>Hold up, that's something people actually would do, click a link in a YouTube description instead of opening a new tab to search for it? Wild.
Yes, most people don't know/care about tracking links or whatever. Moreover even if they do care, most aren't cynical misanthropes who would go out of their way to deny their favorite creator of their affiliate cut.
The affiliate link could be 2x more expensive than other stores. I'd rather see the prices/pick a trusted retailer than just buy from something sketchy like Amazon.
I'm probably out of touch here though, I don't watch YouTubers or streamers in a way that I remember who is who. If I'm watching a video about a product I've likely clicked a few at random to get an overall feeling for it.
I expect most people are going to open the door right in front of them, rather than walk the long way to gain entry, even if they are aware the door is monitored by a security camera.
Yeah, if someone I trust makes a recommendation I would much rather follow the link and get the right one than risk getting some scam.
I hate when people say "I recommend Bubble App" and I need to search for it, I'm always worried that I get some other app with the same or similar name.
It's also the case that e.g. Amazon will rarely show the exact product you search for, and will instead promote an equivalent product that pays them for placement - often extremely similar looking. Web searches are getting worse too, with AI-generated content letting scammy alternatives look more professional than ever. We're circling back to links being king.
I used to always remove affiliate codes from links, but after hearing about just how much revenue creators make from Amazon affiliate, I started clicking them if it’s a creator that I support (especially smaller creators).
With Amazon, apparently the creator gets a percentage commission on your entire cart. Without the affiliate link, the price to me is exactly the same - Amazon just keeps the money. I assume AmazonSmile was basically using the charity you selected as the “affiliate”, but they shut that program down.
So yeah, it hurts my individual privacy stance, but it’s a drop in the bucket compared to all the data Amazon has about me already. Commission affiliate links at least redirect some of the revenue to the creator themselves.
Here me out on this. A lot of people are in a bubble. Honey got popular because almost ever big influencer out there would market it, and they might still for all I know. People in their infinite wisdom trust these influencers, like those that trust David Pakman saying PIA is the most secure VPN, or the thousands of other influencers shilling for NordVPN. A vast majority of people don't know that there are other VPN providers out there, nor do they really care. What matters if how influencers make them feel about their decision.
Now, if Google suddenly gets a spike in negative reviews, and a lot of them are from Chrome-connected accounts where they can see they've never downloaded that extension, or a lot of them appear to be from users who never used it, then they may have reason to remove or not weight those reviews the same. Just like where an establishment has built up a good reputation, and then something unpopular happens on camera and goes viral & so a bunch of people that have never been there flood the reviews.
What seems most likely to me is that Honey is still a rather popular extension, that what might bother you or the techcentric groups you follow doesn't really matter to a vast majority of users. It may be unfortunate, especially if people are getting misled or Honey is engaged in corruption. If people cared about corruption companies like Comcast/Xfinity would be non-existent IMO. Unfortunately they don't. If people want Google to ban/unfeature Honey, then wouldn't it be better to have a court judgement declaring Honey broke the law, rather than doing it just because it was unpopular to a much smaller group of users than the ones that thought Honey was the greatest cause their favorite influencer told them it was?
I'll note it's not only unpopular now with a "smaller group of users" but also with influencers too now as they've realized it kills their own revenue by altering referral codes.
Astroturfing is a kind of manipulation where you mislead people about attribution, so that they associate what you say/do with a group or person of your choice.
For example, say that you really have an axe to grind with the programming language Rust, and are aware that people have a perception or would find it believable that its community is obnoxious, through being pedantic or overzealous.
What you could then do is join in on conversations and start talking as if you were a member of the Rust community, and act pedantic, overzealous, or otherwise obnoxious. Due to the pretense that you're a Rust user yourself, people would attribute this behavior to the Rust community, meaning you succeeded in boosting this negative perception.
> so a bunch of people that have never been there flood the reviews.
quoting a definition:
The implication behind the use of the term is that instead of a "true" or "natural" grassroots effort behind the activity in question, there is a "fake" or "artificial" appearance of support. It is increasingly recognized as a problem in social media, e-commerce, and politics. Astroturfing can influence public opinion by flooding platforms like political blogs, news sites, and review websites with manipulated content. Some groups accused of astroturfing argue that they are legitimately helping citizen activists to make their voices heard.
Thought about this some more. Even if most of the reviews were from people who never used the extension, this is not necessarily astroturfing, because the intent was not to mislead about the attribution of these reviews, unless we're assuming a conspiracy.
Regardless, this is a distinct claim from score manipulation, which unquestionably did occur.
>People in their infinite wisdom trust these influencers, like those that trust David Pakman saying PIA is the most secure VPN, or the thousands of other influencers shilling for NordVPN. A vast majority of people don't know that there are other VPN providers out there, nor do they really care. What matters if how influencers make them feel about their decision.
Brands pay influencers to promote their products in order to raise brand awareness, it is enough that people know some X or Y product exists so if they need something that X or Y products satisfies they will recall that they heard about X or Y product.
People can't vet everything themselves, it's impossible. It must be exhausting to live under American capitalism, anything and everyone is a potential scam out to get your money. But that is what the American dream really is.
No they can't, and even if they could you'd get people that would evaluate things based on criteria that probably has no value or in some cases could be seen as negative value, but to them it is important. Or in some instances, people believe that if they leave a positive review right away & the company does them bad, that the company will be more inclined to fix the problem.
There is no difference between honey and malware other than the later gets attacked by anti viruses. They literally do the same thing. Stealing referrals.
We live in the most corrupt timeline.
I haven't heard of Honey recruiting computers into a DDOS-for-hire botnet, or providing remote desktop access to an attacker, or stealing financial details and draining bank accounts, or bricking computers on purpose, or encrypting files and holding them for random. Are you sure there's no difference and they literally do the same thing?
At the same time, I've not heard of a virus stealing referrals, but I wouldn't be surprised there. Just seems really uncommon among malware, compared to all the other stuff malware does and Honey doesn't.
Honestly, I thought everybody understood referrals are how "free" coupon sites and coupon extensions got their money to continue existing. Did folks think that Honey was spending that money, building that product and infrastructure, out of the goodness of their hearts, rather than as part of a business?
It seems like the only reason this extension out of many is getting attention, is because some rich internet video stars took money to promote it and regret doing so because it ended up making them less money than they hoped. No caring about their fans (for example, educating them, "don't install coupon extensions, they're usually spyware"), I guess because that's less profitable than exploiting them for $$$
Honey and similar extensions are just monitoring every activity in the browser. I would have been surprised even if these were moderately successful but never expected them to be sold for billions. I would never have thought people would happily let themselves be monitored like this for deals when everything is on Amazon already
At least they had to build elaborate services to lure people in. This honey is just a 1999/2000 idea and tech that somehow made money in this day and age. Weird.
the point is that the service that honey provides doesn't seem to warrant selling your entire browsing activity. At least facebook and google provide a means of communication that is difficult, sometimes impossible, to provide elsewhere on the internet
Facebook and Google are creating a solution to a problem they themselves created by killing competition and the open web. That's the only reason it may appear that alternative means of communications is "difficult" or "sometimes impossible."
Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel will put you in some group e.g. ice cream lovers so when you search Google or scroll Facebook feed they will show you ice cream ads.
You did. PayPal Honey, formerly just Honey, is a browser extension that claims to "help with finding coupons" at webshop checkouts so that you get the "best deal".
It was then found that it also steals all commissions at those checkout points, and instead of finding you a "best deal", it colludes with the merchants, allowing them to control how many people get what kind of "deals", completely defeating the point.
> instead of finding you a "best deal", it colludes with the merchants, allowing them to control how many people get what kind of "deals", completely defeating the point.
This is how "deals" have always worked, to the extent to the current technology makes it possible. Companies don't issue "deals" to be pro consumer, they do it because it benefits them, and they do it in ways that benefit them. For example, they would mail coupons two a few zip codes but not actually mark down the prices unless you actually possess a coupon. That's just a low-tech version of what you're describing.
I'm honestly surprised that people are surprised by this aspect of Honey. The hijacking of affiliate links is one thing, but coupons have always been a way for businesses to influence consumer behavior. Who did people think Honey's real customer was, given that the extension is free?
