But they did state the reasons, on their forums. At the time it was only known Honey steals money from affiliate link owners, not from users, and presumably it worked correctly for users.

So what do you think would happen if they encouraged viewers not to use it? “Hey we know this extension makes you money, but please don’t use it because we, millionaire YouTubers, are getting smaller profits when your do, and our profits are more important than your savings”. They checked with other creators, most of YouTube stopped promoting it at the time, and that was it. It would be seen as very self-serving to complain about it to users/viewers.

Oh throught a third party tool, thanks, interesting.

Are you sure? I don’t think you can.

Yes, it was really bad.

I question your assertion that it was purposefully done as a secret conspiracy to ruin a random brand. Don’t attribute to malice what can adequately explained by stupidity.

No, they weren’t trying to ruin the brand, they were trying to make a YouTube video, made a bad job with multiple compounding mistakes, and ended up hurting the brand without that being their intention.

Hah, yeah I guess he does own goal to protect others often.

That’s an egregious mistake of a logistics employee wrongly asset tagging a prototype, ending up creating a huge controversy. Linus never named the employee and took all the heat on himself even though the situation had nothing to do with him.

Making a big deal out of Honey taking creator’s money would again move all the heat on him while warning other creator’s. But I think it would go just as bad.

So the scenario is that they know Honey is losing them money, but it’s saving user’s money by finding them great deals (since that part of the controversy wasn’t known at the time).

And you are proposing they make a video complaining about it. A big YouTuber millionaire telling people “hey, I know this extension is making you money, but please consider not using it because we are profiting off of our affiliate links less when you do and our profits are more important than your savings”.

How do you think that would go? We all know how such a video would be received.