4 ms·

hey! first post here but i have been a lurker for a while. recently with all the honey drama i really wanted an opensource version. however all the versions i

by zeemou 2y ago

hey! first post here but i have been a lurker for a while. recently with all the honey drama i really wanted an opensource version. however all the versions i saw at the time were either for-profit or no longer supported. so , i decided to make my own. over the past few weeks a couple more opensource honey alternatives have popped up. however they all worked on a web scraper that feeds you coupons when it finds you on one of the listed websites. I feel like i can potentially do better by crowd sourcing coupon codes. this post is part promotion, part discussion forum on whether such an approach is viable and any suggestions to move forward with it. i feel like many of the coupons finders out there boast large number of supported websites but have ultimately been low in usefullness. during the creation process i tested out a bunch of these coupon finders on real products i would be advertised and would potentially consider buying (probably about 50+ different products). not once did i get a natural hit. the only ones i have ever encountered being useful is honey itself, in due large part to the fact that they source their coupon codes from participating websites directly. for any standalone project that plans not to involve scummy tactics, is largely impossible to reach the audience of honey through regular means

hmcq6 2y ago
It's also largely impossible to provide the benefits of honey with out that direct participation. Honey was a scam, that's why it would sometimes give out good discounts. There's no free lunch on the internet. You either pay with ads, user data or money (scams). I appreciate the free and open source work you've done but the use case here is that you just don't want to sign up for whatever companies news letter where they distribute coupon codes.
- zeemou 2y ago
  yea, i was talking to one of the guys creating a coupon code finder from web scraped coupons alone about this. they seemed pretty confident to it not being a problem though my own approach is that crowd sourcing coupons has the potential to a much larger set of coupons and websites, and so it can possibly be more useful in a larger number of scenarios. i have already had some uploads that otherwise wouldnt be supported through web scraping alone. rn i think its most important that i work on scalability of that i think.

by zeemou 2y ago

hmcq6 2y ago

It's also largely impossible to provide the benefits of honey with out that direct participation. Honey was a scam, that's why it would sometimes give out good discounts. There's no free lunch on the internet. You either pay with ads, user data or money (scams). I appreciate the free and open source work you've done but the use case here is that you just don't want to sign up for whatever companies news letter where they distribute coupon codes.

zeemou 2y ago
yea, i was talking to one of the guys creating a coupon code finder from web scraped coupons alone about this. they seemed pretty confident to it not being a problem though my own approach is that crowd sourcing coupons has the potential to a much larger set of coupons and websites, and so it can possibly be more useful in a larger number of scenarios. i have already had some uploads that otherwise wouldnt be supported through web scraping alone. rn i think its most important that i work on scalability of that i think.