A couple of YouTubers I watch promoted this and given what I assumed it did, I'm surprised that's all it does.
If it seems to good to be true, it probably is.
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If it seems to good to be true, it probably is.
I think a lot of these YouTubers are pretending to be shocked or caught out.
But promoting products which have such a high likelihood of being shady like this...
Another one was the app or similar where you scanned your receipts and got some discounts or whatever. Obviously they only make money by selling your data, but they mention none of that during the promotion, just how easily you can save some bucks.
Anyone who flogs ball shavers, ass wipes or fuckin microwave dinners don't give a shit about their viewers, and only care about their bottom lines and will shill whatever they can for the right price.
But wasn't Honey paying them?
An honest extension could have still made piles of cash. They did not need to be so aggressive about taking affiliate revenue and they definitely did not need to lie about coupons.
This was not a "too good to be true" situation.
I gave the 'product' to friends and some of them told me "oh, you should do it like ground.news where I can see left, center, right". This idea turns me off so much. Why would I care if it's deemed left, center or right by some commitee. Just give me the information that's there in most sources and it's probably be going to be close to some objective overview of the situation.
It's new media, and in the grand scheme of things, youtuber sponsorships are dirt cheap compared to traditional means.
The news model is well established by this point of ads + no-ad premium subscrition, so I don't think there's many potential dark arts here. It also feel everpresent simply because they are smartly targeting youtubers covering politics. And US politics is a burning hot topic right now.
Yes, but Honey was also stealing from them. Most youtubers make a significant portion of their income via affiliate links.
So, consider the following scenario. I made up these numbers, I don't know if these are accurate:
Honey pays a youtuber $1k for a single ad spot. Due to that ad, many of the youtuber's audience installs the Honey extension. Afterwards, the youtuber's affiliate link income goes down by $2k/month, because all of those affiliate referrals are being stolen by Honey.
Also, Honey never disclosed that they were doing this.
So, of course, you can understand why the youtubers would have grievance. Pretty much nobody would ever agree to give up $2k/month of income forever to get $1k right now. (And it's probably not right now, it's probably more like 90 days when they settle their payables).
I mean what’s wrong with selling ball shavers, ass wipes, and fuckin’ microwave dinners? These aren’t really harmful things and they provide actual value to people.
Are you just opposed to advertising as a concept?
Because at the day information can be political.
>the information that's there in most sources
While I don't use ground news myself, aggregators and classifiers like them can show you when and where stories are being published in very lopsided manners. When a story is only really being published by one side you can use that as another bit of information.
Ground News is a startup that had 3 rounds of funding it total. If it sees significant uptake, it will become a juicy acquisition target for any influence-peddlers you can imagine, in addition to the usual data collection and ad-monetization risks.
I suppose post pay that they dug into darker arts, sadly.
Those can actually be harmful things, and a LOT of media producers will advertise them as being the best thing since sliced bread (Usually having personal endorsements required in the copy).
I never saw a single sponsorship for Honey, but I see a ton for Kiwico and Ground News. I can't speak for Ground News, but Kiwico is a sponsor of basically every educational YouTube channel, and it's actually just that good and totally worth it for kids of the right age.
>> Because at the day information can be political.
Umm. Yes. Which is precisely what placing it left / center / right amplifies.
> the information that's there in most sources
>> While I don't use ground news myself, aggregators and classifiers like them can show you when and where stories are being published in very lopsided manners. When a story is only really being published by one side you can use that as another bit of information.
Sure, it's another bit of information. I think more important are the facts. Did this actually happen? If so, what happened? The tl;dr of what happened should give me a pretty good idea, without having to become a reporter myself, especially if covered by both sides.
I think this is more of an issue of an union, than the 'argument to moderation' or 'false balance' might appeal to. If I'm left, and report or something and you don't. That's probably high noise. If you're right and report to something I don't. That's probably high noise. If we both report on something, and we report differently on 80% but we have the same 20%. I'd say that 20% is high signal.
What if we cut out the left / center / right ideas and just take as many sources as we can? Then extract what's common between them. Wouldn't that have some sort of higher signal to noise ratio than any single viewpoint?
Of course, I'm willing to accept I'm wrong. From my personal experience so far, I'm much less inclined to extremes than I was since starting to use this system.