Sure, but it's as much a lie as "deals" ever are. The whole concept has always been in the business's favor, not consumers', and if something like Honey leads to a lot of people learning that truth, so much the better.
People like you are such a pain. Yes, companies are duplicitous and we should be wary of them. But that doesn't excuse the fact that a company that says we will find you the best deal, and then not only does not but actively colludes with the merchant to decide which deal to offer, if any, is lying and needs to be held responsible.
We have to collectively hold people responsible for lying. People like you make lying nothing to be worried about.
Firefox users are more informed and militant in how to make an effective evaluation on the site. Chrome users are governed by lowest common denominator.
In addition to a sibling comment about median, it could be that or that other common method (I forget, bayesion average? I think), but also consider - 176K reviews, 76 days since the _expose_, if it were 100 reviews a day on average, that's still 7.6K reviews. If it were 10K in the first few days, then 7.6K after, it's still ~10% of total reviews, where they likely had a ~4.6-8 score before hand. A drop in the bucket.
And it's possible (though imo unlikely) that some reviews were removed, perhaps initially at least, due to suspected botting.
Median has little difference to mean when it is a bounded variable .
Rating can only vary 1-5, so mean and median will always be pretty close . For variables like say wealth that skews the average with outliers is where median is more useful than mean
Google doesn't do a very good job of moderating or removing fake ratings, I mean, look at Microsoft's apps on Google Play, look at all those 4.5+ ratings:
I keep wondering why people on HN use Chrome at all three days.
There was a couple of years when people posted demos that only worked in IE^H Chrome but right now everything I need works in Firefox and I don't even see demos that need Chrome anymore.
I keep Chrome as a work browser but use Firefox otherwise. I'm not even affected by the V2 manifest removal because I don't keep an adblocker on Chrome.
For me: because Chrome is the only browser with worry-free sync.
Firefox's sync for example doesn't sync extension settings, search engines and it fails on Android multiple times per day, with the only solution to logout and login again.
It's not a difficult puzzle: I find an always working and worry-free sync of open tabs more important than having extensions on mobile. I'd like to have those too, but right now I have to choose.
Huh, I use FF sync across multiple devices and with extensions, on android etc... never had that issue, my only hitch can be the sync can take a bit for passwords and can't be manually initiated as far as i can tell. Might be the extensions you are using or how cookies are being handled perhaps?
I loved Vivaldi's configurability. But it's sync is slightly moody as well. It can fail for a while. Though it is better than Firefox's in that it fixes itself.
But Vivaldi doesn't support bookmarklets and I use those a lot.
They have completely redone their sync implementation a couple of months ago, which seems to have fixed all the lingering issues (and also added E2EE, which I consider the bare minimum in any case).
I don't know why they particularly think that. But Mozilla developed a way to uniquely track people without their consent or knowledge. I am not ok with that and that is evil to me.
> But Mozilla developed a way to uniquely track people without their consent or knowledge.
Which setting is that, DNS over HTTPS?
I switched back to Firefox the other day and this setting was enabled by default but it wasn't done silently. When you first launch Firefox a popup comes up saying it's going to be enabled but you have options to turn it off on the spot or click a link to learn more.
You have to think about how Google abandoned Firefox, which at the time was quite good, in order to build their own browser. It was always about control and owning the data. They fund their business with advertising spread all over the internet. Manifest v2 allowed their browser to run extensions that block the ads that pay for Chrome to exist.
I used both at the time. I think you are overstating the difference. There wasn't as much full-on JS on the web and for all the things people normally did, FF did not struggle at all.
If Chrome had been aimed primarily at IE, they could have continued to fund Firefox, or could have worked with Mozilla to do whatever improvements they wanted. For example, if the objective had been speed, Google had so much clout with Mozilla at the time that I feel pretty certain they could have contributed to building something like v8 into Firefox.
But it wasn't about any of that. It was about owning the browser because they decided it was in their strategic interest. And that's because their business was by that point entirely funded by people's eyeballs in a browser, looking at ads.
So YouTubers and their fans destroyed PayPal's $4 billion acquisition of Honey....this is like GameStop stoks reloaded. I'm fine with that because PayPal is yet another fishy and scammy tech company that presents itself as savior of Web users' privacy and security. People go crypto. Stablecoins will eventually win.
imagine what affiliate networks in general do, they shave and scrub your leads.
classic explaination, "ohh it seems the pixel fell off, it didn't fire" bla bla bla, this is stealing, nothing else.
What are the odds that it’s not a conspiracy but simply someone at Google thinking it’s a brand they heard of and adding the tag? Or is that not how it works?
Not quite, one has to nominate their extension/apply for it(fill a form, via the dev support centre)[0], for the CWS team to then review it, where after 3-4 weeks they usually grant it - you mainly have to have a "good" listing and "follow best practices" [1]. You can only apply once every 6 months.
In my opinion, either mass reporting, or (unlikely) a manual decision caused them to lose it. And after a while Honey likely applied again, where the reviewer was possibly unaware of past events. Or they were but it's not relevant to the review process. (Having millions of users may have played a part, the bigger exts might be treated differently, though I doubt it). Google doesn't really pay much mind to these things, from what I've seen.
[0] I'm pretty sure there's a dev doc somewhere with this
Interesting, thanks for the information. With it in mind, I think (as you said) someone approved it without giving it much thought. Honey is a very well-known brand, but it's mostly technologists (and only some) who know about the recent scandal.
See sibling comment, it's genuinely just a form you fill in, and if you pass the (arguably low) Store standards, you'll get it. Extensions with ~200 users have them.
I absolutely love how fired up the average YouTube commenter was about Honey... for about 72 hours. People completely unaffected in any way were demanding class action lawsuits, etc with seemingly no clue why they were even upset. Then the subject completely left their minds.
This observation is of course entirely anecdotal, but manufactured outrage is so fascinating, even if it currently eroding the very foundations of society.
Where a lot of online content to be consumed is about dopamine, a lot of other stuff is about spiking cortisol.
There's people on every forum (and regularly here) that suggest, sometimes explicitly, that we must have elevated anxiety and stress levels in response to specific presented content as a moral imperative.
I think cortisol makes the "content" feel more "important" or relevant at the present moment in time. 72 hours later assuming no other exploits our body systems adjust and the content isn't important. It's weird when we notice it, but most of the time our cortisol is being directed to another topic so we don't notice.
There's a ton written about our dopamine addiction and how it's exploited but not much about cortisol and our negative emotions are being exploited.
Many people say that overthinking, anxiety, and stress are moral imperatives as a response to something they don't like: content, political ideas, celebrities, technology companies, and many other things.
It is a completely ineffective method of making a change. I wish they'd stop spreading their anxieties online. I know it makes them feel like they're doing something, but one phone call to a relevant decision-maker is 100x more effective and 100x less destructive to those around them.
It's sort of logical: if a "bad thing" is observed, a "good" observer must feel bad as a negative reinforcement against the "bad thing". Ideally the pressure of the negative emotions must force the "good" observer to stop just watching and go fix things, and afterwards prevent the "bad thing" from occurring again.
This works in simple cases, like spilling your drink: it: it feels bad, the feeling makes you clean it up, and be more careful.
It fails in cases where the immediate effectual action is impossible, or not known. The only reasonable course of action then is to spread the word, because you can't actually fix anything.
And here ingroup / outgroup signaling jumps in! Feeling bad about some issues becomes a signal of group belonging, a kind of virtue signaling. Not feeling bad and not expressing outrage becomes suspicious, if not defiant. This is one of the streams that feeds the outrage machine.
I know this is nitpicking and perhaps a dumb thing to say, but in my view the simple case of drink spilling does not apply.
Have you been around children who spill a drink? The ones who experience high levels of stress bury their heads and treat it as a catastrophe, waiting for someone else to clean it up and soothe them.
Those who treat it as no big deal are more likely to clean it up.
And being more careful only grows slowly with age. Oh, and using heavier glasses btw. It's way better to give kids real glass for drinks and tolerate the occasional breakage than to have constant spilling with light plastic cups.
