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Comment by sss111 | Hacker News Reader

How would you even build a better version of this geared towards consumers? I don’t see the incentives lining up unless you start charging for the service.

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The same way that uBlock Origin was built. Scams being the only way to make your product "profitable" doesn't validate the scams. That's like saying "I made a business offering to clean people's houses for free. Of course I'm gonna steal their stuff while doing it, how else do you expect me to make money?!"

The consumer never gets the affiliate cut either way. If there are coupon codes, the consumer wins. If there aren't, the customer only loses a bit of privacy about what they're buying, which most people don't care about anyway.

how do you think rakuten cash back works

I have no idea. I'm entirely unfamiliar with that.

cash back to the user is a cut of the affiliate revenue/commission they get for the sale. this is commonly how all third party ecommerce cash back programs work (honey, klarna, etc.)

the video explains how honey has the same thing but the cut they give you seems to be tiny - like less than a dollar to users for a $30 commission for them as one example.

i dont know if this is common practice or not but i'm not a user of these extensions personally.

If there's a better coupon code, but the retailer pays Honey to not show it to you, the consumer loses.

If the consumer intentionally uses the affiliate links to support the creator, then they are deceived if someone else steals that cut. This would be similar to charity money being stolen by some third party - the donator would not be getting that money anyway, yet they might feel hurt if it turns out their money didn't go where they wanted it to go.

a simple database of coupon codes for each retailer. That’s it. Basically a “Retailmenot” copy.

Interestingly, RMN did sue over alleged IP infringement in 2018 [1]

[1] https://ia803106.us.archive.org/8/items/gov.uscourts.ded.656...

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