The remaining parts have never been released. In January, MegaLag tweeted to explain what's been going on: https://x.com/MegaLagOfficial/status/1884576211554201671
I hope it's just an "good" product that will (like every SaaS) be plagued by enshittification 5 years down the line.
Either case, it's hopefully a silver lining to my dads "don't trust MSM" tendencies. (fortunately he's too academic to go full conspiracy crazy but you never know)
Their segmentation of news organizations according to bias, can be obviously be biased itself. That's not a problem necessarily, but the service promotes itself as neutral while it's VC funded. You are part of a demographic that will be propagandized in the future to recoup costs.
Ground news tells you the bias of publications that have published the news item not the slant of the news item itself. It lets you see how much news gets completely ignored by the right and left (the right is way worse) when it isn't favorable to their cause. It's also really interesting to sample both sides and see how wildly the facts get slanted as you get further from center.
The publishers are biased, not the news item.
Fortunately none of the youtubers I watched ever went full dark horse and pawned off gambling and scams, though. Closest to a scam was probably those "become a lord" sites that let you "buy a small plot of land in Ireland" or something and a tree gets planted. When the reality is you don't actually own the land through technicalities and it's questionable if the tree is even planted.
Honestly your paranthesis that "the right is way worse" is already too political for my taste. It makes me feel dumb for even writing this reply. Alas, these are my thoughts. News should be news. What happened and when. Not some attack vector against a group of people or another.
If it's not obvious how a company is making money, and they don't explain it somewhere... I'm not interested.
Well, for starters the actual "security" that is often promised from these services is WAY overblown. You are already very secure browsing the internet using https. The TLS standard grants a huge amount of security that doesn't allow for snooping from a MITM.
So, when they start saying "everyone needs to do this to be safe". That's simply a boldface lie.
Your security when going through a VPN is from using https. If you are unfortunate and get a less than scrupulous VPN you might end up with them adding themselves as CAs (yes, some VPNs do that). That allows them to crack and access data within the secure stream.
Most of these VPN services are also trying to get you to do DNS with their DNS servers. Again, a major potential privacy leak problem.
> That's what a security app needs to properly protect you
VPNs aren't anti-virus software and any VPN selling that should be EXTREMELY mistrusted. You are right, they can only provide that sort of service by decrypting your secure payloads. That is where all the scamminess comes into play.
Certainly not every VPN service is bad, but I'd have an inherent mistrust in one that has both a cheap fee and the seemingly endless budget to advertise everywhere on youtube. They are getting money from somewhere and I doubt it's from grandmas signing up for the service.
"What" is often a matter of definition and framing, especially if you also want news to include "to what effect" which is not always black-and-white. "Why" is an answer that also must be answered, but will often come through a political lens. News cannot be free from a political lens if "why" and "to what effect" are considered, and probably can't be free from some element of a political lens even if just sticking to "what".
Nothing is inherently wrong but I trust my ISP a lot more than some random guys in Switzerland or Israel or whatever tax haven islands they operate from. They lie about what they’re good for which is just hiding things from my ISP. The rest of the benefits are fake
Because a secret you should know about your ISPs is they really don't care (or want to care) about what you are doing with their service. They don't want to add the hardware/software it'd take to spy on your data, that's a huge cost to them with nothing but downsides.
I might distrust a large ISP more just because they have the extra cache to burn. But a smaller more regional ISP will not try and invade your privacy.
My impression is that it makes browsing wifi networks you don't trust safer. I just let it happen, but I have a few friends who really hate having to connect to any public wifi. That seems to track with how most of the marketing goes when it's focused more on interceptions while traveling instead of on your home network. (And yes. I'm aware this is more equivalent to adding a door lock when a competent hacker has a crowbar and a window right next to it. Sometimes it's about preventing the incompetent ones).
I didn't mean to liken it to ant-virus per se. But the concepts are the same. Anything you choose that needs elevated permissions better be something you go through a fine-toothed comb with and have a stellar reputation. But without naming names, it seems a bit overly alarmist to name all VPNs that dare advertise as scams.
>They are getting money from somewhere and I doubt it's from grandmas signing up for the service.
it may very well be that. It's the same old subscription service virtually every company in the world does. "sign on for this super cheap fee!". Then you keep it around and then normal ratea happen after X months. Then you just keep using it or even forget about it and that's easy steady revenue.
