Limits for self-promotion in answers

Policy suggestion

If an official policy is going to be set on this, I would suggest it say that whenever

• somebody mentions a product they are affiliated with - commercial or otherwise

• or makes factual statements about it ("It can do X but does take Y into consideration"; "It runs well on a XYZ series server")

• Simply any kind of answer that would directly influence a purchase/usage decision

they make their affiliation reasonably clear inside the answer.

To avoid every answer from a software company employee being loaded with a huge footer of mumbo-jumbo, I suggest that using the word "our" or "my" be enough to indicate the affiliation:

I am looking for an extremely fast solution to swarble gorgles in a multi-server environment. Any recommendations?

Our Quadruptron IV can do this. It can swarble 50 gorgles per second.

Alternatively, they can of course also use a normal disclaimer at the end of the contribution ("Full disclosure: I am CEO of Quadruptron, Inc.") or "I am the maintainer of the project" or whatever. The affiliation is very easy to work into the text flow.

Normal questions involving a product should not require full disclosure in the question text, although I would say it mostly makes sense for everyone involved and is good style.

It goes without saying that an answer needs to be a valuable contribution in the context of the question asked in any case.

I think that the presence of software vendors - commercial and otherwise - on SO in general is a great thing, especially because it's in their own best interest to answer questions about their product when/if they come up.

As the "spammer" in question, I think it reasonable to rise to my own defense.

I think this question is a knee-jerk reaction to anything which has a whiff of commercialism, regardless of its utility.

Spam is defined by wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_(electronic) as "use of electronic messaging systems (...) to send unsolicited bulk messages indiscriminately."

My responses are not indiscriminate. Nor are they unsolicited.

While many of my posts (not all) might be argued as commercially biased, they are NOT spam by this definition. I challenge Michael or others to find a response which is not reasonably related to the question posted by the OP, or in fact even very good answers. The OP explicitly requests information and my responses are, I claim, on-topic.

The fact that they are upvoted by some readers indicate that they believe the answer to be a reasonable answer. The fact that OPs sometimes mark them as best answer shows that the OP believes he got a good response to his question.

Presumably if the post was made by somebody other than me, and the upvoters didn't know the difference, they would have upvoted anyway.

The implications are that my responses are useful to the OP and to the readers.

While I don't always (or even often) note that I am a principal at the company, my icon bio data is extremely clear about my status and what my responses might mean. (EDIT 72 hours after original post: A policy of making this connection explicit seems to have formed at about 12 hours after original post. Immediately thereafter I agreed in a number of comments to various responses to this question to implement that policy on future answers, and revise previous answers as time permits. But the storm still rages on; read the rest of this post).

StackOverflow is useful because it gets answers for posters. Objecting that an answer has some commercial property doesn't negate the value of that answer if it is relevant. There are lots of answers that point to commercial products (e.g., Microsoft) and they aren't marked as spam. Why should posters not be able to get information about useful results, just because my company is small and not a lot of people know about it? Nobody here seems to object to Microsoft getting what amounts to free air time, just because it has mindshare and therefore a non-MS person will provide a MS-biased answer.

While I do make a living from selling my tools, as far as I can tell everybody else at SO pretty much makes a living doing something that is commercially valuable. I'm passionate about the tools I build. I believe they are extremely good at what they do, and of considerable value to the community.

I believe I am doing the community service. I think you should allow any vendor (oh that awful word) that has useful responses to provide such responses.

And I don't think this position should be repeatedly argued at SO, but rather become an explicitly embraced policy.

You are of course allowed to have your own opinion about the quality and relevance of individual answers, and up/down vote answers accordingly. You can downvote because you don't like commercial products, but I just think you are doing the OPs a disservice.

EDIT (12 hours after original post) There now seems to be an additional new objection, which is that there is a large quantity of posts that refer to a (my) website.

1. If a question gets asked, then a reasonable answer should be a reasonable answer. (Whether a question gets closed as a duplicate doesn't change this).

