Multiple game creators describe ineffective moderation on the platform, resulting in unchecked hatred in forums and targeted campaigns of negative ‘anti-woke’ reviews
Steam has a serious problem with a lack of moderation, which has made it a very attractive platform for fascists. Gamergate never ended, and remember that began with Steve Bannon realizing he could exploit gamer outrage to push propaganda. They keep inventing new scandals to repeat their past success.
One of my favorite games had a very minor patch to revise some cringier elements from early in the game’s lifespan. Years later, the forum is still unusuable because it’s been colonized by right-wing weirdos with 0.3 hours on record who have dedicated their lives to crying about a game they never cared about pre-patch, because they saw it as an opportunity to push their propaganda.
While I do question a lot of the changes they made to Skullgirls 2nd Encore, there was one context where censoring panty shots was entirely understandable.
Filia was one of the characters censored. She’s a sixteen year old schoolgirl, and while this may be a stretch, her name sounds like a reference to “paedophilia”, which makes the fact that some of her animation frames and concept art were originally drawn upskirted with clearly exposed panties even more problematic.
It does get tiresome going to steam threads and seeing the same copy pasted “don’t ruin the game with woke shit” post up voted to the top.
I don’t think I’ve read a steam forum post in close to a decade, and even then it was a very niche thing I was looking for. I have long since stopped feeling any enjoyment or novelty in seeing completely random people’s thoughts, since in the last few years particularly, people have no intention to communicate and broadly just want attention, which has become monetized so the problem is far worse than it used to be.
Seriously, at some point we’re going to have to accept that the internet is dead or too close to death to be useful for interacting with other humans. I think we all need to stop communicating online on forums and discord and the like, it’s all become weaponized and not enough people are left without agendas and campaigns they’re trying to push. Let’s go back to how we did it for thousands of years and just talk to each other and make real-world friends, leave the assholes and shills and sock-puppets to fight among themselves.
Imagine the power we will have if all the scum and assholes become the inferior population scared to actually do anything or go outside and we become owners of the day and become the ambulatory force towards goals and social progress.
This whole “why don’t you do it first” reply is no more intelligent than saying “I ain’t reading all that” or “the curtains were just blue” or other dumb thought-stopping exercises vomited out by a generation with no attention spans. I reject it, I block those who dump that like they’re somehow doing some good by trying to find hypocrisy in an idea that makes them uncomfortable.
I’ve tried contacting gaming press about this. I contacted Valve (several times) citing their own rules, screenshots of blatant transgressions and they repeatedly closed my ticket and ignored me. I avoid buying games directly from Steam now. If I can find the screenshots later I’ll update my post.
Edit: So here is the ticket I opened (this was -months- after repeatedly reporting someone spamming the N-word in the Official Steam Deck group chat for weeks).
Hey, you might want to contact the Sentinels of the Store group about this - they do reports on Steam’s developer and customer issues, and occasionally have direct communication with Valve.
Reminder that The Guardian is a dogshit paper that pretty much systematically misgender trans people and keeps tripling down on backing up TERFs. You don’t get to talk shit about the bigots when you’re among them.
The US Guardian is strongly pro-trans, while the UK Guardian is more mixed. It had (maybe still has?) some TERFs in prominent positions for a very long time, and they kept churning out their transphobic opinion pieces week after week.
Moderate your own forum, honestly its kinda based of Valve to be as hands off as they are. You set your own guidelines rather than having Valve force their own on you. It makes sense too given the variety of games on Steam.
“I’m not new to online harassment,” says designer Nathalie Lawhead, who spent two years trying to get reviews removed from their games’ pages. Both reference allegations of sexual assault that Lawhead made in 2019. “I assumed reporting Steam abuse might have its own issues. But when people suggested that I open a ticket, I did have hope that this would be the way to get it resolved.”
One of the reviews, published in 2023, read, “cringe game, made by a liar”. The other, a review of Lawhead’s game Blue Suburbia posted in 2024, said: “A women [sic] who seeks to destroy other’s [sic] career made this. It’s very poorly put together. She also probably has dual Israeli citizenship with how pointy her nose is.”