It's dishonest, but in an apathetic sort of way. Not a malicious one. The solution is simply for a consumer to actually watch their banking statements.
I don't really, per se. Especially in my area where they have a monopoly. But VPNs aren't advertising making your home network safer anyway.
It was honestly surprising when one of my subcibed creators (around 400k subs on Youtube) talked a bit about financials and that half their revenue came from sponsors. And this was one who avoids all the typical ads. I imagine the numbers to sell out to yet another RAID ad must easily double that.
As well as just some general sentiments you see from browsing here:
- Strongly anti-copyright and seem fine completely abolishing the idea. One that would remove regulations when it comes to selliing ideas.
- Often defends the idea of private marketplaces and their cuts on developers. Which seems odd on the surface. but it makes sense when you consider it is easier to minmax for one monoplistic storefront than develop endpoints to support multiple stores. Why disrupt something you make steady income from as is?
- There's definietly underlying sentiments towards in work-related topics that come from those leading/managing companies. a stronger skew towards employee productivity and a need to aggressively weed out "low performers". A slight skew supporting business decisions like mass layoffs, even suggesting those laid off were low performers or otherwise just freeloading.
little things you catch here and there as you browse a community for years.
Get a substantial number of users, and it can be used to extract money from publishers to be part of the service, and the information provided can be swayed to investors objectives.
Any issue I’m deeply familiar with that gets reported is almost always missing lots of meaningful information. There isn’t really competition for most news, so there’s no incentive to follow up.
Publishers have biases, and their sources have agendas.
That's why it's problematic. Using a known-good VPN can make it safer.
However by installing some VPN software you are intentionally installing a man in the middle which you now have to trust is legit.
And the promotions tend to vastly exaggerate the risk, something NordVPN got slapped for[1].
[1]: https://www.theregister.com/2019/05/01/nordvpn_tv_ad_rapped_...
I always thought Youtubers made the bulk of their money with brand deals (like Honey), and some from youtube ads + light sprinkling on top from afill links.
Maybe I'm not the typical user.
I personally don't mind creators advertising VPNs, but just be honest about it. Don't pretend like it's your favourite VPN you've always used, and it's the bestest, most secure, will make you super safe..
If they'd say like, I've been paid to advertise xyz VPN, I've tried it for a few days, works as advertised. I can watch my US Netflex while traveling out of the US, or whatever. But keep in mind, instead of just your ISP knowing where you browse, now the VPN providers knows, and is probably selling your data. Like, cut the bs.
MegaLag posted a VPN example, which was an edge case, but it was enough to spark outrage. Ironically, there are many YouTubers who have only Amazon affiliate links which Honey never touches.
Many YouTubers that Honey sponsored also didn't have conflicting affiliate links at the time of promotion.
Also, if you work with affiliate links, you should probably know how they work. IMO it'd be condescending if Honey tried to explain to every YouTuber how last click attribution worked.
Ah, the modern day equivalent to snake oil, where you buy a product that gives your data to a random company in a tax haven over your publicly accountable ISP.
Ironically, this is the reason LinusTechTips never did an expose video on this back when they originally learned about Honey doing this years ago - they thought "this only affects us, if we do a video on it the viewers will be like - who cares about your bottom line?"
And now on the contrary, LTT viewers are FURIOUS that they didn't expose it and flaming them in the comments of every tangentially related video...
I guess for creators with a much smaller merch business, affiliate links would be twice as big a portion.
Given how many parrot exactly the same story, practically word for word, about how they personally find it so useful, is a useful barometer of whether I should trust any recommendation from those channels. It was called astroturfing in my day, I don't consider it any more trustworthy in its new name “influencing”.
People are hating the player when really the majority of the outrage should be pointed towards hating the game.
The privacy problem is most people using Google's DNS servers in the first place. A VPN is unlikely to keep your browsing history out of Google's hands when you're sending them a record of every domain you visit, when, and how often.
A VPN service is basically saying "Trust us more than you trust Google/your ISP" and that by necessity means giving them your DNS traffic as well.
> I'd have an inherent mistrust in one that has both a cheap fee and the seemingly endless budget to advertise everywhere on youtube. They are getting money from somewhere and I doubt it's from grandmas signing up for the service.
