Too diplomatic even.

The internet is truly dead. People can’t recognize sarcasm anymore. Fireship should have added the /s at the end of his title.

If we ban social media companies* we won’t.

Privately owned social media is a tool of media manipulation. You can change the weights of some inscrutable algorithm and boost exposure to political ideologies that you want while no one can truly make a case against you, “it’s just the algorithm” they say. There’s no scenario where they should be allowed to exist in a sovereign country.

You have cursed us. Doomed us to a miserable existence, aware of the sins of men.

I’ve recently been seeing lots of Archer references around, and they make me very happy. This makes me happy, thanks.

Affiliate links generally have nothing to do with discounts. Coupon codes do, and custom shop urls also often do, but I don’t think those were poached by honey, as they require manual input. Many creators just have affiliate links from amazon (for example) where they just list tools/stuff they used in their videos under the description and you can buy stuff at no extra cost and support the creator. You can also buy the same stuff for the same price by just going to Amazon, and the creator gets nothing. E.g. LTT could have a pc build video and list all the parts on newegg with their affiliate links, they don’t need any special partnership for the video, just to be part of neweggs affiliate program. This is hugely important for smaller content creators that don’t have the pull to get partnerships.

Americans are blind. They think their capitalism is also not state funded. The only difference is that in China corporations are owned by the state, and in the USA the state is owned by corporations. “It’s not fair” yeah, obviously it isn’t, the USA has been imperialistic and monopolistic over the entire global south for the past 7 decades, nobody wants to be playing with your bullshit rules anymore. The “free market” is heavily stacked in their favor, and always will be. Case in point? BRICS are about to move away from the dollar, and the USA immediately goes ballistic saying it will impose tariffs and sanctions and whatnot if we dare challenge their authority. Where’s the free market in that? Where’s the free market when your 2nd in command has said before that the USA will invade and coup whatever country they feel like it in order to get resources? Yeah, we’re not playing your stupid free market game anymore, it’s rigged. And yes, China is part of the global south, they have been so since they were oppressed and enslaved and explored by the global north for decades, they just did a good job of turning around. I wish my country had done as good of a job…

Honey would look for coupom codes, and sometimes it would find them, it wasn’t always, but also wasn’t never, so yes, they were “saving money” for the user as far as people knew at the time. After MegaLag’s video we know that the whole “find all available and working coupons to guarantee the best deal” was horseshit, and they were in partnership with business controlling the whole thing, but back when LTT and other creators dropped Honey, that part wasn’t known yet, just that they poached affiliate links. Which is very scummy, but likely not illegal.