Before I even clicked it I knew there would be no real journalism involved. It’s just parroting the video the LegalEagle put out, so if you’d rather give your click to the creator, just watch the Youtube video, and don’t bother with the techcrunch “article”.
This article credits Legal Eagle, embeds the original, is much shorter to read than an 8-minute video and doesn’t require me to wear headphones. Lemmy is a text based social media so it makes sense to favour text sources. Definitely better than linking to some overloaded Invidious instance which seems to be the norm.
Exhausting. Like the people who used to yell at us for using straws. Your anger is misplaced at individuals.
I believe in the right to quote which is also the law in most of the world because of Berne Convention.
Lemmy is a text based social media
No it is not. It is a link aggregator. Can be text, can be images, can be video, can be news, etc. etc.
There’s plenty of core social components to Lemmy. It’s a platform for self-organising communities that curate, rank and discuss content. Without that I’d be using RSS reader only.
The very first time I saw an ad for Honey I knew there had to be a catch. Nothing is ever free.
It wasn’t immediately obvious how they were going to make money, though. I figured they’d just sell gather and sell user data. I had completely forgotten about affiliate links. But they probably also sell your data for good measure.
There are plenty of free things on the Internet. You’re commenting on a free social network.
It’s not, my point was more that you see a lot of things being hosted on the Internet for free just out of people’s goodness and curiosity.
Honey is not one of them. But it’s not the fact that Honey is free to use that’s the suspicious part. It’s the fact that they had an awful lot of money to spend on sponsor spots for a free product/service.
I pay $100/month for internet access.
Lemmy may be free to access, but certainly not free to host. Am I paying for it personally? No, but someone is.
You also don’t see Lemmy paying hundreds of YouTubers and influencers for ad spots.
I pay $100/month for internet access.
Which you’d also pay if you used Honey.
Lemmy may be free to access, but certainly not free to host. Am I paying for it personally? No, but someone is.
You also wouldn’t have paid to use Honey.
You also don’t see Lemmy paying hundreds of YouTubers and influencers for ad spots.
That one, that’s a valid argument.
I pay $100/month for internet access.
Irrelevant to the point, but damn that feels so high. I pay something like 30 or 40 euros per month for symmetric 500 megabit, in one of the countries with the highest internet prices in Europe.
Lemmy may be free to access, but certainly not free to host. Am I paying for it personally? No, but someone is.
Well yes, someone is, but my point was, there are loads of examples on the Internet where something truly is free to use and hosted by someone who doesn’t ask for anything. There is real altruism to be found here.
You also don’t see Lemmy paying hundreds of YouTubers and influencers for ad spots.
Yes, this is where the difference comes in. When something is free AND the people running it have ridiculous amounts of money to spend on sponsorships and ads… Then you can be sure there’s a catch.
Wow, internet is expensive where you are. I pay £28 (about $35) a month for 1gig up/down in the UK.
It’s not, but go look on github. There are so many projects out there that aren’t monetized. People just built them for the fun of it.
Hell, the entire KDE software suite is not monetized to the best of my knowledge. They ask for donations, but they don’t make a buck off you in any way unless you voluntarily donate.
Lemmy isn’t paying out the nose for influencers to hook their stuff. I haven’t seen any Lemmy instances advertise at all, much less to the extent that Honey has.
I only go there for the free pencils and make my furniture out of the pencils. Checkmate
No purchase required, though. You can just take all the pencils and paper rulers you want!
Do they still exist? In China and Malaysia where I’ve been living for the last 10 years there are only QR codes at the items that you can scan with the IKEA app.
If you don’t want to install the app, all you can do is take photos of the labels, or bring your own pens.
Still exist in UK as of last year, short wooden pencils stacked in a plastic cube, free for as many as you can take before security gets angy
I’ve never seen an ad for honey, not heard of it’s existence before this video.
Ad blocking is the way
Hmm ad blocking is not enough, because many YouTubers sponsor Honey inside of their videos. Maybe you also use Sponsorblock.
The icing on the cake was lying about the best deals when partnered stores paid them to do so.
Frankly I’m surprised it took this long for anyone to notice they were swapping referral codes. I always assumed that was what was in it for them. Perhaps the extent to which they’ve done it is greater than we knew, but if you have ever heard of referral codes, it seems obvious that this is how such an extension would monetize.
There was a video years and years ago where they explained their business model and it has either since changed or they lied. Back then it was that they offered deals through sponsorships or something. I don’t remember. It was years ago. What’s frustrating is that I remember seeing that video and it definitely made me think it wasn’t a scam. Probably had the same effect on a lot of other people too.
