this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2025
330 points (97.1% liked)
Technology
77925 readers
3281 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I agree with most of it, but......
If you (a business) want to give out coupons only "internally" (usually only to employees), allowing ANYONE to redeem them is just stupid. That system is designed to be exploited. IMO, this is either a bug or very bad application planning.
And I have an idea for a "honey trap trap".... Whenever someone tries to redeem an "internal" coupon code in your shop, do this: If the person is employee, let them redeem it. If not, display "Attention! You have a dangerous spyware called Honey on your PC. Please uninstall it as soon as possible" with a link to this video...
Yeah, Honey is just exacerbating the inherent flaws in the system, and most of it can be dealt with having a limit of coupon usage and expiration of the coupons.
The thing which really upset me is advertisers pulling money from podcasts which have referral codes because of abuse from Honey. I'm not a fan of advertisements, but the referal codes were a simple solution since there's no way to accurately measure if an ad was listened to. Honey causing advertisers to pull support for podcasts just pushes podcasts to closed ecosystems with more tracking and analytics, and takes money away from Podcasters.
To elaborate on this, since watching this video I've paid attention to how sponsorships provide discounts to viewers of creators, and it's often via URLs. eg. service.com/creator_name, not with a discount code. That way, a website can track how many people went to the URL, not how many used whatever code is associated with that URL.
As an additional blocking measure, maybe a website could simply create a different listing for the same product instead of relying on discount codes, this different listing only being accessible via the creator links. I'm not sure if Honey would figure out how to navigate that as well or not, swapping the item in the cart or whatever.
I'd totally be interested to hear more on how companies deal with this, and if there are better ideas than the one I came up with as I typed this comment.
Part 3 of the video series will probably show how Honey f*cked that system up, too. 😄