Despite Steam’s code of online conduct and community guidelines prohibiting “abusive language or insults”, public accusations or “discrimination”, moderators initially cleared both reviews after Lawhead reported them.
What’s with Lemmy users and lying and bending backwards to shield poor indie dev company Valve from harassment? Does Gabe’s dick taste that good?
Honest question, do you think someone replying to a thing in a public forum “cringe thing made by a liar” is actually harassment and should be forcefully removed just because the dev doesn’t like it?
Yes. Never in a million years I would consider “cringe game, made by a liar” an honest review, and I don’t know why anyone would consider it as such. It’s clearly part of a harassment campaign.
should be forcefully removed just because the dev doesn’t like it?
It should be removed because it’s not a review and has nothing to do with the game at hand, not because the dev doesn’t like it.
Yeah but what good is reporting when Valve themselves takes what feels like an eternity, getting down to dealing with just a few?
Eventually, they’re going to be faced with making one of two choices; Shut down the discussions board to a particular game for violating ToS or let it go unchecked for however long.
Talking about my own experience here; there are rules (ToS) which people break and then Valve ignore. Hands off is one thing but being totally nonchalant about these blatant, hate filled transgressions is another all together.
For anybody saying “it’s not a problem, just moderate it yourself”, look at Relooted’s steam forum. There are more than 700 threads there and most of them are really not kind. Tell me how you’re going to moderate that.
Just put yourself in the shoes of game publishers or studios that make a game which goes against the grind and gets attacked like Relooted is being attacked. Would you want to employ somebody just to moderate the forums? Should the onus be on the forum owners or should it be on the forum providers (Valve)? Do you think this has no effect on the types of games being released?
I mean, look at this game Tyrone vs Cops 2. Is this OK? What do you think the forum discussions look like. Are they OK? If it’s only devs that should moderate their forums, that means the KKK could make game about water lillies and then have their forums be the meeting ground for white power discussions. They won’t be offended after-all. That’s OK?
nobody is forcing you to play it, and nobody is forcing you to go to a forum and talk about it. If it bothers you so much just don’t go there?
You guys realise that censoring racist content doesn’t modify or remove the underlying belief right? just like closing your eyes doesn’t make you invisible…
We’re in a reality where groups like ISIS have actively recruited followers through gaming networks. There’s genuine, violent risk in allowing hate speech to reach across land masses and be granted some form of discoverability, even if some of the recipients are just looking for answers to the question “Man why no girl want me”
we’re in a reality where syria is controlled by isis-like headchopping terrorists, and our western governments drape these terrorists in liberal moderate language to make them more palatable to western audiences. By paying your taxes, by supporting your western country you are giving material indirect support to literal wahabbist terrorists. You going to your job and pretending to yourself and others that your silly middle class existence is somehow ‘civilised’ because your don’t say the n word or cuss is materially much closer to violent terrorism than some chud saying crude words on his day off.
What bothers you isn’t a proximity to evil or violence, your everyday ordinary existence materially entangles you in that process. What bothers you is strict conformance to civility politics. What bothers you is people saying uncomfortable things, because your bourgeois, performative morality places you and your paper-mache feelings at the center of the moral universe.
Fuck shit damn. Cunt piss bitch. America was built on goddamn slave labor. Ooh boy, all that cursing was so, so difficult for my civilized upbringing.