Saved you a click
Among other accusations, MegaLag said that if a YouTuber or other creator promotes a product through an affiliate link, if the viewer has installed Honey, the extension will surreptitiously substitute its own link when the viewer makes a purchase — even if Honey didn’t provide any discounts. That means Honey, not the creator, receives the affiliate revenue for the transaction.
If they’d just been a little less greedy, and only inserted their affiliate link for purchases where none was originally present, and actually provided the service they advertised rather than ‘partnering’ with merchants to provide worse coupons, they’d probably never have gotten caught and if they had, nobody would have cared. Could have skimmed a significant but lesser amount forever. But no, they had to go full on villain, and here we are.
Having a pressure point against the shops by letting them control what kind of coupons would be shown was probably a big reason they weren’t just kicked out of at least some of those affiliate programmes.
That’s a fair point, but they could have been up front about it, or at least adjusted their advertising some. They basically told consumers “We’ll get you the best deal, and if we don’t find one, it doesn’t exist”, which is a spurious claim anyway, but it surely misled people. They could have just said “We’ll see if we have any coupon codes available” or something less committal. There still would have been a lot of value for regular consumers… if you weren’t using a coupon code, 5% off is better than nothing and if they weren’t being dicks about the referral links, nobody likely would have cared in the slightest.
I am up to speed on this little drama, but it’s still unclear to me what they’re suing over.
Yea, Honey effectively took over affiliate links. And yes, they were obviously shady (I never used it, because I did not know how they made money). But I don’t quite understand how other people trying to make money from affiliate links have a real claim against them.
Or is this just a case of the influencers realizing they have the moral high ground and the public’s ear, and wanting a pay out?
It’s fraud. They publicly claimed, point-blank, to do a certain thing for years, and were instead doing the opposite, in the interest of making more money. The affiliate link thing is only one of several points that they’re suing over. The far more egregious one is that they don’t actually “scour the internet to find you the best coupons” They will actively hide better coupons that they know about, if marketplaces pay them to, and still tell you in the browser “this is the best coupon.”
It’s more than that, at least from a EU perspective. Don’t know what is legal in the US, but manipulating URLs in an obviously malicious way and without the user’s explicit knowledge and consent would be highly illegal here.
Are they modifying URLs?
As far as I know they steal cookies but don’t change the URL.
Also, I think the bizarre market practice of “last click takes attribution” seems to be also common in EU.
Unfortunately just because it’s shady doesn’t make it immediately illegal even here in EU.
And the response from PayPal Honey shows they want to fight it in court. Which don’t think they would do if they thought it would have been considered highly illegal.
They found a loophole and abused it to steal creators (and users).
The YouTubers can only sue for actual damages THEY realized.
As the class is for content creators that partnered with Honey, it can only be for the affiliate links.
Users will need to sue separately, either individually or as a different class. My money is on them having a forced arbitration clause, so direct lawsuit will most likely be out of the question.
It’s not just youtubers. It’s anyone who uses affiliate links. Online ads use affiliate links.Things like Amazon Smile used affiliate linking for charity fundraising.
And since Honey was jacking links class action is the only way for them to really do it. No individual affiliate can point out their individual loss through Honey because Honey erased their links.
That means the class action needs to go after all affiliate revenue Honey has ever made.
The video has links in the description to the complaint.
[Here it is on Court Listener](https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69503243/9/wendover-productions-llc-v-paypal-inc/
Edit: To your other point. Why should Honey take money away from actual referrers when they didn’t even provide a discount code?
I don’t think the case you consider as “legal precedent” is as relevant as you think.
But I guess we will see.
There’s moral precedent that being a greedy lying cunt can get your privilege to life revoked
I hope we will see.
The other lawyer in the case, Attorney Tom made a video going over what they are sueing for and some of the misconceptions.
https://youtu.be/ItiXffyTgQg?feature=shared
People have a claim due to lost profits and potentially missed business opportunities.
Let’s Youtuber A had a sponsor affiliate and a spoken ad spot. Creator makes 2k for the sponsor read and 2% every time someone buys something via link. Honey swoops in and steals the affiliate link (regardless if the user got a coupon or not). The creator no longer getting the 2% and skews the success of the ad.
The creator’s ad performance (ad to finished transaction) is down, so sponsor lowers the commission to 1% and 1.5k for the next video. Enough people use honey and the metrics are bad enough the sponsor doesn’t renew contract with the creator.
