this post was submitted on 24 Dec 2024
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Reposting my tl;dw from another post:
Affiliate injection: When you click the "Find coupons" button, it will inject their affiliate cookie. This is somewhat okay in normal circumstances, but if you visit a site/store via (insert YouTuber) 's sponsorship and use a Honey coupon, it will override theirs and use Honey's. The YouTuber loses the profit they would've made, and instead, PayPal/Honey gets it, despite the YouTuber doing the work. It will also inject their affiliate cookie if you click find coupons and it doesn't find any, or if you click okay on their "We didn't find any coupons, but this is the best deal!" popup.
Misdirection: They will show that they found the "best deal" while intentionally leaving off higher coupon deals; if a company has a partnership with Honey, they may, for example, have a 10% promotion running. With a honey partnership, they may ask Honey only to give users a 5% coupon and say it's the "best deal" or tell users no coupons are available despite some being available (even if added to their database), so they pay a small affiliate fee to Honey in exchange for lowering the rates they give in coupons so they can still say they are giving them, but use them as little as possible.
Honey Gold cashback: This one, in combination with the above, gives you 1 1-2% of the order, but they make substantially more than they pass to the user anyway. This one is to be expected, but it is a reminder that they still do "normal" scam stuff on top of their notable scammy practices.
tl;dr: They scam you and your favorite content creators with misleading practice and affiliate injection; the only true "winners" with Honey and other similar services are the service themselves and the stores they partner with.