This is what chuds don’t get, since they never read terms of use. Social networks don’t often oppose aimless expletives like “Let’s fucking kick a baby into lava haha!” They oppose pointed, meaningful intention like “I’m going to shoot up my school because it’s been infested with n%%%%s.” Hate is a language used everywhere, separate from curses, and it’s one I don’t mind blocking on every front possible.
because if you don’t see it - it disappears! like magic!
the angry chud whos economic stability has been shattered by a neoliberal race to the bottom, the chud who can’t afford to live in the same town he grew up in, who has been directed to view every moral or class grievance in purely racial terms by the corporate media. When that same chud dares to express any anger or resentment or hostility, and he expresses that anger to his cultural out group, at least YOU will be there! to wag your finger in his face and moralise to him about how people’s feelings are important, even as you ignore his.
censoring someone doesn’t change their mind, if anything it hardens their velief and encourages them to spread it elsewhere
LOOK AROUND LEMMY! Every political community! Every discussion! EVERYONE is angry, jaded, fucking upset the system isn’t working! The difference is, SMART angry people get angry at the actual causes of that economic disparity. Not going on wild, racist tangents to blame people even poorer than them that have barely done a thing to even affect that economic situation!
I don’t fucking trust anyone who’s not angry at the world. Those people are blind. But worse are people who are angry at the most victimized part of the world, instead of the ones doing the victimizing; or those who are angry at politicians who did in fact try to give rural America something to do with their hands - read the Inflation Reduction Act - but were spat on because Fox News parroted Shell’s line that renewable energy is a scam.
Don’t you dare say I’m demonizing people or “wagging my finger at them” for being fucking angry. That is a bald-faced lie. I demonize people for taking their anger out on people that should be brothers and sisters in the fight against injustice.
It “controversial” because racists and bigots made it that way. There was no controversy about other heist games, there’s no “controversy” about games with all-white characters. But put in a diverse group of character, that steal back what was stolen and suddenly that’s “controversial”.
I mean, look at this game Tyrone vs Cops 2. Is this OK?
It’s probably filled with vile stuff, so I simply won’t go there. There’s awful stuff to be found everywhere on the internet if you seek it out, you can just not go there.
Sure, I won’t travel to Gaza and say “wow, so many dead people here” and act surprised, but if I stumble upon a dead body on a playground, you betcha it’s at least a little surprising.
I clicked a random thread and it looks like a lot of posters don’t even own the game. I’ve seen this a lot of times, people flaming and trolling on a game’s forum don’t even own the game. Thought the simplest fix would be to just not let them post and restrict game forums to those who bought it.
They do have an “Owners” forum (the default is the Non-Owners for those who don’t own the game). I imagine the non-owners forum is there to provide an opportunity for non-owners to ask genuine questions about the game, but that obviously isn’t happening. Maybe you’re right and they should just make it owners only. I don’t know if it would be visible to others though.
There are valid use cases for non owners, but I think they don’t outweigh the cost. Sometimes you have to sacrifice something and this is something I could live with.
For anybody saying “it’s not a problem, just moderate it yourself”
I’m of the opposite opinion. It’s a much bigger problem than just Steam community moderation and it needs to be addressed more broadly. (Monkey’s paw curls)
The reason it got this bad was because they didn’t nip it in the bud sooner. If they had been more proactive from the start, there wouldn’t be 700+ threads.
At this point, just nuke them all and ban everyone who made a bigoted troll thread. It’s gonna be a game of whack-a-mole for a little while, but once you start handing out bans, the trolling will start die down.
Breaking News: Bigots increasingly comfortable, some mods bigots too.
It’s a shame there isn’t real moderation when people feel harassed, but I no longer care about those reviews as a consumer anyway. A negative review by some loser probably means I’ll like it more.
And I continue to support challengers to monopolies. Hope Steam gets a real competitor someday so I can take my money elsewhere.
and we don’t try to moderate reviews based on accuracy
Than, it’s not a review, it’s a social media feed.
Calling that a review would imply that it must have passed some check.
If there is none, it’s a post, on a social media.
Even than they’d try to moderate that if they cared.
Removing reviews, the response claimed, could be seen as “censorship”.
Fact checkig and moderation isn’t censorship, it’s moderation.
Recourse for developers is limited. Some are looking into their own security, shoring up protections for developers on their team against being doxxed or hacked by trolls. Or, in the case of the developers of Caves of Qud, paying their own moderators to handle forums and the hate that spills out of Steam
Which is guess for small teams or single devs is less feasable the less resources they have.
