Post #2331061

2025-12-22 16:40 UTC

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...

Replies (2)

@Joelk111@lemmy.world 2025-12-23 07:32

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.

Open ##2331114
@bamboo@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2025-12-23 16:44

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.

Open ##2331115