this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2025
977 points (99.6% liked)

Technology

60305 readers
5810 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
L3s
enu
technopagan
977
For-profit Pie Adblock (from the founder of Honey) called out for copying uBlock Origin open source code without credit (www.theregister.com)
submitted 3 days ago by dantheclamman to c/technology
70 comments fedilink hide all child comments
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Squizzy 8 points 3 days ago (2 children)

The founder still made it do what it does.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

Depends when all of that functionality was added in. Honey started as a legit coupon scraping extension back in 2012, and was sold to PayPal in 2020. Somewhere in the last 12 years, someone got a bit too greedy.

Reminds me of the story of AdBlock - helpful extension gets a huge market share, people get greedy, it gets sold to a for-profit, and starts doing shady deals with the people it's supposed to be "working against".

[–] freddydunningkruger 7 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Um, PayPal paid $4,000,000,000 to buy Honey. $4 billion. Now, think about how much profit Honey would have had to been generating for PP to look at the numbers and buy it for that much. However it "started", the functionality to steal was in there before they sold it to PayPal

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Companies that aren't profitable get bought all the time for ridiculous amounts of money not because they currently make boatloads of money, but because they have a huge userbase and brand recognition, and the buyer thinks they are the geniuses that can make it do that. Yahoo paid 1.1 billion for Tumblr - since sold to wordpress for 3 million - and Musk 44 billion for Twitter - now worth a fraction of that - for example.
That is exactly why they often go to shit only after they have been bought.

Fwiw, Honey did around $100 million in revenue back in 2018. That's 40 times less than what they were bought for, and that isn't even profit, but just how much money they received before all their business expenses were paid.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

The founder made it steal commissions for a company that they weren't even affiliated with?

[–] extremeboredom 6 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Do you believe that the affiliate scam only started when PayPal acquired Honey?

[–] [email protected] -5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Do you have reason to believe it didn't?