They make a lot of their money from file sharers (some of which are also grandmas). The VPN will keep your ISP off your back and the MPA/RIAA at bay. I assume most VPNs like that are being monitored (if not outright operated) by the NSA or some other three letter agency. It's fine if you're just using the VPN for regular browsing or to torrent TV shows though because they're not going to spoil their honeypot over something so trivial and the VPN's success at keeping pirates safe builds their reputation as a secure service.
In the US ISPs collect, monitor, and sell your browsing history. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/how-i...
It's probably not a nefarious scheme though, they just saw the clear market opening for "News that people think is impartial" from all the liberals that need to keep on top of the narrative that Fox News or New York Post publish but don't want to waste hours a week watching talking heads, and from all the blatant conservatives who need to validate their belief that the general conservative narrative for anything is "not political"
This site is an advertisement for YC, and was built primarily for mindshare. "Growth hacker" types that started YC and built HN and spun off Reddit don't build things "for fun" if there is profit to be made.
I don't. I want to be able to draw my own conclusion as to the effect of what happened might be.
> News cannot be free from a political lens if "why" and "to what effect" are considered, and probably can't be free from some element of a political lens even if just sticking to "what".
I have no interest in the "why" and "to what effect". I have an interest into "what" so that I can draw my own conclusions.
Though thank you for your thoughts, it helps me understand the people calling for political sides better.
Then, the Rebel Times says "Moisture farmer with magic powers joins fight against Empire", but the Empire Daily has "Moisture farmer joins fight against Empire". the common whats are just that a moisture farmer joined the Rebel Alliance, which is true, but much less consequential than if he had magic powers.
Later, the Rebel Times says "Secret Empire super-weapon destroyed at the Battle of Yavin", and the Empire Daily publishes... nothing because they don't want to admit defeat. There's no common information between these stories (because there is no second story), so looking for common whats would conclude that nothing happened.
If the process of analysing the news accounted for the fact that the different outlets are interested in presenting different whats, it could conclude that the fact that the Empire Daily published nothing about the third story doesn't mean that it didn't happen. In the second case, if it could account for the Empire wanting to suppress information about the Force, the conclusion would be that Luke joining the Alliance is somewhat more of a big deal than otherwise. Even in the first case, it might realise that the fact that the two sources don't agree about Leia doesn't mean that one side isn't right.
That's fair BUT do you see how this is a decision that a) won't always have a clear line of demarcation and b) reflects an internal mental model of news that likely isn't universal?
For example: let's say someone reads a news article that titled "Trump Won't Rule out Military Intervention in Greenland" (god help us, a real story). Maybe you get all the "what" you need from the headline. I would argue though that omitting contextual information about "Why does he want Greenland?" is irresponsible and bad journalism. Many others might argue that in a duty to inform readers, they should collect statements from people who understand international relations to discuss implications of such a stance.
Another example: insurance rates are rising for coastal properties in Florida. That's the "what", but there is no honest, legitimate exploration of the topic if the journalist doesn't explore "why", because the "why" of this story if also a "what" of the many contributing factors. Since that "what" will necessarily include climate-related topics, it is now considered "political" by many. And in this instance, exploring "what effect" this is likely to have on homeowners, renters, and businesses seems a core element of the phenomenon.
a) I think there's a clear line of demarcation to the "what".
b) I can see how this isn't a universal mental model, I just fail to see why the "why" makes for a better one.
> irresponsible and bad journalism
I honestly don't see how left / center / right fixes this. If there's no consensus between tens / hundreds (and I'm in a small country) sources on the actual thing that lead up to the what, I don't see why that should be included. Else the news would just be (for example, not political affirmation) "Trump Won't Rule out Military Intervention in Greenland[...] as loss of key trans-atlantic partners considered less valuable than securing arctic trade route".
> Another example: insurance rates are rising for coastal properties in Florida. That's the "what", but there is no honest, legitimate exploration of the topic if the journalist doesn't explore "why", because the "why" of this story if also a "what" of the many contributing factors. Since that "what" will necessarily include climate-related topics, it is now considered "political" by many. And in this instance, exploring "what effect" this is likely to have on homeowners, renters, and businesses seems a core element of the phenomenon
Honestly it's the same thing, if 80% of covered news sources point out to a why as climate change, sure. If only the left (or right, or center) ones do and they're not a solid majority. I don't particulary care. I care more about the "what".
Again, this might tie into the mental model more than anything but the whole left / center / right divide seems political and high noise to signal ratio to me.