The bad pushes out the good until you’re only left with bad.
A system that tolerates bad actors like this will in time only have bad actors. It’s tolerated because it makes a large amount of money for a small number of people.
This is exactly it. When things are horrible around us, there is a strong temptation to throw ones hands up in apathy and let the rot fester. "Eh, Honey is probably selling my data but I got $5 off my new mattress, so wtv".
We need to resist that call to apathy, stop acquiescing, and start demanding better of others. That, incidentally, often starts at demanding better of ourselves.
I work for a very large company. I'm very close to throwing my hands up in apathy because the company keeps throwing the teams in our area into chaos and disarray with little regard for the humans in them.
We have no investors to answer to. We're printing money. Yet at every opportunity company leadership reveals itself as this slavering beast where the only people in positions of power have gotten there through duplicity and a lack of empathy.
The tech job market is terrible. I'm trapped in the guts of a machine that was supposed to be one of the "good ones".
I'm not sure there's anything to do for people who want to act ethically and be decent to each other if even the "good" companies show a complete lack of regard for anything but making their profits take off into the stratosphere.
I disagree that it’s down to the individuals. While individuals can throw themselves into the gears of the machine it is understandable why they do not.
I see things in terms of a sharecropping analogy, feudal lords (corrupted government) allow the scammers to harvest the crop (victims) for a share of the proceeds. We cannot fix people to the point they are un-scammable and there does not exist a democratic force strong enough to fix the government. Almost all ads I’ve ever seen are for obvious scams, especially on twitter. You’d think the richest guy in history (possibly?) could afford not to allow industrial exploitation of his users but apparently not.
You have gambling sites and binary auction scams that have a turnover that includes a significant percentage of suicides. I wish we had a democracy that could prevent this but we do not. While many of us here may be smart enough to avoid falling victim to these scams we have family members that we care about who are not so this still indirectly costs us wealth.
Absolutely! I think this was kind of what OP was driving at with the suggestion to "start demanding better of others." It doesn't work to expect they should do better from their own motivation, we need to fix the broken incentives and consequences that result in those bad decisions being attractive.
While I agree with that ideal I’m not sure how realistic it is. Trump was elected on a populist platform and quickly betrayed his base again, this time before he has even taken office. What are people to do, vote harder? It’s not like Kamala would have fixed this either. If Kamala had a better chance of winning the ‘Tech Titans’ wouldn’t have switched teams. They would have done anything the government asked for so long as the scamming ad revenue kept flowing.
If we mean ‘we tech workers’ then you’ll just be replaced, just like how I was when I quit being a researcher at FANG companies over this and other ethical concerns. The only observable outcome is that my clear conscious came with the cost that I’m far poorer than I could have been. I’m lucky as I’m still well off but not everyone can make that call and survive. These scamming behaviors are trivial to detect and especially so at the large internet company level. It exists on these platforms because the owners want them to.
The US is rife with scams and has been for a long time, and the US has had the two party system for a long time. It would take a lot of convincing for me to believe that this time 4 more years of Democrat rule would have been when the they finally decide to actually do something about it.
> I wish we had a democracy that could prevent this but we do not
Doesn't this rely on us as the individual? We get the government we allow. We, humanity, could've had anything we wanted, this is what we gave ourselves.
‘We’ are animals who have evolved to be a certain way. You could maybe at tremendous effort fix one person but you cannot fix a population. Ever try to get an alcoholic to quit drinking, a junkie to quit drugs, a gambling addict to quit gambling.
Humans have built in innate weaknesses that are easily exploited by the unscrupulous. People have been exploiting others since time immemorial, secret police keep libraries of exploits and you can see them used repeatedly and effectively throughout history. Pied-piper strategy (basket of deplorables), Operation Trust (Q-Anon).
Unfortunately the "first past the post" system used in the USA and UK are effectively a form of prisoner's dilemma. The best thing to do is for everyone to not vote for one of the two oligarchy parties, but if only a small number do that it's meaningless.
It does and yet this seems to highly simplifying things.
