“The biggest scam in YouTube history”

  • simple@lemm.ee
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    5 days ago

    Hell yeah. Huge respect to him and the other youtuber that exposed this, it’s crazy that Honey just pocketing most of the referral money has been undiscovered for so many years.

      • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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        4 days ago

        I don’t get how anyone thought they would work. If your color blind they obviously don’t magically alter the receptors in your eyes.

        • webghost0101@sopuli.xyz
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          4 days ago

          Colourblindness knows many types, most can still see color. Some types even see more or shifted colors.

          At least on paper it seems plausible to measure the colour detection cones per iris and then build a filter to strengthen color per eye for which detection is lacking.

          The moment i realized they sold them without detailed personal eye scanning involved i knew they were a scam. Gimmick at best. Worst part is they seem catered to people as gifts for colorblind friends, thats just a way to obstruct people from analyzing them to much. What are they going to say? “I dont for a sec believe this overly saturated view is realistic and your gift sucks”? No, they will say “wauw thank you” and shove it in a drawer somewhere next day, never to mention them again.

        • kent_eh@lemmy.ca
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          4 days ago

          If selling false hope wasn’t profitable, there would be a lot of companies (and religions) go out of business.

        • psud@aussie.zone
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          4 days ago

          If they had worked they might have done so by some sort of contrast enhancement or edge detection, but I don’t think either are possible with just optics

          • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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            4 days ago

            Yes you could absolutely do it with a camera and a computer screen and some software but I can’t see how glass or plastic lenses could possibly be expected to do it

            • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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              3 days ago

              You could do AR glasses. And with just optics, you could probably adjust some color spectrums a bit, provided you knew the exact deficiency and which way to adjust colors.

              But yeah, no one size fits most situation here.

            • psud@aussie.zone
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              4 days ago

              I just watched the megalag videos on the glasses — the first episode of three — and the claim is they cut out confusing areas of colour that abnormal chromats see.

              So if it worked, it only works for people with abnormal versions of one of the three normal colour vision sensors, and only if their deficiency is in green, and then only if it’s the correct degree of deficient

              But it doesn’t work anyway.

              The glasses help people see the number in some sheets in the colourblindness test, but hide the number in others. Their colour blindness would appear slightly worse than reality.

    • sunzu2@thebrainbin.org
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      5 days ago

      There is a YouTube video that literaly said they were scamming from 2020.

      Linus tech tips figure it out a year back and stop shilling it once they figured it out but for some reason didn’t make a video about it?

      • JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works
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        5 days ago

        They didn’t make a video about it because they thought it was a problem for creators, not a problem for consumers. They may have communicated to creators separately to drop honey. They talked about it publicly once they found out honey was also lying to consumers about what they did.

        • DasAlbatross@lemmy.world
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          5 days ago

          They didn’t say anything because they’re not pro consumer, they’re pro linus media group. They didn’t want to appear to be unfriendly to advertisers. There’s a reason tech jesus was able to do a big expose on how crap their videos are. They want to churn out content and make money. Being seen as a problematic channel for advertisers doesn’t help that.

          • runjun@lemmy.world
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            5 days ago

            lol certain criticisms of LTT are quite funny to me. They literally were “unfriendly to advertisers” with Anker. They’ve done it several times in the past. The “tech Jesus” video you’re referring to caused them to pause production and they haven’t ever returned to a video every day since that came out. 🤷‍♂️ you can just not like their videos, it’s ok.

            • misk@sopuli.xyz
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              5 days ago

              There’s probably some overlap between people calling for more social responsibility and people who thought some earlier behaviour from LTT was not ok.

          • JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works
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            5 days ago

            Why would being problematic to honey hurt them? If anything, it’d make the other sponsors more confident in their affiliate links. They’ve burnt plenty of brides with Apple and Nvidia, I don’t see why they would be afraid of honey.

            • DasAlbatross@lemmy.world
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              5 days ago

              Why would publicly burning an advertiser on their channel cause other advertisers to be reluctant to work worth them?

              Could be any reason.

              • person420@lemmynsfw.com
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                5 days ago

                I don’t have a dog in this fight, but just to play devil’s advocate the advertisers too could have been losing money and be happy it was brought to light?

                • jrs100000@lemmy.world
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                  4 days ago

                  You are ascribing a lot of human reasoning and emotion to corporate entities they they just dont have. Gratitude is not part of their decision making process. Instead, they might attempt to use past behavior to predict future behavior when evaluating an outlet for their marketing budget. They arnt going to prefer an outlet that occasionally burns advertisers, even if the benefited from it once.

              • JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works
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                5 days ago

                They’ve had public spats with Anchor and Plex, doesn’t seem to have hurt them too much. I don’t see how honey is more dangerous to them.

                • brbposting@sh.itjust.works
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                  5 days ago

                  About to entirely make something up

                  Maybe there are 10 more advertisers they want to rip on but they already felt two was too many

                  IDK!

        • aleq@lemmy.world
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          4 days ago

          They didn’t make a video about it because they thought it was a problem for creators, not a problem for consumers.

          Which is true. Influencers are great at making their thing your thing, because that’s kind of their job, and we’ve seen it many times before. Just look at all the outrage about the YouTube algorithm and such, it doesn’t matter to anyone except influencers but somehow it’s made to be everybody’s business.

          This feels very similar. Scummy business practice, good on them for suing, but to the rest of us it should only be a curiosity.

          • dev_null@lemmy.ml
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            4 days ago

            It’s not just creators though, it’s also preventing customers from getting a good deal, because stores can pay honey their protection racket money to stop it from giving their customers discounts.

            Admittedly it’s a lesser issue - you are just not getting a discount you could have gotten - but it’s the opposite of what it was claiming to do for you.

      • Kushan@lemmy.world
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        4 days ago

        I don’t know why LTT are somehow the bad guys in this, they weren’t the only ones to realise that the extension messed with their affiliate links and it’s not like it’s a thing to publicly shout about every dropped sponsor.

        I bet LTT has dropped plenty of sponsors without making a big public deal about it.

        • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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          3 days ago

          Why not name and shame? It’s not like burning that bridge would matter if you’re unwilling to do business with them anymore.

          If you quietly move on, that doesn’t help anyone.

        • Cocodapuf@lemmy.world
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          4 days ago

          I don’t think anyone is saying they’re the bad guy. At least I didn’t read it that way.

          • MajorasMaskForever@lemmy.world
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            4 days ago

            There’s a few threads over on Reddit and the LTT forum about how Linus has apparently handled this all wrong, they should have made a video years ago, Linus being dismissive of if on WAN show is him being detached from reality, you know, the usual bullshit

            Edit: ITT https://lemmy.world/comment/14273487

            In fairness to me (and maybe you) Sync didn’t load the comment initially so only after I kept reading I found it

      • kent_eh@lemmy.ca
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        4 days ago

        but for some reason didn’t make a video about it?

        Neither did every other creator who stopped doing paid promotion for Honey years ago.

        They’re not scambusters, they’re a computer/tech review channel.