On the consumer end, which due to arbitration clauses the lawyers aren’t actively pursuing (at this time) (see linked video).
Honey has in its terms of services that you accept not to take part in a class action lawsuit and favor arbitration. It seems like these kind of clause is enforceable usually so I’m curious to see how Legal Eagle will navigate the issue.
Edit: Either the creators sue Honey and they will argue it is not illegal to poach affiliate links because they follow the “last click” rule that is standard (it’s just that they pushed it to the extreme).
Or its the users that are scammed because they were told the best coupon would be used. But if it’s the users, they are under the EULA and should have to comply with the no class action rule.
I’m not a lawyer but this is how I understand the setup for this trial to be.
In this case the class action would be youtubers and other content creators not users of Honey.
Then it remains to be proven that it is illegal to poach affiliate links like that. Because Honey says they just follow strictly the “last click” rule that is common practice in the field.
It’s bullshit but if that bullshit rule is indeed the standard practice then it will be hard to fight.
Could it not be seen as a deliberate deceit to avoid adequate compensation as per any sponsorship agreement though? Such practice can’t be legal surely?
Even if they tried to weasel it into the terms of a sponsorship agreement one would assume it would be considered null as it goes against the very purpose of the contract?
Feel like Legal Eagle wouldn’t waste their time and resources on a class action if they didn’t have strong enough grounds for a fight? (And would instead make a video explaining why it would be pointless to do so)
That’s kind of like a looter invoking the ‘finders keepers’ defense. Last click isn’t a law.
According to Legal Eagle’s video, Honey could be pocketing affiliate link money from creators that had never even anything to do with them.
It’s installed on viewer’s side, so it makes sense.
I’d also say there are probably limits to what you can enforce arbitration for, especially if you outright lied to your customers, but I am not American and I have no idea how irredeemably fucked up your customer protection laws are.
That’s the thing PayPal Honey is saying they are respecting the “last click” rule and in their eyes there is nothing illegal in that.
Even if the creator as nothing to do with honey they are saying the last click is in honey just before checkout so they get the money. I understand this is a terrible excuse but it seems that’s the defense they will follow. Basically they are hiding behind that stupid last click rule and using it to justify it’s perfectly legal.
Basically Honey says “we just strictly comply to a standard practice in affiliate links”.
So Disney had an arbitration clause in a eula that a user agreed to when they signed up for a streaming trial service and never ended up subscribing. When he died of food poisoning at a restaurant at one of Disney’s amusement parks, his widow looked to be unable to sue the park over it, because he had agreed to that eula by signing up a couple years before.
It was generally perceived that the clause would have been enforceable in that fucked up situation, but Disney backed off when the word got out that the lawyers in the trial were pushing that argument, and they waived the clause. But in that instance, it was never actually ruled on, and many people seemed to think that it was going to be enforced. That’s how fucked the system is when it comes to these clauses.
I know that story. It’s a lot more nuanced than that.
Thing is, Disney barely had anything to do with the restaurant itself (they’re basically the restaurant’s landowner). And the only thing on which they could attack Disney was to point that the restaurant had a description on Disney’s website… which is part of Disney online services, and subject to their terms of services.
So yeah, grasping at a clause from an old Disney+ subscription is bullshit, but the claim honestly did not make a lot of sense to begin with. The restaurant itself should have been sued to hell, even more so because apparently they reinstated they were allergy compliant several times when asked.
Disney hoped the clause would be enforceable. At least part of the reason Disney settled out of court was because they didn’t want to challenge that assumption.
You can put whatever clauses you want in a contract. The law still trumps those contracts if it ever comes to enforceability.
Youtubers who had their affiliate links hijacked aren’t subject to the EULA.
Exactly. The forced arbitration is for Honey users. These random people with affiliate links are not Honey users.
MegaLag has other videos coming. I would assume Honey is also selling a shit ton of purchasing behavior data
About that is it normal that the other videos are not released?
I feel like he is losing the momentum he had with that video series and the more time he waits the more likely the gag orders or retaliation from PayPal.
What if Megalag can’t release the next videos because a horde of lawyers is already on his back?
Surprisingly I think Honey decided not to be able to sell user data (Ludwig sponsorship’s with honey was pushing this).
Basically they were making so much money on affiliate links they probably thought it wasn’t worth risking to be caught for some privacy reason.
Here is another video on the topic: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ItiXffyTgQg. This individual is from the law firm working with Devin. He explains that this actually is likely to limit suits from consumers, but not for the class taking action, the creators.