I think you might be overthinking it. Kids learn to prevent bad things from happening. They learn it so well that sometimes they also learn much helplessness.
It’s the classic politician’s syllogism: we must do something, this [the anxiety, stress, victimisation, activated fear response, overthinking, catastrophising, etc.] is something, therefore we must do it.
The worst thing about it is how it will actually make you less resilient, and a lack of resilience just makes it harder for you to function day to day as each adverse encounter, no matter how trivial, becomes increasingly overwhelming.
To me that feels like a night terror: screaming and shouting about a frightening thing at the end of the bed, but frozen in place and unable to act, unable to fight back. Has to be someone else.
I won’t lie, I think I’ve suffered from this and it’s held me back over the past couple of years as I’d choose flight or avoidance over fight, essentially repeating the cycle until I managed to deal with it and move forward.
Only thing you can do is step back and get out of your head. Separate all the stuff you can’t action from the stuff you can.
> Many people say that overthinking, anxiety, and stress
Man it's as if billions of people were being peddled algorithmic content platforms whose "engagement" metrics benefit from showing you content that promotes overthinking, anxiety, and stress.
"but one phone call to a relevant decision-maker is 100x more effective and 100x less destructive to those around them."
I don't think, the relevant decision makers are open for incoming calls from the internet, but I agree that panic and anxiety solves nothing, but creates just more problems.
You'd be surprised. Almost all government organizations have receptions you can call, and many private companies (who are not using client support to insulate themselves from feedback) will have executives you can speak to if you ask. There are also many activists you can talk to.
The change might not come from them doing something for you, too. They may teach you something you don't know, which can reduce your friction in some situations, too.
For example, people commonly complain about poor consumer protection around the world. But usually, there are already laws against mistreating consumers, and if they were to report the incident to the right organization/inspector, they would get the remedy they want.
The solution is often the two right people getting on a call or talking in a room. In the EU, there are even some summer camps for teens aged 14-18 to learn how to approach government decision-makers. It is doable.
I think you may have some learned helplessness everyone here talks about. But if you give it an earnest try and approach a problem you see from various angles, you'll make some progress on it. Usually, this will be done by talking to a decision-maker.
Ah, yeah. I live in the US so it's a bit of a different situation here. Political polarization in a two-party system means that the decision makers are rarely actually listening. We rely on the EU to regulate our technology, so generally the same situation makes us feel disempowered because, well, we are. The people who make the rules don't represent us.
I’m part of a volunteer group that lobbies congresspeople about climate change, and there’re at least a few examples of it making a very obvious difference (for example, one republican member of congress started the conservative climate caucus after going on a nature walk with some members of this group, it now counts over half of all republican members of congress as members). So I’d caution from adopting this idea that it’s all useless, it’s not. A lot of times, they’re just not hearing that their constituents really care about these things. They’re only human.
I hope you don't take it as an offense, but this seems like learned hopelessness. Have you earnestly tried to speak to a decision-maker?
Not everyone in the EU will listen to you, either. There is a bit of a learning curve. Sometimes, you have to apply pressure through specific channels in specific ways, such as influencing stakeholders. Sometimes, you even have to form an organization for your cause. But not always. Sometimes, it just takes time to find someone who will listen. But effort it does take.
"A phone call to the relevant decision maker" LOL.
I'm with you: outrage alone is useless, but I wouldn't expect to be a "call to a decision maker" to be anything other than the same banner of "more to make yourself feel good".
If you want to change the world, do ANYTHING to make your voice heard. Shout your message to everyone. Sing, blog, go outside with a poster. Start a substack. Write a web browser. Heck, if someone wants to make a better version of Honey I hear there's a lot of people who want to support creators through affiliates but are evidently having a hard time finding a company who sees them as anything but patsies.
Let's think about what shouting a message to the world does. First, you affect the stakeholders of the decision-maker (person or organization). When talking about a politician in a democracy, the public often determines whether they get elected. So, you are applying pressure to them through a stakeholder — “fall in line or risk your career.”
You are also slowly changing the culture and applying pressure to the societal outlook. This also applies to your decision-makers (whose friends, family, co-workers, and political or corporate partners partake in the broader culture) and future decision-makers raised in the culture you are shaping.
These are all tactics you can use, but some decision-makers are very resistant to societal and stakeholder pressure. They either have a strong negotiating position (like Donald Trump, who offered Americans many things other candidates were not offering for moral reasons), or they may have a model of functioning in the politico-organizational system that insulates them from the ideas of others (they may simply be narcissists or zealots). But if you speak with them and you negotiate in terms relevant to them, they will listen.
To that end, you first have to make the call or get in a room with them.
It gets collected and tallied by an intern who probably isn’t even paid. The tally is then reported for the day to an actual staffer who may or may not bother mentioning it to the rep that day.
Is my anxiety warranted yet if I'm a trans person? Because I wish people would at least acknowledge reality, that there is a tangible threat of genocide around, that we're being targeted for easy rhetorical wins, that trans women are currently put in men's prison despite court orders prohibiting it - not despite but because they'll be raped and "v-coded".
What I mostly get is indifference or "didoing" ("it's not so bad") - and yes, that indifference spikes my anxiety. Because it feels like this is the same indifference that ultimately lead to "Didn't the Germans know what was happening?". The answer is, they didn't care to look.
I would say anxiety is not warranted, but when the circumstances become dangerous to you, action might be.
Perhaps use the exit, voice, and loyalty (EVL) model. It describes three effective responses that don't involve anxiety. Exit means you remove yourself from the situation — perhaps you move to a state where your rights are better protected or leave your current doctor for an activist doctor. Voice means getting into rooms and on the phone with decision-makers, as well as preparing for this. Loyalty means you stop worrying and remain loyal to an organization but hopeful that things will change. In this model, remaining in the situation and stressing about it is a misguided choice.
Just as you worry about the Third Reich, the EVL model explains the coping strategies of people who were under the regime. Some exited, some dissented, and some chose loyalty. These were very functional strategies.
I'm not going to debate the exaggerated genocide claim. Still, I'd say be careful how you use this specific historical term, as much genocide is happening in the world today, and much has happened in the last several generations. Some readers will have family trauma; it's easy to offend people this way and turn them off to your cause. In general, the more emotional language you use, the less trustworthy you will appear.
Either way, I acknowledge your anxiety is real and that some harm may come your way in the future. I want to be clear: this is not a dismissal of your fears. But I suggest action instead. Whether that action protects you or others in similar circumstances, it will be more effective than worrying.
Considering how this thread went, and how there's just no way to reach most people anymore in this post truth affect driven world, yeah maybe I should live in rural Iceland or something.
> I'm not going to debate the exaggerated genocide claim.
Too late, you called it exaggerated. I'm wondering, would you consider residential schools genocide?
There's no tangible threat of genocide though. Perhaps you've been overexposed to a social media bubble that's steeped in anxiety about this, despite there being no plausible prospect of such a horror occurring?
There are bathroom bills in 13 US states. Trans people (especially those who pass well) need to make a rather difficult choice when out in public for more than a few hours. Do they use the bathroom that matches their gender identity and run risk of criminal punishment? Do they use the bathroom that matches their birth sex but the look completely out of place and make it likely that they will be harassed or have the cops called on them? Neither option is good. If you can't use public bathrooms safely then "being out of your home for more than a short period of time" is a denied right.
We've seen bills introduced to consider trans people "misrepresenting" their gender as different from their birth sex as criminal fraud. This isn't too far from the current administration's executive order banning trans people from the military for being "liars", according to the bigots in the administration.
There are also bills trying to make the public visibility of trans people something that is threatening to children based on the bigoted perception of trans people as child rapists. So you'll get things like "public performance" classified as sexualized drag performance so that trans people experience the same limitations on being in or around places with children as sex offenders.
Then, of course, there is all the basic healthcare stuff. The white house put out an executive order (currently delayed by courts) withholding federal funding for hospitals that provide gender affirming care for people age 18 and 19. These are legal adults. If this stands, we'll almost surely start seeing legislation banning gender affirming care for adults in various red states. Criminalizing hormone treatment is forced detransition.