2. If the answers are reasonable, why does it matter what site they link to, or how many times that site is mentioned across all the SO answers?

3. In case anybody is paying attention, one of the reasons that I have a lot of answers is because my company builds a lot of different tools (using a common engine, check my bio if you want to know how this might be possible).

I think I'm getting singled out on this partly because I can provide a lot of useful answers. That seems downright unreasonable.

EDIT (36 hours after original post)

There appears to be a proposal for a policy suggesting that marking one's own products explicitly in an answer would be A Good Thing. I've agreed (see various comment threads where I seem to have to repeat my agreement repeatedly) to do this, and have in fact gone back and made changes to some of my posts.

However, it is entirely unclear that having a policy proposal is the same as

• having a policy
• having that policy be known
• having the policy be followed. Consider a malcontent that doesn't like the policy. (It may be obvious there are some working this SO thread). S(he) simply decides to take matters into her own hands and mark policy-following answer as spam anyway. A blinking "somebody marked this as spam" is likely a magnet to a other malcontents, and thus you are likely to get a piling-on effect. Small numbers of malcontents then produce almost predetermined outcomes; its called exponential decay. For those malcontents, I suggest this link.

I guess I'm not thrilled with how "community consensus" works. Welcome to the Internet.

In any case, I'll make the commitment that if policy is decided, "no self promotion", then I'll quit providing my-tool answers where my tools make sense, even if I think that's dumb. It'd be nice if the malcontents would make similar commitments about SO "policy". I don't hold a lot of hope based on some of the vitriol present.

EDIT (48 hours after original).

In spite of the invective, I do not recall having answers I have provided removed as spam. (It is possible there were some; early on in using SO it was pretty hard to tell why my rep went up or down). What I find very disturbing is that since the start of this discussion, I have suddenly had a number of answers apparantly spam-buttoned-out, as indicated by several roughly 100-point drops in rep. The coincidence strongly suggests causality. Apparantly there are those that have read the thread(s) here and aren't interested in a positive policy outcome, and have simply gone vendetta.

EDIT (64 hours after the original)

Here's an answer which I think has just been spam-tagged. I'd like somebody to explain to me how it is not a direct answer to the OP's question, regardless of attribution. This looks like outright spam-button abuse. (It was visible when first tagged; if you can no longer see this message, that's because it has been spam-deleted. Its harder to make your case when the evidence in your favor is deleted.)

EDIT (July 27). The vigilantes are killing good answers. Here's one upvoted by the author of the question.

If the best answer to the question happens to be a commercial product, it seems entirely irrational to me that it can't be posted by any user.

Forbidding the person most likely to be familiar with the product from doing so would seem to go against the real goal - getting good answers.

That said, posting your own product without disclosures is essentially misrepresenting something - most readers will assume that your opinion is unbiased, and it's not.

Still, this seems pretty easily solvable:

1. Post good, relevant answers, and if they happen to be about your product, so be it. That means that it's okay to list your own product if it really meets the criteria, but if it's wildly off what the poster asked for, it's SPAM.
2. Clearly disclose conflicts and biases. While I think "our" or "my" probably conveys it, some folks obviously don't, so why debate it: You're only posting your own stuff when it's appropriate, and helpful, and it will make people love you, right? What's the harm in getting used to pasting this: (Disclosure: I [work for/own/whatever] the company that makes it, but I think it's a logical fit for your need).

It seems as though the last thing you want is some guy who knows that his app has a rarely-discussed feature to solve the problem sitting around waiting for some other user to discover it. On the other hand, those that blindly post their own product to any borderline-related query should be down-voted and flagged.

It's unpaid advertising, pure and simple.

I would call it spam, simply because there's no such thing as a private reply on SO: every answer addresses every reader who finds that question. But if that makes you uncomfortable, then fine: it's just rude.

SO provides an extensive system for placing advertisements in designated locations. If you have a commercial product that you wish to promote on SO, then pay for it. It's folks buying ads that keep the site up and under continual improvement.

