• FauxPseudo @lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    157
    ·
    2 days ago

    “From the founder of Honey.” Which means that stealing code and affiliate links is just the surface of shady stuff they are up to.

    • Ulrich@feddit.org
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      59
      ·
      2 days ago

      The founder of Honey no longer owns Honey, and hasn’t for some time. It’s owned by PayPal, a much more notoriously shady company that some people still use for some reason.

      • Bibbiliop@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        11
        ·
        2 days ago

        Now I feel bad. I use paypal because in some cases of purchases it is the only means I can use. What is shady about them?

        • JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          6
          ·
          edit-2
          2 days ago

          Depends when all of that functionality was added in. Honey started as a legit coupon scraping extension back in 2012, and was sold to PayPal in 2020. Somewhere in the last 12 years, someone got a bit too greedy.

          Reminds me of the story of AdBlock - helpful extension gets a huge market share, people get greedy, it gets sold to a for-profit, and starts doing shady deals with the people it’s supposed to be “working against”.

          • freddydunningkruger@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            7
            ·
            2 days ago

            Um, PayPal paid $4,000,000,000 to buy Honey. $4 billion. Now, think about how much profit Honey would have had to been generating for PP to look at the numbers and buy it for that much. However it “started”, the functionality to steal was in there before they sold it to PayPal

            • JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              3
              ·
              edit-2
              1 day ago

              Companies that aren’t profitable get bought all the time for ridiculous amounts of money not because they currently make boatloads of money, but because they have a huge userbase and brand recognition, and the buyer thinks they are the geniuses that can make it do that. Yahoo paid 1.1 billion for Tumblr - since sold to wordpress for 3 million - and Musk 44 billion for Twitter - now worth a fraction of that - for example.
              That is exactly why they often go to shit only after they have been bought.

              Fwiw, Honey did around $100 million in revenue back in 2018. That’s 40 times less than what they were bought for, and that isn’t even profit, but just how much money they received before all their business expenses were paid.

        • Ulrich@feddit.org
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          arrow-down
          5
          ·
          2 days ago

          The founder made it steal commissions for a company that they weren’t even affiliated with?