Consider the US scoped studies studies showing that the population doesn't get what it wants. They showed that policy follows the whims of the wealthy even in the cases where the population overwhelmingly agrees on a contrary direction. So the data says "no", control has been removed from us.
Part of the complication is that the determined action of a few actors can efficiently spoil the efforts of communities.
That's not apathy, that's not caring and, frankly, there's nothing wrong with that.
You and I value our privacy but most people don't. That's the truth. The tone of your post assumes people agree with you but, clearly, most people don't.
This. Allowing bad actors to participate in a system allows them to externalize costs, which makes them more competitive than good actors. In human relationships, this behavior is punished by excluding bad actors from social relationships (i.e. the "no assholes" rule).
That does not work for corporations, because most people who are customers of these corporations are unaware of the corporation's bad behavior, are unable to avoid the corporation's products, or are stuck with a choice between bad options.
The main solution is regulation, oversight, and legal action, but the first two of these are unlikely to be enacted in the US in the current political climate. The Biden administration made some steps towards stronger regulation (e.g. by putting Lina Khan in control of the FTC), but received little to no political benefit from it and probably harmed fundraising for the Democrats.
Legal action is often prevented by arbitration clauses or disparate funding, where it is financially untenable to restrain bad actors using legal action.
> That does not work for corporations, because most people who are customers of these corporations are unaware of the corporation's bad behavior, are unable to avoid the corporation's products, or are stuck with a choice between bad options.
I mean laws are supposed to stop the bad actors but at this point the extreme cost of legal action and the street-crime fixation of police forces mean those laws don't constrain wealthy interests unless they harm other wealthy interests.
Protects and does not bind vs bind but does not protect. Same as always.
How do you propose a company like Honey should make a profit without deception and scams?
Their product is supposedly: install a FREE extension and you get discount codes applied for you at retailers when you check out.
It turns out they were able to be profitable by making themselves the affiliate every time you purchase something, but that's scammy because it's stealing from others who actually generated the referral.
But what other non-scammy business model could they have? There's basically no business model for what they're trying to offer that makes sense other than end-users paying for it.
I propose Honey should not make money. There is, in fact, no right to make money by doing whatever you want. Honey should lose massive amounts of money and be shut down. Theft is not a business model that needs to be protected.
Why do you assume they are always stealing a referral from somebody? Do you think everything people buy comes from a prior affiliate link? Yes, Honey makes money from affiliate commission. That money is funded by the merchants who voluntarily choose to partner with Honey. How is that scammy?
In the rare case there is a prior referral, yes last click attribution comes into play. But that's the same for every shopping extension (Rakuten, Capital One, etc). The extensions have to comply with the affiliate network's "stand down" policies, which means they can't just automatically pop-up and actively try to poach the commission if it's within the same shopping session. And they all comply. MegaLag focuses on a very niche case of going back to the merchant in the same month.
Source: I worked in the affiliate industry for a few years
I don't know anyone over there anymore, just a few people back before they were acquired, from when I worked in the industry. I'm just trying to provide an industry perspective.
If I understood MegaLag's video correctly, Honey was indeed overriding an affiliate session cookie with their own once the user the reached the checkout. The extension would silently open a tab in the background, which seems pretty scummy. I've observed the same background tab shenanigans with the Capital One extension as well.
They do this to not interrupt the purchase flow, not to be scummy. Opening a tab in the foreground or refreshing the page is extremely annoying to users and merchants request it to be in the background so it doesn't hurt their conversion.
I never said Honey doesn't override cookies. I'm not saying this isn't a problem, it's just not a Honey-specific problem. If the affiliate networks used first-click or multi-click attribution, none of this would be an issue.
Yet another defense of these practices, it's almost as if you're not sincerely trying to put blame in the right place as you've said in other comments on this story but rather defending the whole evil industry like a shill.
> Why can't people just run businesses decently without deception & scams?
1 - Because investors are now the customer. There is no incentive to solve a problem or provide a product for end-users, only to funnel money to investors. That is the business model.
2 - The attention economy is run entirely on deception. Without solving someone's problem, the best option is to keep their attention and prevent them realizing they don't need a subscription. Literally addicting people to notifications and scrolling.
