this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2025
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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.
I can see how it happens though.
No one was doing any oversight on their practices. If you were running a referral affiliate link system, it must have seemed like honey was doing a really good job bringing customers to you.
I'm just kind of disappointed that nobody inside the company ever spoke up or blew any whistles and said "Hey, this is at best unethical if not entirely illegal and either way exposes us to the risk of a massive lawsuit, maybe we should just actually do our jobs instead of stealing the work of other people."
I'm not. What do you get as a reward for blowing the whistle? Genuinely?
There's no bounty, even if there was you wouldn't get it for at least a year after you blow the whistle.
Once it's discovered it's you, you're fired. There goes your paycheck, your health insurance. Now your home is in jeopardy and you have no decent income verification to get a new one.
Good luck working in any job even remotely related to what you know. You now have a stigma in any background check and while a privately owned mom & pop might look at you favorably, there ain't a single corporation who will take pride in hiring you. You're risky.
The most ethical person, is one with no debt, who owns their home, and has 8 months expenses saved up. That's not most Americans right now.
This is also why there was such coordinated effort to shut down wikileaks, or to at least stall out the cultural movement that was building behind it.
If you give people a methodology to whistleblow that at least on paper allows them to stay anonymous and avoid putting their life/livelyhood/survival in jeapordy, that removes one of the biggest disincentives.