> Do they use the bathroom that matches their gender identity and run risk of criminal punishment? Do they use the bathroom that matches their birth sex but the look completely out of place and make it likely that they will be harassed or have the cops called on them?
Thanks for writing up this answer. I suspect the commenter you are replying to has never even stopped to consider the experience of a real person and what it would be like.
The entire situation is just so asinine. In addition to the clear pain and suffering this causes trans people, it also hurts cis people and doesn't even achieve the stated goal of making cis women feel safe in the bathroom (not that it would justify the bigoted policies, even if it did).
There are plenty of butch cis women who now get harassed in the bathroom for "looking like a man" because these policies have opened up the floodgates for bigots to transvestigate everybody they come across. And if everybody follows the law as written then there will be people using the women's restroom who are indistinguishable from cis men unless you inspect documentation (which nobody is obliged to carry in public) or inspect genitals.
The true outcome (and I believe the true goal, though not typically stated out loud) is that trans people (and people who don't fit rigid and traditional gender presentations) are simply not able to be in public safely.
The regression we've seen in legal rights has been so swift. In 2016 North Carolina tried to pass one of these bills and major organizations like the NCAA and Paypal took serious economic action in order to get it reversed. It felt like a society-wide rejection where it wasn't just left leaning activists pushing back but major organizations without a typical political agenda too.
In the past four years we've seen 13 states pass bathroom bills and more than half the states pass gender affirming care bans for minors largely without a peep from corporations.
In addition to the very good sibling answers: look up what the original Stonewall riot was about. Crossdressing (not the same as being trans! but a necessary precursor) was illegal, and the police could carry out raids and arrest people for wearing gender non-conforming clothing.
This is (just about) in living memory - Donald Trump was 22 years old when the Stonewall riot happened - and there's plenty of people who would like to roll back the law to then. Not just ban trans people but overturn Obergefell v Hodges just like they did with Roe v Wage, end gay marriage, and re-criminalize homosexuality and LGBT expression. Which is why the community rallies against attempts to split off trans people from LGBT.
Healthcare, as in the hormones requires to transition and not detransition. The system is also likely cruel enough that it'll leave people who've had any kind of GRS without hormone replacement at all, and you don't want to have no sex hormone in your body, your bones don't appreciate it.
There's also some "performance" ban bills that are broad enough that they could classify a trans person existing in public as "drag performance" (the website you didn't read says "However, the language of the laws is so broad that it could extend to performances of Shakespeare.").
Please at least to attempt to "engage curiously" next time, the answers are all here.
Eradication doesn't need to happen though death, though these actions of course also raise the suicide rate. Displacement, cultural eradication, making it impossible to exist in public, stochastic terrorism though constant demonization - these are all already here.
If you all feel more comfortable with those words, feel free to replace genocide with all of the above. Does not help with my anxiety being rooted more in indifference to the actions than the actions themselves.
You need to read up on the definition of genocide (especially beyond thinking of it as the last 2-3 stages; being defined out of existence is quite literally EO 14168) and then maybe have a look at https://translegislation.com/.
It's one of those things that'll always sound exaggerated, even if it's not.
Interesting website but could you explain why this legislation, most of which was rejected, indicates intent to commit genocide?
I honestly do not see how, to take one example, athletes only being allowed to compete against others of the same sex is a step on the path to genocide.
This suggestion of genocide does sound very exaggerated, and I believe your anxiety on this is misplaced.
The sports bans are distractions or canaries at best. They're a wedge for making action against trans people palatable, as even democrats will occasionally, as a gut feeling, agree with them. There's a nuanced discussion to be had, but ultimately it should be fairly obvious that republicans do not actually care about women's sports. These bills are proposed for different reasons. The sheer volume of the legislation should make it clear alone. It's March, and we got more bills introduced this year than last year already.
If you can't get the image of genocide as traincars and skull piles out of your head, I can't help you, but there's a concerted effort to make our lives miserable to unlivable and to definitionally erase us from public consciousness (aside from painting us as legitimate dehumanized targets). If you can't see that I can't help you, I can just stack it on my anxiety pile as someone else who never wondered how Germany was for Jews (and many other groups, including queer people) in the decade before the holocaust.
Yes, it's concerning how prevalent scare stories are. They needlessly raise everybody's stress levels. This disease of modern times is a serious issue that can only get worse, and we should all be very worried about it.
It's not manufactured. The people affected were social media influencers who used affiliate links. So the incident affected a very small and specific segment of society that incidentally could broadcast this to a lot of people.
The replacing affiliate links was older news (though still news to a lot of people). The new info in the video which blew up involved them also being scummy to the end users as well.
Not really, it was pretty clear from the investigation that some youtuber that I can't remember the name of that it wasn't just that.
One of the big claim from Honey is that it finds for you the coupons with that make you spend the least amount of money, but that's false if they have an agreement with the seller to only show you certain coupons.
So no, it doesn't affect just influencers, it affects also customers and vendors.
The point of GP is that some of the people specifically affected (through honey replacing their codes) were influencers / streamers, who thus specifically
LTT certainly talked about Honey replacing other discount codes in baskets potentially making a basket more expensive, and injecting their own affiliate code when no discount was available.
It was all thoroughly scummy and against the spirit of an affiliate referral.
But I don't understand why YouTubers were so surprised. This thing is clearly generating revenue to pay off all the top shelf YouTubers and it's clearly doing that by inserting affiliate codes to generate revenue. There's no ethical explanation as to where this extra saving and Honey's revenue comes from.
It felt clear to me because that's where the money is. Even if you don't understand that, YouTubers would because that's how they paid from all their sponsored links.
I also wouldn't expect PayPal to recoup this huge marketing investment from very partial purchase data. It'd be nothing compared to what VISA and the other big card companies collect.
I feel like the internet is turning into TV. There are not that many things going on, instead, there's a firehose that directs all the rage or all the love to something for some period of time. Almost like the legacy media picking topics and directing the narrative.
I'm particularly annoyed by Twitter lately because I can no longer share anything with my GF because she have already seen it. Our timelines are largely similar, it doesn't matter much who do you follow. Also, the algorithmic discovery being the default is very effective to create this channels(Technology Connections recently made a video about it).
On Twitter it appears like there are few talking points, or "channels", are being pushed based on location and few other things maybe and apparently to get exposure you have to say something that fits the narrative.
Maybe its not intentional, maybe its the result of the algo dividing people in cohorts or something but I'm very annoyed by the potentially destructive effect of the firehose. Everyone being very outraged of something for short period of time or being very excited for short period of time can't be healthy because it lacks depth and continuation.
> there's a firehose that directs all the rage or all the love to something for some period of time.
I call it “outrage porn.” I have a friend that is really politically engaged, and occasionally sends me YouTube links to almost cartoonish vids. I watched the first couple, but ignore them, now. He seems to take them completely seriously, and I’ve learned not to trigger him, when it comes to politics.
I've found futility in trying to "get" others to do anything. As a manager, I used to have the power to coerce folks, but that was always a stopgap measure.
The main thing that I do, personally, is not engage in these things. There are some shows, vids, and news sources that I simply avoid, and that seems to have done the trick.
It's like giving up an addiction, though. I felt quite uncomfortable, for a time. I no longer feel uncomfortable, and these once-legitimate (to me) news sources, now seem to be little more than cartoons.
> and apparently to get exposure you have to say the something that fits the narrative.
I think we should really be aware that, if tech companies weren't already able to build something like this anyway, with LLMs they are definitely able now.
There is lots of talk about the generative powers of LLMs, but they also have unprecedented analysis powers: You can now easily build something that automatically checks whether a tweet expresses a certain opinion or narrative and automatically upranks or downranks it based on the results.
So if you're the owner of a platform, you can now fully control the appearance of what "people are saying" on the platform, without even having to use bots or fake messages.
(Of course you could use those as well, in addition, if the opinion you want to push is so bad there aren't enough real users to uprank in the first place)
Definitely. AFAIK they previously used to do sentiment analysis and Facebook faced some backslash for experimenting over the mood of their users by manipulating their timelines but today it must be possible to do %100 editorial moderation using LLMs and pretend that whatever you want is the general public sentiment.
