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Deceptive practices
I'm not sure we need to lead with the "deceptive practice" bit. After all, when I signed up for LinkedIn they pulled the same contact-scraping stuff, tricking me, an experienced computer programmer, into emailing my entire gmail address book. This sort of deception is not an uncommon thing. Gigs (talk) 16:29, 29 April 2014 (UTC)
I would like to second the concerns raised by Gigs. Before I do, I'd like to explain why I'm not editing the article directly myself. I follow the "Bright Line" practice of not directly editing articles where I may be perceived to have a conflict of interest. In this case, I know Andrey Andreev socially sufficiently well that I wouldn't want to be perceived as acting inappropriately on behalf of a friend.
The current "controversial tactics" bit has two sources, neither of which strike me as sufficient to even include this claim, much less raise it to the level of the opening sentence. I think it is a disgrace that it used to say (for a sadly long time) 'deceptive practice' - a clearly non-neutral claim. But even toned down, I think it is badly mistaken.
First, one of the sources is said to be (in the footnote) a comment on the Motherboard story! That's bad enough, but in fact, when I scroll to the bottom of the article, the comment seems to not exist at all. I would imagine this is a no-brainer to remove.
Second, the Motherboard article is not a straight news piece by any means. It's a humorous commentary about the author's experience signing up for the service, written in a contentious style. For example, "The deluge of real life Badoo spam on subway cars and giant billboards doesn’t just offer some indication of the company’s desperation: it hints of what happens on the Internet version too." The word 'spam' is not normally applied to advertising in subway cars and billboards, at least not in a factual sense. (It is applied that way in a condemnatory way, I suppose.) And as the dramatic financial success of the company is explained later in the piece, there's nothing factual in the article to support the notion that the company is experiencing 'desperation'. My point here is that we can't treat this article as a news report - it's commentary.
Having said that, the actual allegations in the article certainly don't support the adjective 'deceptive' nor do they support the idea that there is 'controversy'. It seems like the site asks you to link your Facebook, Google, Yahoo accounts (a standard practice these days) and that they ask to contact your friends (or do they really ask? - a factual story about that *would* to my mind justify the use of the word 'controversial'). The Motherboard piece does not seem to justify it, because the author cheerfully admits that he agreed to it. In order to really justify discussing things, we'd need a better source - and we'd need a much better source or set of sources to justify elevating this to the lede. (Facebook, MySpace, and many others sites have received complaints about viral marketing methods, but we don't put that into the lede for any of those.) --Jimbo Wales (talk) 15:41, 30 April 2014 (UTC)
I gave the article a once-over removing a lot of poorly sourced controversy, as well as some redundancy, general copy-editing, slight promotion, etc. In the process I removed a source from The Economist that may have good information in it, but was poorly used to add quoted commentary. I find quotes are often used to add anecdotes and editorialized language from the source that would otherwise be seen as un-acceptable and un-encyclopedic.
I need to run (to a dentist appointment as it were) but one thing Jimbo mentions above I did not look into is the Motherboard story here. The author is called a "contributor" and on his Twitter he calls himself a "reporter" for Motherboard. If he is a professional reporter, he should be a reliable source. However, I have not read the whole article (it is a long read) or evaluated exactly how it is used on this page. CorporateM (Talk) 19:01, 1 May 2014 (UTC)
Dear all:
I thank you all for your comments. They contain many excellent points. Let me reply.
Many factual sources, such as The Economist, write about Badoo. But, as far as I can tell, Mr. Stuckey is one of a select few professional writers who has ever actually used Badoo. (There also exists a Badoo review by one Mr. Needleman. But this second reviewer resisted Badoo's entreaties for a copy of his Facebook contact list.) Perhaps the other professionals were too reluctant to sign up for a social network which got the lowest privacy score in a large peer-reviewed study. (Source: Telegraph Media Group citing Joseph Bonneau and Sören Preibusch. See here.)
True, Mr. Stuckey's Motherboard article isn't only factual: it also weaves in some of the author's personal opinions. However, we should still use it as a source for factual matters. When you give in to Badoo's supplications for a copy of your Facebook contact list, disaster ensues. Mr. Stuckey's article its the only professionally-published review I could find which even mentions what this disaster entails. (What does it entail? Well, see my comment to Gigs, below.)
Dear Mr. Wales: Surely you are unhappy that Misplaced Pages says unkind things about Mr. Andreev's company. Well, Mr. Andreev's company should try to be kinder to its users. If it does so, then reliable sources (and Wikipedians) will likely notice.
Dear Mr. Wales, and dear @Gigs: You both feel that we shouldn't mention Badoo's "deceptive practices" in the lead. Well, convincing users to email their entire address book is annoying enough. But emailing a lie to each contact (e.g. "Unforgettableid left you a message; join Badoo to read it")? This is far worse.
By the way: Dear @CorporateM: I just want to be doubly sure that there's been neither any undisclosed COI editing nor undisclosed canvassing going on. So, just to verify, do you have any COI here? And, if I may ask, when did you first discover the existence of this article?
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