There is more than enough angst and controversy over the official, clearly marked, paying-for-the-site-to-keep-running ads - clogging the answers themselves with unofficial, unmarked ads should never be seen as acceptable.

Flag as spam or flag for moderator attention, lest this become a cancer on the site...

Clarification

Look, I'm not saying they aren't well-written advertisements. I'm not saying they're completely off-topic, or that the tools being promoted couldn't, for some users in some situations, prove useful. Advertising doesn't have to be cringe-inducing - that's just what we're used to, because there's so much of it around. But take a look at something like Eric Sink's blog - he writes about source control, running a software company, advertising, and of course his own company and its products. There are some great articles... And it's brilliant advertising, since people want to link to them. The "Joel on Software" site is the same thing, fun to read while at the same time a huge series of ads.

I don't have a problem with good ads. I'm not anti-advertising.

But SO isn't anyone's personal blog. Questions from people struggling to use competing products shouldn't be seen as an open invitation to hawk your own. SO users, as a group, tend to be rather trusting - the starting assumption when reading an answer is that it is actually intended to solve the problem described in the question.

I consider the abuse of this trust to be poisonous. And I have no sympathy for systematic, long-term abuse, regardless of what name you give it. I regret that I have only five flags a day...

It's simple honesty and courtesy to state affiliations. And if it's not the law yet (in the USA) it probably soon will be. See FTC Moves to Unmask Word-of-Mouth Marketing - Endorser Must Disclose Link to Seller

SO and friends exist to get good answers to questions.

Anything that causes more and better answers is good. Anything that stifles useful answers is bad.

I'm firmly opposed to any policy that restricts anybody from giving a good, relevant, answer to a question, just on the basis of irrelevant details like personal involvement. I agree that attribution is necessary, and I know that it's possible to deliver irrelevant and bad answers while recommending software, but if I have a problem and somebody out there sells a product that will solve my problem, I don't want any policy stopping that somebody from recommending it.

I have just flagged as spam, Ira's answer to Any valid reason for code duplication?. While I appreciate his willingness to edit his previous answers, I do not think that adding the word "our" before his product names is adequate.

It just barely calls out his relationship to the product in question. In fact, I wonder if it will even be meaningful to some for whom English is not their first language.

Furthermore, reading his answer, I did not find it responsive to the question. The fact that he has a product that helps detect duplicate code does not respond to the question of whether there is ever a valid reason for duplicate code. It's great that there was a solution for the problem, but nobody asked for a solution to the duplicate code problem.

I will continue following his user feed.

Today, I used the 10k tools for the first time in a while, and noticed there were 25 flags. I clicked over there just for the heck of it, and saw several of Ira's answers on the first page. I was inspired.

So, since I said I'd do this publicly, here's the reasoning:

• In his answer to Metaprogramming how much is too much?, written over six months after the previous answer, he starts by answering "There's never enough". That was the only thing in the answer that is responsive to the question. The rest describes how metaprogramming came to be, describes the "ideal world" with respect to metaprogramming, then states that the ideal world is provided by his product!
• In his answer to What’s a good desktop-based code review tool?, he goes straight for the spam flag, presenting his company's diff tool as though it were a code review tool. The OP did not ask about diff tools!
• His answer to Best Diff Tool? is better, but only because the OP asked for diff tools, and asking for the "best" such tool leaves an opening for those who think their product is the best. I'll grant that Ira does describe those features of his product that make it a contender for "best". I may even try it myself, as I've wanted a language-sensitive diff tool for decades. I did not flag this one as spam.

There are three more flagged answers, but the rest are not on the first page, so I'll let them slide for now.

I have nothing against commercial products, but I also promote full and visible disclosure for free services or personal blogs. Hence, I think undisclosed and somehow hidden self-promition should be removed. (I don't consider references in a user's profile to be disclosure.) Fully disclosed self-promotion is a different matter; I think in general that will be handled by the community votes, either up or down.