I also notice that "influencers" are also influenced by this. They pick the talking points from real time media like Twitter and then make coherent videos over this stuff and it gets legitimized. People rarely revisit their past works once the firehose is spraying at some other direction and the fake public sentiment becomes the real public sentiment.
> So if you're the owner of a platform, you can now fully control the appearance of what "people are saying" on the platform
There was a whole scandal at Twitter about this around 2020 or 21. People came forward and said there were secret departments that would suppress certain ideas or keep certain stories from trending.
If anything this is more like the old internet, where there was only a few central wells of information, and with a few hours of daily browsing you could know "everything" that was going on.
Today it's dramatically more splintered than that. Still central wells, but the amount of content is many orders of magnitude larger and everyone has their own tailored feed.
I disagree, today there are just a few platforms and on Twitter at least everyone sees about same things. I say this because the feed of my girlfriend is very similar to mine, also I see the pretty much same stuff shared on WhatsApp groups of unrelated(related only because of some interest, not having social interaction beyond the group) people.
The total number of content is much larger, probably the absolute number of topics is also much larger, but in my opinion, the diversity of topics is getting smaller and it is directed by the platforms. People’s attention spans and time is limited and the platforms are choosing what they are going to fill it up with and what would be the main topics.
It's just the social media process - find drama, blow it up to a ridiculous scale, profit.
In this particular case the creators were also harmed the most - the users didn't strictly get the "best" deals with Honey, but something is still better than nothing.
I wasn't affected, but the outrage seemed real. People understand theft. If you're going to cozy up to a group of people and then pick all their pockets, you better be ready to be an enemy to that group of people.
The amount of information flooding our minds on a daily basis is staggering. We barely have enough time to process how we feel about a topic, when there are dozens of others craving for our attention. The software we use is built precisely to deliver as much information as possible in the shortest amount of time. So can you really blame people for moving on to other things?
I suppose as long as YouTubers and popular media can band together and talk about a thing, that will create a trend and give them all clicks and watch time.
There are definitely many things to be said about the irresponsible use of this power.
Anger is a temporary motivator so bad actors use it as a way to increase the likelihood of swarm behavior like brigading.
There are also some people who enjoy being part of brigades because it makes them feel like they have a social group that does important things. That's why the same people often go from cause to cause without ever making a noticeable change beyond complaining.
It kind of sucks because they feel like they're special and march to their own tune but often they're being played by whichever piper is in town.
There's no reason to believe that this wasn't just people being impulsive as normal. The Honey debacle left my mind all the same, because life goes on.
If you have any evidence of this having been a manufactured outrage, please do post it. Otherwise, this is just a conspiracy theory, and I'm getting awfully tired of those.
Yeah, the internet outrage cycle is wild. One minute, it's the biggest scandal ever, and the next, everyone's moved on like it never happened. It's like collective amnesia, but with more yelling
No, Honey scammed both the users and the creators. If a store partnered up with Honey, the store could decide which discount codes the users got with Honey and it didn't have to be the best one. This directly contradicts Honey's advertising ("If we find working codes, we'll automatically apply the best savings we find to your cart.") that is still somehow on joinhoney.com.
Not totally true. Honey deliberately only included a subset of coupons (at the seller's discretion), and in many cases better discounts were available elsewhere.
I said this in a reply comment, but it's likely Honey lost it due to mass reporting or _maybe_ (but unlikely) a manual decision, and now that time has passed, they've applied again (the badge "nomination" is just a form you fill in) after a short while and either the manual reviewer was unaware, or it just doesn't matter to the process, as the requirement are quite low.
It's possible larger extensions (1+ mil) have some sway/means to contact internally, but imo Google really doesn't pay much heed to "controversial"/topical things (perhaps apart from ublock). Or developers in general.
It becomes evident when you read some extensive related articles by Wladimir Palant (https://palant.info) [0] who does some pretty deep dives on the Chrome Store. I think he even developed Adblock Plus (the open-source version).
Just to add - you'll find Firefox pays much closer attention (evident by their quick move to remove the badge, and keep it that way) to these sorts of things, and are much more responsive.
The person reviewing Honey's badge nomination/request could have been unaware of the controversy Honey has been in.
Thus upon finding Honey meets the "standards" they grant the request, and Honey is once again "featured".
thanks, after reading a few more comments I picked up on this but not exactly sure the nature of the controversy, something related to affiliate content creators?
I still don't understand why most people got so angry about this, the extension does what it says it does: search for coupons in some kind of database. It seldom works but you don't lose much by trying.
The ones getting "scammed" out of a few referral sales are the ones advertising shitty products with no care whatsoever. Maybe they should have read the fine prints? Maybe the real lesson here is to do your due diligence before pushing garbage products to your fans?
But it doesn't. What it says it does (or at least used to, maybe they've changed it) is "find the best coupons" for you in that database. Instead, they collude with merchants, and do not necessarily give you the best coupons they're aware of, or even falsely claim they do not have any coupons in their database at all.
> The ones getting "scammed" out of a few referral sales are the ones advertising shitty products with no care whatsoever
You're unable to know this / this is an opinion.
> Maybe they should have read the fine prints?
What fine prints are you referring to?
> Maybe the real lesson here is to do your due diligence before pushing garbage products to your fans?
In the original reporting there was another similar extension featured that did not use to do this, but has since started engaging in this same behavior. For all anyone knows, this could have happened to Honey as well.
Sounds like you are taking MegaLags’ video without a grain of salt.
Honey does not touch Amazon affiliate links (you can test this) and yet many enraged influencers just use Amazon affiliate links.
Did you ever test for yourself to see that Honey was not finding you the best coupon? You can test this too. There’s a reason the second video is taking so long.
Yes, some codes are requested to be removed by merchants. You’ll find that these typically are of the friends and family variety with steep discounts. In my experience, if the coupon is public, Honey will try to use it.
> Did you ever test for yourself to see that Honey was not finding you the best coupon? You can test this too. There’s a reason the second video is taking so long.
No. I further did not examine the extension's codebase or followed back its entire revision history. I also do not have access to their infrastructure, particularly their database of coupon codes, and any server side code. I also did not read through the multiple class action lawsuit documents. Not only that, but I also did not perform deeper examination of all the evidence provided. This would include:
- I did not reproduce his tests
- I did not listen to the hours of podcasts mentioned
- I did not independently research his claims
- I did not reach out to merchants for comments
- I did not try to gain insider information
- etc.
Instead, as you noticed, I'm discussing the points published by MegaLag and others, under the assumption that they're true, which the OP didn't claim otherwise - they instead were not even familiar with what was published seemingly. So whether what was published or not is actually true is actually a separate concern from my perspective.
It also lies to its users - they will "affiliate" with stores and the stores can then choose which coupons are shown, so you don't actually get the best coupon.
Even if it's not a huge deal in the scheme of things it's definitely a case of false advertising
I think I watched a video that showed the case when the user was indeed better off NOT using the extension. If you followed an affiliate link that came with a discount for a product that Honey didn't have one for they would still remove the affiliation, thus making you lose money.
Exposing the Honey Influencer Scam [video] - 253 points by jadyoyster (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42483500)
uBlock Origin GPL code being stolen by team behind honey browser extension - 1057 points by extesy (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42576443)
> "You're convinced you should buy the one recommended in his video so you scroll down and find the affiliate link to that product"
Hold up, that's something people actually would do, click a link in a YouTube description instead of opening a new tab to search for it? Wild.
Yes, most people don't know/care about tracking links or whatever. Moreover even if they do care, most aren't cynical misanthropes who would go out of their way to deny their favorite creator of their affiliate cut.
I'm probably out of touch here though, I don't watch YouTubers or streamers in a way that I remember who is who. If I'm watching a video about a product I've likely clicked a few at random to get an overall feeling for it.
You trolling or what? Clicking is easier than searching some long ass name or sentence or whatever.
I hate when people say "I recommend Bubble App" and I need to search for it, I'm always worried that I get some other app with the same or similar name.
