Zach Lipton recently flagged this answer.
OP has also posted another answer with the same content.
I asked chief prosecutor Lipton to provide the evidence. Turns out the CEO of the company which sells the app is clearly the same guy (photo and name) who posted the answers. This is not disclosed in the answers, as is required by the rules here.
What should we do here? The TSE community are the judges.
As "chief prosecutor" here, I'm in the delete camp, and wanted to explain why.
Ordinarily, disclosure is great. If someone comes and provides a useful answer, and says "btw, this is my app; let me know if you have any feedback or comments," that's a helpful answer and should be encouraged. The SE rules explicitly allow for this kind of behavior, unlike some online communities that ban all self-links (and generally ban the users who make them too). This is a good thing. But that's not what happened here. This user breezed in, dropped links to his own app on two questions, and split, without ever explaining he had any connection to the app. He's demonstrated no interest in participating other than self-promotion.
Most people wouldn't tolerate this behavior offline. What would you think if you asked your neighbor to recommend a plumber, he said "oh I know this great guy, does excellent work at a good price," you call him, and a few hours later your neighbor rings your doorbell wearing overalls and a hat, carrying a pipe wrench? I suspect you'd be peeved that he conveniently failed to mention the fact that he was recommending himself. Even if he turned out to be a good plumber, you likely wouldn't get past the fact that he omitted this material information from his recommendation.
Spam destroys communities. What some are proposing is that we just add a note to the answer and move on. But how would that work for other similar situations? We get tons of answers of the form "need a visa? go to myvisahqtotallylegitvisaservice.xyz" that are deleted as spam without a moment's thought. Should we really just all a disclaimer to these answers and keep them?
Can we catch everyone who posts self-links without disclosing that fact? Of course not. Had this user not used his real name and picture, it may well have slipped by (though obviously the tone of it was suspicious enough for several of us to investigate, which is something I don't exactly make a habit of here). But when someone is clearly only interested in using the site for self-promotion and blatantly fails to mention that fact, delete the answers.
We should send a clear message that advertising one's own products without disclosing one's affiliation is not alright. In this case the problem has been left unresolved for over a year, which is unfortunate. Both answers should now be deleted.
First time I've seen this in the mod queue, although I've only been a mod again for a few months. It's technically not a great answer - and some would class it as spam. To not be, you need to:
As the post fails the second criteria, I've deleted. In future, you can simply vote to downvote it and also vote to delete it (if you have the privilege level), which given the attention it's had since then would have gotten it removed earlier than now, when I'm looking at the mod queue. But both ways do work!
Spamming is uncivilized behavior, and I have to be pretty desperate to reward a spammer with my business, no matter how good their company is. In other words, if an answer is spam, that automatically makes it a recommendation against the product.
While the OP didn't disclose his affiliation, which is certainly bad, it doesn't mean the app is not useful. It does appear to answer the questions, and may be useful to readers.
We need to add very visible warnings which state that OP is the CEO of the company selling the app. OP may not have known about TSE rules, so him not disclosing affiliation himself should perhaps not be penalized quite so severely as to delete the answers. However, he did not respond to comments regarding it, which does detract from his case.
@EugeneO has written some good reasoning in favour of this answer. I'm including it here, because it is well written.
We are not the morality police - our #1 driving goal should be to create a site with content that is useful to travelers. To me it is clear that deleting a potentially useful answer hurts this goal much more than adding an affiliation notice. We should evaluate each answer on its merits first, and secondary criteria, well, second. If the app is a good solution to the posted question, it will get my upvote, if not - downvote. Would the usefulness of the answer to the travel community really be different if it was a random user posting about an app they like, as opposed to the app creator?
I understand the rule and the problems with self-promotion, but I think that we already have 2 mechanisms to fight it:
- Any user can edit the answer and add an affiliation warning.
- If the app turns out bad, there's the downvote mechanism.
I don't think we need a 3rd mechanism, outright deleting an answer that may be genuinely useful to someone (unless it's outright spam - promoting an app/site that does not actually answer the question where it's posted as an answer).
