this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2026
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TLDW: MegaLag found code and rules in the Honey extension that modifies behaviour specifically to make discovery of non-compliance with affiliate programs and affiliate poaching harder for testers. This behaviour has been in place since 2017 at least.

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[–] AlecSadler@lemmy.blahaj.zone 73 points 5 days ago (1 children)

His Honey videos are hopefully going down in history as one of the greatest fraud discoveries.

When I started watching them (and he isn't even done yet), I expected it to be bad because of PayPal. It is...so. much. worse.

Absolutely vile practices and I look forward to lawsuits from all angles against them.

[–] buddascrayon@lemmy.world 31 points 5 days ago

Paypal needs to be sued unto oblivion.

[–] dylanmorgan@slrpnk.net 32 points 5 days ago (2 children)

I appreciate the TLDW because the thumbnail made me think this was about bee vomit, not a scammy browser plugin

[–] exu@feditown.com 6 points 5 days ago

Glad it helped. I thought this would need some explaining why I posted it in this community.

[–] BeardedGingerWonder@feddit.uk 3 points 4 days ago

I was going to make a joke about big bee and then remembered actual honey is a huge fraud as well, a significant portion of what's sold as honey isn't actually honey. Need a good docu on that too.

[–] TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world 29 points 5 days ago (3 children)

I'm resisting my inner Lemmy user desire to shit on this for its thumbnail, but this is a great video, people should know about this. What Honey did is fucked up.

[–] AWistfulNihilist@lemmy.world 29 points 5 days ago (2 children)

It's legit offputting, but when you're on YouTube it makes sense to play that game. Following a thumbnail meta will get your video more engagement, they even allow A/B testing of thumbnails to find the best performing one. YT is as much a thumbnail platform as it is a video one, and I'm only being slightly hyperbolic.

[–] TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world 11 points 5 days ago

Yeah I kind of roll my eyes at it, but I get it. People have to earn a living and feed themselves, and they can't do that without clicks.

And really, pulling a dumb face on a thumbnail is a hell of a lot more ethical in terms of driving engagement than some headlines you see that are so misleading they may as well be outright lies.

[–] wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 5 days ago (1 children)

There are also various browser extensions to show you an image from the middle of the video instead of a thumbnail. I personally prefer that.

[–] Nythos@sh.itjust.works 4 points 4 days ago

The hate for the thumbnail for this video I don’t get, but there is some REALLY egregious thumbnails on YouTube sometimes

[–] nullroot@lemmy.world 6 points 5 days ago

It took me days to get around to watching the video because of the thumbnail lol.

[–] Deceptichum@quokk.au 4 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I really don’t get the thumbnail hate. It’s something you look at for a second, like a books cover. It’s so irrelevant yet people get hell bent hung up on it.

[–] 0_o7@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 4 days ago

It's more of a problem for the younger audience. It's the gateway for awful cringe shit kids do. All the rise in right wing incel behaviour, online celebrity worship, falling for dubious scams didn't come out of nowhere.

If you have been around kids using YouTube, they absolutely go for the most outrageous thumbnails, despite being awful video content.

Encouraging that behaviour is just letting things go to shit just because it's

[–] Sunny@slrpnk.net 14 points 4 days ago

Great video, more people need to know about this and that paypal is responsible.

[–] shoo@lemmy.world 10 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Crazy that companies will do this shady stuff with client side code. At least it was slightly obfuscated at first, but that's just incompetent fraud to leave it so obvious that a self professed non-software engineer (though clearly a smart guy) can read it and deduce what's happening. Throw a tiny bit of random noise to the stepdown logic and it becomes much harder to find and reproduce as proof.

[–] 0_o7@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 4 days ago

Things like this happen in client side extension and it can take so long to get to what was happening but some people get defensive when people claim tiktok, facebook, google, microsoft are all listening in on your data.

There are so many ways to obfuscate data we'll probably never know the extent of the data being collected.