“The biggest scam in YouTube history”

  • 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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            4 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.