That is to say, you’re alone out there.
Steam provides the forums; not mods. The developers are supposed to moderate their forums. The only forums I actually see moderated are the Steam specific ones (like the support board). Game specific ones are hit or miss. Most devs just seem to ignore that they even exist.
Steam provides the forums; not mods. The developers are supposed to moderate their forums.
No, all of Steam’s forums default to Valve moderation, unless a dev chooses to bring/do their own moderation. If the dev moderates, they have total control and can do anything they want, regardless of community rules. If Valve moderates, you basically get eventual, low effort checks for flagrant rule violations in reported posts (which many trolls even exploit, knowing Steam mods don’t read threads or history or anything).
I agree valves platform moderation is terrible but getting upset over some negative reviews from “charlietweet” and “toowoke” is bubblewrap levels of soft.
Reviewing generally anything should be a way to help beacon those who’re unsure as to whether or not they should bother spending their hard-earned money on something and time they’re not getting back.
They aren’t going to get anything out of XxNoLife42069xX’s “review” of a game when they splerg about things not related to the game.
as the article details, in the case of reviews flagged by devs, Steam gets to decide if they want to remove them or not, and often they don’t, even when they contain open bigotry or personal attacks towards the developer
I wouldn’t mind some moderation, but for the love of god I hope countries won’t block Steam over this. I have so many games there, and I can’t remember the last time I bothered to read a review.
No countries are going to block Steam for not preventing alt-right hate-groups from leaving hate comments on store pages. Reddit and TikTok are regularly censoring users criticizing alt-right hate groups and international Satanic pedophiles, and no nation has even considered blocking them AFAIK.
I hope you’re right! I saw something flashing by about the UK suing Steam over price fixing, with the threat of enormous fines or being banned if they don’t pay them. Steam has many flaws, but I believe the world is better with them than without them.
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Steam has a serious problem with a lack of moderation, which has made it a very attractive platform for fascists. Gamergate never ended, and remember that began with Steve Bannon realizing he could exploit gamer outrage to push propaganda. They keep inventing new scandals to repeat their past success.
One of my favorite games had a very minor patch to revise some cringier elements from early in the game’s lifespan. Years later, the forum is still unusuable because it’s been colonized by right-wing weirdos with 0.3 hours on record who have dedicated their lives to crying about a game they never cared about pre-patch, because they saw it as an opportunity to push their propaganda.
While I do question a lot of the changes they made to Skullgirls 2nd Encore, there was one context where censoring panty shots was entirely understandable.
Filia was one of the characters censored. She’s a sixteen year old schoolgirl, and while this may be a stretch, her name sounds like a reference to “paedophilia”, which makes the fact that some of her animation frames and concept art were originally drawn upskirted with clearly exposed panties even more problematic.
Skullgirls?
Yup.
It does get tiresome going to steam threads and seeing the same copy pasted “don’t ruin the game with woke shit” post up voted to the top.
There’s a pencil thin line between farming clown emoji and overt bigotry getting pumped to the top of the reviews section by bad faith actors.
They removed the clown reaction, as well as the ability to get points for receiving reactions.
If that ever was an excuse, it no longer is.
I don’t think I’ve read a steam forum post in close to a decade, and even then it was a very niche thing I was looking for. I have long since stopped feeling any enjoyment or novelty in seeing completely random people’s thoughts, since in the last few years particularly, people have no intention to communicate and broadly just want attention, which has become monetized so the problem is far worse than it used to be.
Seriously, at some point we’re going to have to accept that the internet is dead or too close to death to be useful for interacting with other humans. I think we all need to stop communicating online on forums and discord and the like, it’s all become weaponized and not enough people are left without agendas and campaigns they’re trying to push. Let’s go back to how we did it for thousands of years and just talk to each other and make real-world friends, leave the assholes and shills and sock-puppets to fight among themselves.