But whether commercial or non-commercial, disclosed or undisclosed: 412 out of 670 answers, that's a link to a specific website in 60% (!) of the answers.

Are these products suitable for many different cases? Are the questions duplicates of each other (in which case >3k should then vote to close, rather than answer, if you'd ask me)? Of course, one's knowledge makes one more likely to answer the questions one understands best. But would for 60% of that set of questions one's own product be the answer? Or is the set of questions not only limited to one's knowledge, but even further limited to those to which one's own products could be the answer? Like George put it in a comment:

What if every one with a commercial product to plug started searching SO for every opportunity to plug their wares?

So yes, why not define some limit to ensure that doesn't happen? That limit would probably be some random figure, like "at most 10% of one's posts", but just let's make it clear?

(EDIT: Added thoughts on the limit.)

Another solution could be to have vendors who promote their own products be given a special tag next to their name. That would take care of the disclosure problem in a simple and convenient way, as well as having the potential for people who are bothered by such posts to be able to filter out ALL self-promotional material that was posted in accordance with the rules.

I despise spammers, but I think I'm on Team Ira (i.e., I don't think he's a spammer). He's on topic, and doesn't try to hide his association. HOWEVER, when his answers get flagged for spam, I don't automatically clear the flags. While I'm on the team, if the community wishes to declare an answer spam (six flags over an answer) it'll get deleted. While I can't see who has flagged, I've emailed one user who asked for direct mod intervention, letting them know why Ira isn't banned (not spammer, no direct action; community decides fate of answers)

When those spam votes started coming in I looked at circa 5 of Ira's posts that had been flagged, found that they all contained an admission of the relationship (usually "Our FooBaricator 2000 can..." which is admittedly minimal), saw that several had positive comments from other participants, and decided to let it go.

The sheer volume does give me some pause, but each answer should be evaluated on it's own, and the ones I looked at were responsive at a non-trivial level.

May I suggest to Ira a more prominent disclosure?

I sometimes find questions on S.O. without adequate answers. If I can code up a good solution, I do so, then I post a link to my github repo or gist, as well as a copy of the code (usually remembering to mention that the link is to my repo/gist).

The reason for the link is that stack overflow is not a good repository. You can't include GPL license info, fork it, multiple files, etc.

IMO: Links to open source gists and github repos in support of a relevant answer should never be called spam. (It's even there in the guidelines)

My rep at Stack Overflow is not yet that big, but ad and links to own contributions are a sensitive matter. So I try to write a suggestion.

Idea

Extend the answer section with a checkbox: "I'm promoting my own product/article. It may be commercial."

Checking the box has these consequences:

1. Any downvoting will be not result in -2, but -40 reps, and any upvoting will not be worth +10, but +20 reps.
2. In order to set a link on your own commercial webpage, you need a reputation of at least 500.
3. In order to vote such an answer, you also need a reputation of at least 500. (500 should be enough to understand what is going on.)

Sanction: Anyone setting a link to her/his own contribution/webpage/product and not checking the box will first be warned and then banned.

Possible Consequences

If you promote your own links, with the mechanism explained the stakes are much higher. You can ruin much of your rep by misguiding or misusing the community's willingness to discuss freely about solutions.

You can't come in as a "fresh company" and place some ad as you don't have the rep to poker with, and you won't find much attention. Your answer with your link might show a downvote number of "-200", which is a bright red alert lamp for everybody. It might also show +50, but then you have earned it.

Real spammers will have struggle harder to mask their activities.

It is up to the community to decide what is annoying and what is not. Like this, nobody has to judge if sth is inside the limit or not.

People who wish to solve common problems by presenting an own tool may do so, but they will act carefully, not area-wide.

Most links for own contributions would probably move to the comments in order not to provoke downvoting the answer. In comments, such links are ok to me.

Other than @Pekka, I don't suggest a policy change as I don't believe such changes have enough influence in this case.

Thanks for reading :-) Many ideas are not meant to be realized 1:1, but to trigger other ideas. So may it flow...