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.

Sure, don’t trust your government. What are you trusting then? Sure as hell not corporations, I hope. Yourself? That’s what I would call of naiveté. An individual power is irrelevant in the modern world, even most communities are irrelevant (Lemmy is an example, we’re the 0,001%). Revolution sure is a nice idea, but I don’t see anyone getting off their arses and doing it (talking about it on Lemmy doesn’t matter, it’s a tiny little bubble), and honestly, I don’t even think revolutions are technically possible anymore (the powers that be are very keenly aware of its processes, mechanisms and risks, and media manipulation is so fucking easy these days). So you got to do something, you have to stand behind some power that can actually make a difference: there’s only one real/realistic choice: your government. I’ve seen what happens when the left starts voicing their mistrust of the government too carelessly. The right will take those complaints and shift them into their own, and things will snowball very quickly. People often mistake the idea of trust with the idea of blind faith. You can trust someone/something and still complain and fight against some of their actions and decisions. But you have to pick your battles very carefully. If you want a history lesson, look up what happened with Brazil in the period between 2011-2018. I was there, I lived through history. I can tell you that we should all really be fucking afraid of social medias and the internet, and if a government moves aggressively into regulating that, we should take a step back and think very hard while analysing the whole picture. Even if it looks like authoritarianism, it might still be the correct choice.

Don’t even try to reason with people here that governments should be responsible for blocking harmful agents to affect the population. Government control and communism are bad words here, it’s obviously much better to be free to spread misinformation and foreign propaganda, and if you can’t have such freedom, you’re obviously being oppressed by the government. I wish my ““free”” country had done the same ~10 years ago when social media truly became mainstream, and maybe we wouldn’t have suffered a coup d’état that was clearly in the best interests of other nations.

Not everyone lives in America. Most governments in the world are not just fronts for oligarchs. I trust the current government of my country to act in the better interests of the people most of the time (sadly we live in a capitalist dystopia, so sometimes lobbying can make politicians fuck up). If you don’t trust yours, you should look into what you can do to make a change.

Yeah, I just use the fork.

I just use Obsidian + Syncthing + MEGA. My obsidian folders are on my mega synced folder on my pc, and they are set up to use syncthing to push updates to all my other devices (2 phones and a tablet), but you can have as many devices as you want. It’s all free as well, and the cloud service can be any that you like.