Imagine the power we will have if all the scum and assholes become the inferior population scared to actually do anything or go outside and we become owners of the day and become the ambulatory force towards goals and social progress.
They said while communicating online on social media.
No need to stop doing it, just be selective about it.
This whole “why don’t you do it first” reply is no more intelligent than saying “I ain’t reading all that” or “the curtains were just blue” or other dumb thought-stopping exercises vomited out by a generation with no attention spans. I reject it, I block those who dump that like they’re somehow doing some good by trying to find hypocrisy in an idea that makes them uncomfortable.
whooosh
Steam forums are about game mechanics, advice and tech support right? Or am I being filtered the on-topic stuff?
I’ve tried contacting gaming press about this. I contacted Valve (several times) citing their own rules, screenshots of blatant transgressions and they repeatedly closed my ticket and ignored me. I avoid buying games directly from Steam now. If I can find the screenshots later I’ll update my post.
Edit: So here is the ticket I opened (this was -months- after repeatedly reporting someone spamming the N-word in the Official Steam Deck group chat for weeks).
Hey, you might want to contact the Sentinels of the Store group about this - they do reports on Steam’s developer and customer issues, and occasionally have direct communication with Valve.
In fact they covered this article in a recent post: SteamWatch - Developers Accuse Steam of Failing to Tackle Bigotry
Thanks, I really appreciate it, I’m just going to bed now but I’ll be sure to check this out ASAP.
Reminder that The Guardian is a dogshit paper that pretty much systematically misgender trans people and keeps tripling down on backing up TERFs. You don’t get to talk shit about the bigots when you’re among them.
Do you have evidence of this? I thought the Guardian was pretty left-wing?
Not sufficiently. We need to torch all rags that don’t meet certain purity standards.
The US Guardian is strongly pro-trans, while the UK Guardian is more mixed. It had (maybe still has?) some TERFs in prominent positions for a very long time, and they kept churning out their transphobic opinion pieces week after week.
There was even an intra-Guardian clash about this in 2018, when their US reporters called out their UK colleagues: Why we take issue with the Guardian’s stance on trans rights in the UK
There’s so much Guardian posted on lemmy that I feel they’re spamming us.
I disagree, bad people can still make good arguments against different bad people. If the shit against bigots is valid, let it be talked.
Thanks. I boycott all Guardian articles that talk shit about bigots.
I would very much like to read something about it !
Moderate your own forum, honestly its kinda based of Valve to be as hands off as they are. You set your own guidelines rather than having Valve force their own on you. It makes sense too given the variety of games on Steam.
It’s about reviews, not forums, which devs have no control over
They list both, and the developers have direct control over the forum. Less over reviews but you can report them if they are inappropriate.
Which is what the entire article is about, reports being ineffective…
Its not, its about Valve not proactively moderating for the devs.
What’s with Lemmy users and lying and bending backwards to shield poor indie dev company Valve from harassment? Does Gabe’s dick taste that good?
Honest question, do you think someone replying to a thing in a public forum “cringe thing made by a liar” is actually harassment and should be forcefully removed just because the dev doesn’t like it?
The seems too far censorship to me.
The antisemitism yeah get rid of that shit
Yes. Never in a million years I would consider “cringe game, made by a liar” an honest review, and I don’t know why anyone would consider it as such. It’s clearly part of a harassment campaign.
It should be removed because it’s not a review and has nothing to do with the game at hand, not because the dev doesn’t like it.
Yeah but what good is reporting when Valve themselves takes what feels like an eternity, getting down to dealing with just a few?
Eventually, they’re going to be faced with making one of two choices; Shut down the discussions board to a particular game for violating ToS or let it go unchecked for however long.
Talking about my own experience here; there are rules (ToS) which people break and then Valve ignore. Hands off is one thing but being totally nonchalant about these blatant, hate filled transgressions is another all together.
For anybody saying “it’s not a problem, just moderate it yourself”, look at Relooted’s steam forum. There are more than 700 threads there and most of them are really not kind. Tell me how you’re going to moderate that.