With Amazon, apparently the creator gets a percentage commission on your entire cart. Without the affiliate link, the price to me is exactly the same - Amazon just keeps the money. I assume AmazonSmile was basically using the charity you selected as the “affiliate”, but they shut that program down.
So yeah, it hurts my individual privacy stance, but it’s a drop in the bucket compared to all the data Amazon has about me already. Commission affiliate links at least redirect some of the revenue to the creator themselves.
https://www.herzindagi.com/society-culture/google-chrome-upd...
Now, if Google suddenly gets a spike in negative reviews, and a lot of them are from Chrome-connected accounts where they can see they've never downloaded that extension, or a lot of them appear to be from users who never used it, then they may have reason to remove or not weight those reviews the same. Just like where an establishment has built up a good reputation, and then something unpopular happens on camera and goes viral & so a bunch of people that have never been there flood the reviews.
What seems most likely to me is that Honey is still a rather popular extension, that what might bother you or the techcentric groups you follow doesn't really matter to a vast majority of users. It may be unfortunate, especially if people are getting misled or Honey is engaged in corruption. If people cared about corruption companies like Comcast/Xfinity would be non-existent IMO. Unfortunately they don't. If people want Google to ban/unfeature Honey, then wouldn't it be better to have a court judgement declaring Honey broke the law, rather than doing it just because it was unpopular to a much smaller group of users than the ones that thought Honey was the greatest cause their favorite influencer told them it was?
Investigation: GamersNexus Files New Lawsuit Against PayPal & Honey https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKbFBgNuEOU
I'll note it's not only unpopular now with a "smaller group of users" but also with influencers too now as they've realized it kills their own revenue by altering referral codes.
Astroturfing is a kind of manipulation where you mislead people about attribution, so that they associate what you say/do with a group or person of your choice.
For example, say that you really have an axe to grind with the programming language Rust, and are aware that people have a perception or would find it believable that its community is obnoxious, through being pedantic or overzealous.
What you could then do is join in on conversations and start talking as if you were a member of the Rust community, and act pedantic, overzealous, or otherwise obnoxious. Due to the pretense that you're a Rust user yourself, people would attribute this behavior to the Rust community, meaning you succeeded in boosting this negative perception.
Just an example of course.
quoting a definition:
The implication behind the use of the term is that instead of a "true" or "natural" grassroots effort behind the activity in question, there is a "fake" or "artificial" appearance of support. It is increasingly recognized as a problem in social media, e-commerce, and politics. Astroturfing can influence public opinion by flooding platforms like political blogs, news sites, and review websites with manipulated content. Some groups accused of astroturfing argue that they are legitimately helping citizen activists to make their voices heard.
even uses the same verbiage you did originally.
Regardless, this is a distinct claim from score manipulation, which unquestionably did occur.
Brands pay influencers to promote their products in order to raise brand awareness, it is enough that people know some X or Y product exists so if they need something that X or Y products satisfies they will recall that they heard about X or Y product.
At the same time, I've not heard of a virus stealing referrals, but I wouldn't be surprised there. Just seems really uncommon among malware, compared to all the other stuff malware does and Honey doesn't.
Honestly, I thought everybody understood referrals are how "free" coupon sites and coupon extensions got their money to continue existing. Did folks think that Honey was spending that money, building that product and infrastructure, out of the goodness of their hearts, rather than as part of a business?
It seems like the only reason this extension out of many is getting attention, is because some rich internet video stars took money to promote it and regret doing so because it ended up making them less money than they hoped. No caring about their fans (for example, educating them, "don't install coupon extensions, they're usually spyware"), I guess because that's less profitable than exploiting them for $$$
Is this actually true or just your personal speculation?
Enter Facebook and Google.
It was then found that it also steals all commissions at those checkout points, and instead of finding you a "best deal", it colludes with the merchants, allowing them to control how many people get what kind of "deals", completely defeating the point.
This is how "deals" have always worked, to the extent to the current technology makes it possible. Companies don't issue "deals" to be pro consumer, they do it because it benefits them, and they do it in ways that benefit them. For example, they would mail coupons two a few zip codes but not actually mark down the prices unless you actually possess a coupon. That's just a low-tech version of what you're describing.
I'm honestly surprised that people are surprised by this aspect of Honey. The hijacking of affiliate links is one thing, but coupons have always been a way for businesses to influence consumer behavior. Who did people think Honey's real customer was, given that the extension is free?
We have to collectively hold people responsible for lying. People like you make lying nothing to be worried about.
My best guess: the app asks the user whether they're enjoying it, if yes, asks for a review, if no, nothing.
And it's possible (though imo unlikely) that some reviews were removed, perhaps initially at least, due to suspected botting.
Rating can only vary 1-5, so mean and median will always be pretty close . For variables like say wealth that skews the average with outliers is where median is more useful than mean
https://play.google.com/store/apps/dev?id=672084787255366272...
There was a couple of years when people posted demos that only worked in IE^H Chrome but right now everything I need works in Firefox and I don't even see demos that need Chrome anymore.
Firefox's sync for example doesn't sync extension settings, search engines and it fails on Android multiple times per day, with the only solution to logout and login again.
Chrome for Android doesn't support extensions at all, so I'm a bit confused as to how that's a better experience for you.
But Vivaldi doesn't support bookmarklets and I use those a lot.
We are now just entering a timeline where chrome nose dives on that comparison chart of "who is better?" with compared to Firefox.
Which setting is that, DNS over HTTPS?
I switched back to Firefox the other day and this setting was enabled by default but it wasn't done silently. When you first launch Firefox a popup comes up saying it's going to be enabled but you have options to turn it off on the spot or click a link to learn more.
I dont think theres anywhere in google chrome that you can turn off tracking telemetry to google.
(I would argue that Chrome was targeted primarily at IE, though.)
If Chrome had been aimed primarily at IE, they could have continued to fund Firefox, or could have worked with Mozilla to do whatever improvements they wanted. For example, if the objective had been speed, Google had so much clout with Mozilla at the time that I feel pretty certain they could have contributed to building something like v8 into Firefox.
But it wasn't about any of that. It was about owning the browser because they decided it was in their strategic interest. And that's because their business was by that point entirely funded by people's eyeballs in a browser, looking at ads.
Corporations never change
In my opinion, either mass reporting, or (unlikely) a manual decision caused them to lose it. And after a while Honey likely applied again, where the reviewer was possibly unaware of past events. Or they were but it's not relevant to the review process. (Having millions of users may have played a part, the bigger exts might be treated differently, though I doubt it). Google doesn't really pay much mind to these things, from what I've seen.
[0] I'm pretty sure there's a dev doc somewhere with this
[1] https://developer.chrome.com/docs/webstore/discovery#feature...
exploiting people in a shady way => featured, rewarded and protected
Controversial take? no shit, sherlock
This observation is of course entirely anecdotal, but manufactured outrage is so fascinating, even if it currently eroding the very foundations of society.
There's people on every forum (and regularly here) that suggest, sometimes explicitly, that we must have elevated anxiety and stress levels in response to specific presented content as a moral imperative.
I think cortisol makes the "content" feel more "important" or relevant at the present moment in time. 72 hours later assuming no other exploits our body systems adjust and the content isn't important. It's weird when we notice it, but most of the time our cortisol is being directed to another topic so we don't notice.
There's a ton written about our dopamine addiction and how it's exploited but not much about cortisol and our negative emotions are being exploited.
It is a completely ineffective method of making a change. I wish they'd stop spreading their anxieties online. I know it makes them feel like they're doing something, but one phone call to a relevant decision-maker is 100x more effective and 100x less destructive to those around them.
This works in simple cases, like spilling your drink: it: it feels bad, the feeling makes you clean it up, and be more careful.
It fails in cases where the immediate effectual action is impossible, or not known. The only reasonable course of action then is to spread the word, because you can't actually fix anything.
And here ingroup / outgroup signaling jumps in! Feeling bad about some issues becomes a signal of group belonging, a kind of virtue signaling. Not feeling bad and not expressing outrage becomes suspicious, if not defiant. This is one of the streams that feeds the outrage machine.
Have you been around children who spill a drink? The ones who experience high levels of stress bury their heads and treat it as a catastrophe, waiting for someone else to clean it up and soothe them.