My understanding from consumer branding research is that consumers have a strong preference for established brands. The average person is much more interested in drinking Coca-Cola than Neo-Cola, even if Neo-Cola is said to taste just as good, and offers a 10% discount.
If you assume that purchasing decisions are also affected by scandals -- which would make sense -- then the overall consumer purchasing algorithm could be summarized as "buy whichever brand has existed for the longest period of time without a scandal". So businesses are rewarded for minimizing their scandal rate.
Top story on HN today:
"Since we launched PlasticList, we’ve been heartened to have quite a few food companies reach out and ask for help interpreting their results and tracking down and eliminating their contamination." https://x.com/natfriedman/status/1874884925587087434
Warren Buffet said:
"It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently."
"Lose money for the firm, and I will be understanding. Lose a shred of reputation for the firm, and I will be ruthless."
And also:
"The stock market is a device for transferring money from the impatient to the patient."
Overall, I think there's a case to be made that doing the right thing is actually the most profitable strategy in the long term. It's not flashy, but it works.
Many businesses can be profitable without deception, but can Honey in particular can be profitable without deception? I'm not so sure. It seems like they have been deceptive about their core business from the start.
some people have a substantially lower bar for personal ethics. "why can't people..." what you and I consider to be normal is not even on some people's radar.
Most do, but the scammers and hustlers often win. When you're scamming and hustling you don't have to do the real work, which means you can spend 100% of your time and energy marketing and you win there.
I'm deeply pessimistic about the future of open source. A lot of people are going to give up on it as it becomes clear that it's just free labor for SaaS companies and hustlers. That and I expect far more supply chain attacks in the future. I'm quite surprised there haven't been a lot more like the attempted XZ poisoning... yet. Or maybe there have been and we haven't caught them.
Edit: I forgot free training data for code writing AI. It's that too.
OSS is one of the Internet's last remaining high trust spaces. It'll be dead soon like all the others. The Internet is a dark forest.
I get all kinds of free open source and contribute. I don't care that people or big corps make money off my contributions.
I get linux for free, an entire OS. Tons of giant companies contribute to it. I get llvm and clang mostly paid for by giant companies. I get python, go, node paid for by giant companies. I get free hosting for open source projects and free CI (github) paid for by giant companies. I get free frameworks (React, Flutter). Free languages, free libraries, etc...
My open source is just part of that. Contributing back to all the free stuff I get, much of it from giant companies.
My general belief is that you can be a millionaire by acting ethically, but you can’t be a billionaire. Lots of people motivated by money want to be billionaires.
And in this case it worked, PayPal acquired Honey for $4 billion in cash. I can't say I'm surprised to learn that the founder is also very into Web3. Crypto is a grifter magnet.
I know one billionaire. He's third generation to run a investment / hedge fund firm that is super secretive. Can barely find him on google, just a few articles about his dad and granddad. They quietly played the financial system for 7 decades and the fourth son will soon take over, but all he seems to do is travel because their employees do all the work. I've learned there are hundreds of billionaires that play this quiet financial-machine game and do everything in their power to remain anonymous. To the first order they are "ethical" because they follow the law, but when you can write the laws that define the financial system by funding congresspeople to insert obscure legislation that no one but financial experts can comprehend, it is very hard to explain exactly what is unethical in a way that your typical Cletus-like voter can understand (hell, I have no effing clue so I should go easy on Cletus).
You're right though, centimillionaires feel entitled to become billionaires, and billionaires feel entitled to become centibillionaires. However, I have noticed that the decimillionaires I know are aware that they still aren't in the right lane to even think that way and are largely content.
(wow, you're getting downvoted, the little boys on the site sure are a jealous bunch.)
Because we, as a society, have decided that lying should be effectively mandated and there should be no punishment for it in general. It's not just a few businesses, it's practically all of them. As a rule, an honest businessman can't make enough money to survive while being undercut by everyone else.
I'm sure they can be profitable.
This deceptive behaviour actually makes the business loose customers in the long term.