. Supposedly the extension would check the internet for various coupon codes and add them to various marketplaces while you were making a purchase. In the background however, honey would change the referral codes in so that the sale would be attributed to Honey as a company, rather than any referral links you clicked or even if you clicked none, even if the extension failed to find any coupons whatsoever, thus skimming off the top from everybody, even creators who never advertised Honey at all.
Furthermore, in the background it was colluding with these marketplaces so that the marketplace could determine which coupons Honey would apply if any, thus completely breaking the service that was advertised to the customer base.
As always, if the product is free, you’re the product. Legal Eagle has started a class action lawsuit.
One aspect that I think is very underdiscussed in this debacle is the actions, or rather inactions, by LinusTechTips. As per the video detailing the investigation by MegaLag, LTT found out how Honey operated and stopped their advertising partnership with them because of it. However, they neglected to tell anybody else. And they knew this years ago.
A year later, MegaLag has finally published his second Honey video. Likely it was delayed due to legal matters. Still the way Honey works is just astonishingly awful.
TL;DW: Honey isn’t just stealing influencer commissions and restricting what coupons can be applied to partnered stores, they are also wedging themselves into the sales of non-partnered stores, applying private coupon codes after scraping them from users who didn’t consent to Honey taking that code, and then applying them to non-partnered stores in an attempt to strong-arm them into becoming a Honey affiliate. They are essentially racketeering.
The fact that Honey also scrapes all of your browser data is basically just expected.
Maybe it’s the privilege of having some money, but I was like this long before I had any.
I don’t use coupons of any kind except in rare/lucky circumstances. I am unwilling to go through any hoops or hassle that is even remotely adjacent to coupons or referrals for nearly any amount of savings. It has to be a ridiculous and potentially error-enabled deal.
They’re not worth the mental effort. I save myself a lot of mental energy by ignoring the concept of sales or deals and just buying exactly what I want or need when I want or need it, as my available money allows.
But even worse, I’ve been a Product Manager long enough to know more about how these things work. They’re basically just a way to lower your prices for people who are willing to spend time/energy/hassle, without opening up those lower prices to everyone. It’s an extreme and highly targeted form of demographic discrimination for maximum revenue.
I am rather similar. Coupon codes seem more like a hassle or a theft unless I have gotten it directly from the store. And I inherently distrust basically all “podcast subsidy programs” that primarily sponsor internet content especially if the service they offer is “free”. But at the same time I can’t really fault anybody trying to save a bit of money.
The thing though is that Honey reeks basically from the outset. “Save a bunch of money with no strings attached” has so many red flag all over it that the only question you need to ask is “okay, but how does Honey make money then?” that it is pretty obvious that it will be at least a data-scraping operation.
That the grift goes so deep and rises to in my opinion criminal levels is however astounding, definitely falling under the offenses of racketeering and fraud. That they basically managed to get a bunch of influencers to advertise a service that literally steals money from them is in one way hilarious, but also morally depraved.
Many of those influencers deserve it in a way though. Mr. Beast shouting at you that you should essentially install malware on the PCs of your family members is fucking disgusting.