Those who treat it as no big deal are more likely to clean it up.
And being more careful only grows slowly with age. Oh, and using heavier glasses btw. It's way better to give kids real glass for drinks and tolerate the occasional breakage than to have constant spilling with light plastic cups.
The failure case I see most often is when this thinking is applied to some kind of a wicked problem.
1. The problem is not understood until after the formulation of a solution.
2.Wicked problems have no stopping rule.
3. Solutions to wicked problems are not right or wrong.
4. Every wicked problem is essentially novel and unique.
5. Every solution to a wicked problem is a "one shot operation".
6. Wicked problems have no given alternative solutions.
Source: Dialogue Mapping: Building Shared Understanding of Wicked Problems 2006 Jeffrey Conklin ISBN: 978-0-470-01768-5
The worst thing about it is how it will actually make you less resilient, and a lack of resilience just makes it harder for you to function day to day as each adverse encounter, no matter how trivial, becomes increasingly overwhelming.
To me that feels like a night terror: screaming and shouting about a frightening thing at the end of the bed, but frozen in place and unable to act, unable to fight back. Has to be someone else.
I won’t lie, I think I’ve suffered from this and it’s held me back over the past couple of years as I’d choose flight or avoidance over fight, essentially repeating the cycle until I managed to deal with it and move forward.
Only thing you can do is step back and get out of your head. Separate all the stuff you can’t action from the stuff you can.
Man it's as if billions of people were being peddled algorithmic content platforms whose "engagement" metrics benefit from showing you content that promotes overthinking, anxiety, and stress.
Algorithmic social media is severely fucked up.
I don't think, the relevant decision makers are open for incoming calls from the internet, but I agree that panic and anxiety solves nothing, but creates just more problems.
The change might not come from them doing something for you, too. They may teach you something you don't know, which can reduce your friction in some situations, too.
For example, people commonly complain about poor consumer protection around the world. But usually, there are already laws against mistreating consumers, and if they were to report the incident to the right organization/inspector, they would get the remedy they want.
The solution is often the two right people getting on a call or talking in a room. In the EU, there are even some summer camps for teens aged 14-18 to learn how to approach government decision-makers. It is doable.
I think you may have some learned helplessness everyone here talks about. But if you give it an earnest try and approach a problem you see from various angles, you'll make some progress on it. Usually, this will be done by talking to a decision-maker.
Not everyone in the EU will listen to you, either. There is a bit of a learning curve. Sometimes, you have to apply pressure through specific channels in specific ways, such as influencing stakeholders. Sometimes, you even have to form an organization for your cause. But not always. Sometimes, it just takes time to find someone who will listen. But effort it does take.
I'm with you: outrage alone is useless, but I wouldn't expect to be a "call to a decision maker" to be anything other than the same banner of "more to make yourself feel good".
If you want to change the world, do ANYTHING to make your voice heard. Shout your message to everyone. Sing, blog, go outside with a poster. Start a substack. Write a web browser. Heck, if someone wants to make a better version of Honey I hear there's a lot of people who want to support creators through affiliates but are evidently having a hard time finding a company who sees them as anything but patsies.
You are also slowly changing the culture and applying pressure to the societal outlook. This also applies to your decision-makers (whose friends, family, co-workers, and political or corporate partners partake in the broader culture) and future decision-makers raised in the culture you are shaping.
These are all tactics you can use, but some decision-makers are very resistant to societal and stakeholder pressure. They either have a strong negotiating position (like Donald Trump, who offered Americans many things other candidates were not offering for moral reasons), or they may have a model of functioning in the politico-organizational system that insulates them from the ideas of others (they may simply be narcissists or zealots). But if you speak with them and you negotiate in terms relevant to them, they will listen.
To that end, you first have to make the call or get in a room with them.
It gets collected and tallied by an intern who probably isn’t even paid. The tally is then reported for the day to an actual staffer who may or may not bother mentioning it to the rep that day.
What I mostly get is indifference or "didoing" ("it's not so bad") - and yes, that indifference spikes my anxiety. Because it feels like this is the same indifference that ultimately lead to "Didn't the Germans know what was happening?". The answer is, they didn't care to look.
Perhaps use the exit, voice, and loyalty (EVL) model. It describes three effective responses that don't involve anxiety. Exit means you remove yourself from the situation — perhaps you move to a state where your rights are better protected or leave your current doctor for an activist doctor. Voice means getting into rooms and on the phone with decision-makers, as well as preparing for this. Loyalty means you stop worrying and remain loyal to an organization but hopeful that things will change. In this model, remaining in the situation and stressing about it is a misguided choice.
Just as you worry about the Third Reich, the EVL model explains the coping strategies of people who were under the regime. Some exited, some dissented, and some chose loyalty. These were very functional strategies.
I'm not going to debate the exaggerated genocide claim. Still, I'd say be careful how you use this specific historical term, as much genocide is happening in the world today, and much has happened in the last several generations. Some readers will have family trauma; it's easy to offend people this way and turn them off to your cause. In general, the more emotional language you use, the less trustworthy you will appear.
Either way, I acknowledge your anxiety is real and that some harm may come your way in the future. I want to be clear: this is not a dismissal of your fears. But I suggest action instead. Whether that action protects you or others in similar circumstances, it will be more effective than worrying.
> I'm not going to debate the exaggerated genocide claim.
Too late, you called it exaggerated. I'm wondering, would you consider residential schools genocide?
We've seen bills introduced to consider trans people "misrepresenting" their gender as different from their birth sex as criminal fraud. This isn't too far from the current administration's executive order banning trans people from the military for being "liars", according to the bigots in the administration.
There are also bills trying to make the public visibility of trans people something that is threatening to children based on the bigoted perception of trans people as child rapists. So you'll get things like "public performance" classified as sexualized drag performance so that trans people experience the same limitations on being in or around places with children as sex offenders.
Then, of course, there is all the basic healthcare stuff. The white house put out an executive order (currently delayed by courts) withholding federal funding for hospitals that provide gender affirming care for people age 18 and 19. These are legal adults. If this stands, we'll almost surely start seeing legislation banning gender affirming care for adults in various red states. Criminalizing hormone treatment is forced detransition.
Thanks for writing up this answer. I suspect the commenter you are replying to has never even stopped to consider the experience of a real person and what it would be like.
There are plenty of butch cis women who now get harassed in the bathroom for "looking like a man" because these policies have opened up the floodgates for bigots to transvestigate everybody they come across. And if everybody follows the law as written then there will be people using the women's restroom who are indistinguishable from cis men unless you inspect documentation (which nobody is obliged to carry in public) or inspect genitals.
The true outcome (and I believe the true goal, though not typically stated out loud) is that trans people (and people who don't fit rigid and traditional gender presentations) are simply not able to be in public safely.
The regression we've seen in legal rights has been so swift. In 2016 North Carolina tried to pass one of these bills and major organizations like the NCAA and Paypal took serious economic action in order to get it reversed. It felt like a society-wide rejection where it wasn't just left leaning activists pushing back but major organizations without a typical political agenda too.
In the past four years we've seen 13 states pass bathroom bills and more than half the states pass gender affirming care bans for minors largely without a peep from corporations.
This is (just about) in living memory - Donald Trump was 22 years old when the Stonewall riot happened - and there's plenty of people who would like to roll back the law to then. Not just ban trans people but overturn Obergefell v Hodges just like they did with Roe v Wage, end gay marriage, and re-criminalize homosexuality and LGBT expression. Which is why the community rallies against attempts to split off trans people from LGBT.
There's also some "performance" ban bills that are broad enough that they could classify a trans person existing in public as "drag performance" (the website you didn't read says "However, the language of the laws is so broad that it could extend to performances of Shakespeare.").
Please at least to attempt to "engage curiously" next time, the answers are all here.
If you all feel more comfortable with those words, feel free to replace genocide with all of the above. Does not help with my anxiety being rooted more in indifference to the actions than the actions themselves.
You need to read up on the definition of genocide (especially beyond thinking of it as the last 2-3 stages; being defined out of existence is quite literally EO 14168) and then maybe have a look at https://translegislation.com/.
It's one of those things that'll always sound exaggerated, even if it's not.
I honestly do not see how, to take one example, athletes only being allowed to compete against others of the same sex is a step on the path to genocide.
This suggestion of genocide does sound very exaggerated, and I believe your anxiety on this is misplaced.
If you can't get the image of genocide as traincars and skull piles out of your head, I can't help you, but there's a concerted effort to make our lives miserable to unlivable and to definitionally erase us from public consciousness (aside from painting us as legitimate dehumanized targets). If you can't see that I can't help you, I can just stack it on my anxiety pile as someone else who never wondered how Germany was for Jews (and many other groups, including queer people) in the decade before the holocaust.
One of the big claim from Honey is that it finds for you the coupons with that make you spend the least amount of money, but that's false if they have an agreement with the seller to only show you certain coupons.
So no, it doesn't affect just influencers, it affects also customers and vendors.
To anyone with a modicum of business savvy, it's not remotely surprising. You literally (don't) get what you literally (don't) pay for.
> could broadcast this to a lot of people.
It was all thoroughly scummy and against the spirit of an affiliate referral.
But I don't understand why YouTubers were so surprised. This thing is clearly generating revenue to pay off all the top shelf YouTubers and it's clearly doing that by inserting affiliate codes to generate revenue. There's no ethical explanation as to where this extra saving and Honey's revenue comes from.
> There's no ethical explanation as to where this extra saving and Honey's revenue comes from.
I also wouldn't expect PayPal to recoup this huge marketing investment from very partial purchase data. It'd be nothing compared to what VISA and the other big card companies collect.
I'm particularly annoyed by Twitter lately because I can no longer share anything with my GF because she have already seen it. Our timelines are largely similar, it doesn't matter much who do you follow. Also, the algorithmic discovery being the default is very effective to create this channels(Technology Connections recently made a video about it).
On Twitter it appears like there are few talking points, or "channels", are being pushed based on location and few other things maybe and apparently to get exposure you have to say something that fits the narrative.
Maybe its not intentional, maybe its the result of the algo dividing people in cohorts or something but I'm very annoyed by the potentially destructive effect of the firehose. Everyone being very outraged of something for short period of time or being very excited for short period of time can't be healthy because it lacks depth and continuation.
I call it “outrage porn.” I have a friend that is really politically engaged, and occasionally sends me YouTube links to almost cartoonish vids. I watched the first couple, but ignore them, now. He seems to take them completely seriously, and I’ve learned not to trigger him, when it comes to politics.
This seems to be de rigueur, these days.
The main thing that I do, personally, is not engage in these things. There are some shows, vids, and news sources that I simply avoid, and that seems to have done the trick.
It's like giving up an addiction, though. I felt quite uncomfortable, for a time. I no longer feel uncomfortable, and these once-legitimate (to me) news sources, now seem to be little more than cartoons.
I think we should really be aware that, if tech companies weren't already able to build something like this anyway, with LLMs they are definitely able now.
There is lots of talk about the generative powers of LLMs, but they also have unprecedented analysis powers: You can now easily build something that automatically checks whether a tweet expresses a certain opinion or narrative and automatically upranks or downranks it based on the results.
So if you're the owner of a platform, you can now fully control the appearance of what "people are saying" on the platform, without even having to use bots or fake messages.
(Of course you could use those as well, in addition, if the opinion you want to push is so bad there aren't enough real users to uprank in the first place)
I also notice that "influencers" are also influenced by this. They pick the talking points from real time media like Twitter and then make coherent videos over this stuff and it gets legitimized. People rarely revisit their past works once the firehose is spraying at some other direction and the fake public sentiment becomes the real public sentiment.
There was a whole scandal at Twitter about this around 2020 or 21. People came forward and said there were secret departments that would suppress certain ideas or keep certain stories from trending.
Today it's dramatically more splintered than that. Still central wells, but the amount of content is many orders of magnitude larger and everyone has their own tailored feed.
I disagree, today there are just a few platforms and on Twitter at least everyone sees about same things. I say this because the feed of my girlfriend is very similar to mine, also I see the pretty much same stuff shared on WhatsApp groups of unrelated(related only because of some interest, not having social interaction beyond the group) people.
The total number of content is much larger, probably the absolute number of topics is also much larger, but in my opinion, the diversity of topics is getting smaller and it is directed by the platforms. People’s attention spans and time is limited and the platforms are choosing what they are going to fill it up with and what would be the main topics.
What more would you want?
Average viewers are largely unaffected, so it’s not a topic that makes for great content.
In this particular case the creators were also harmed the most - the users didn't strictly get the "best" deals with Honey, but something is still better than nothing.
I watch an embarrassing amount of YouTube and it was virtually all I heard about for 72 hours and then any mention at all vanished.
There are definitely many things to be said about the irresponsible use of this power.
Anger is a temporary motivator so bad actors use it as a way to increase the likelihood of swarm behavior like brigading.
There are also some people who enjoy being part of brigades because it makes them feel like they have a social group that does important things. That's why the same people often go from cause to cause without ever making a noticeable change beyond complaining.
It kind of sucks because they feel like they're special and march to their own tune but often they're being played by whichever piper is in town.
The Honey business model was the same as every other coupon website that has launched over the last two decades.
Providing coupons in return for affiliate cookies
Before the media outrage how did people assume they made money?
Greed has always led people astray. But the whirlwind has no power on those who are content. It's a tragedy but a fateful one.
There's no reason to believe that this wasn't just people being impulsive as normal. The Honey debacle left my mind all the same, because life goes on.
If you have any evidence of this having been a manufactured outrage, please do post it. Otherwise, this is just a conspiracy theory, and I'm getting awfully tired of those.
It's possible larger extensions (1+ mil) have some sway/means to contact internally, but imo Google really doesn't pay much heed to "controversial"/topical things (perhaps apart from ublock). Or developers in general.
It becomes evident when you read some extensive related articles by Wladimir Palant (https://palant.info) [0] who does some pretty deep dives on the Chrome Store. I think he even developed Adblock Plus (the open-source version).
[0] I'm unaffiliated, just a reader.
The ones getting "scammed" out of a few referral sales are the ones advertising shitty products with no care whatsoever. Maybe they should have read the fine prints? Maybe the real lesson here is to do your due diligence before pushing garbage products to your fans?
But it doesn't. What it says it does (or at least used to, maybe they've changed it) is "find the best coupons" for you in that database. Instead, they collude with merchants, and do not necessarily give you the best coupons they're aware of, or even falsely claim they do not have any coupons in their database at all.
> The ones getting "scammed" out of a few referral sales are the ones advertising shitty products with no care whatsoever
You're unable to know this / this is an opinion.
> Maybe they should have read the fine prints?
What fine prints are you referring to?
> Maybe the real lesson here is to do your due diligence before pushing garbage products to your fans?
In the original reporting there was another similar extension featured that did not use to do this, but has since started engaging in this same behavior. For all anyone knows, this could have happened to Honey as well.
Honey does not touch Amazon affiliate links (you can test this) and yet many enraged influencers just use Amazon affiliate links.
Did you ever test for yourself to see that Honey was not finding you the best coupon? You can test this too. There’s a reason the second video is taking so long.
Yes, some codes are requested to be removed by merchants. You’ll find that these typically are of the friends and family variety with steep discounts. In my experience, if the coupon is public, Honey will try to use it.
No. I further did not examine the extension's codebase or followed back its entire revision history. I also do not have access to their infrastructure, particularly their database of coupon codes, and any server side code. I also did not read through the multiple class action lawsuit documents. Not only that, but I also did not perform deeper examination of all the evidence provided. This would include:
- I did not reproduce his tests
- I did not listen to the hours of podcasts mentioned
- I did not independently research his claims
- I did not reach out to merchants for comments
- I did not try to gain insider information
- etc.
Instead, as you noticed, I'm discussing the points published by MegaLag and others, under the assumption that they're true, which the OP didn't claim otherwise - they instead were not even familiar with what was published seemingly. So whether what was published or not is actually true is actually a separate concern from my perspective.
Even if it's not a huge deal in the scheme of things it's definitely a case of false advertising