Just put yourself in the shoes of game publishers or studios that make a game which goes against the grind and gets attacked like Relooted is being attacked. Would you want to employ somebody just to moderate the forums? Should the onus be on the forum owners or should it be on the forum providers (Valve)? Do you think this has no effect on the types of games being released?
I mean, look at this game Tyrone vs Cops 2. Is this OK? What do you think the forum discussions look like. Are they OK? If it’s only devs that should moderate their forums, that means the KKK could make game about water lillies and then have their forums be the meeting ground for white power discussions. They won’t be offended after-all. That’s OK?
nobody is forcing you to play it, and nobody is forcing you to go to a forum and talk about it. If it bothers you so much just don’t go there?
You guys realise that censoring racist content doesn’t modify or remove the underlying belief right? just like closing your eyes doesn’t make you invisible…
People are allowed to engage in discussion about the games they play and deserve to do so without being hampered by shitlords. Easy idea.
We’re in a reality where groups like ISIS have actively recruited followers through gaming networks. There’s genuine, violent risk in allowing hate speech to reach across land masses and be granted some form of discoverability, even if some of the recipients are just looking for answers to the question “Man why no girl want me”
we’re in a reality where syria is controlled by isis-like headchopping terrorists, and our western governments drape these terrorists in liberal moderate language to make them more palatable to western audiences. By paying your taxes, by supporting your western country you are giving material indirect support to literal wahabbist terrorists. You going to your job and pretending to yourself and others that your silly middle class existence is somehow ‘civilised’ because your don’t say the n word or cuss is materially much closer to violent terrorism than some chud saying crude words on his day off.
What bothers you isn’t a proximity to evil or violence, your everyday ordinary existence materially entangles you in that process. What bothers you is strict conformance to civility politics. What bothers you is people saying uncomfortable things, because your bourgeois, performative morality places you and your paper-mache feelings at the center of the moral universe.
Fuck shit damn. Cunt piss bitch. America was built on goddamn slave labor. Ooh boy, all that cursing was so, so difficult for my civilized upbringing.
This is what chuds don’t get, since they never read terms of use. Social networks don’t often oppose aimless expletives like “Let’s fucking kick a baby into lava haha!” They oppose pointed, meaningful intention like “I’m going to shoot up my school because it’s been infested with n%%%%s.” Hate is a language used everywhere, separate from curses, and it’s one I don’t mind blocking on every front possible.
because if you don’t see it - it disappears! like magic!
the angry chud whos economic stability has been shattered by a neoliberal race to the bottom, the chud who can’t afford to live in the same town he grew up in, who has been directed to view every moral or class grievance in purely racial terms by the corporate media. When that same chud dares to express any anger or resentment or hostility, and he expresses that anger to his cultural out group, at least YOU will be there! to wag your finger in his face and moralise to him about how people’s feelings are important, even as you ignore his.
censoring someone doesn’t change their mind, if anything it hardens their velief and encourages them to spread it elsewhere
NO ONE WANTS YOU NOT TO BE ANGRY!!
LOOK AROUND LEMMY! Every political community! Every discussion! EVERYONE is angry, jaded, fucking upset the system isn’t working! The difference is, SMART angry people get angry at the actual causes of that economic disparity. Not going on wild, racist tangents to blame people even poorer than them that have barely done a thing to even affect that economic situation!
I don’t fucking trust anyone who’s not angry at the world. Those people are blind. But worse are people who are angry at the most victimized part of the world, instead of the ones doing the victimizing; or those who are angry at politicians who did in fact try to give rural America something to do with their hands - read the Inflation Reduction Act - but were spat on because Fox News parroted Shell’s line that renewable energy is a scam.
Don’t you dare say I’m demonizing people or “wagging my finger at them” for being fucking angry. That is a bald-faced lie. I demonize people for taking their anger out on people that should be brothers and sisters in the fight against injustice.
Surprisingly despite the forums the game has a “Very Positive” review, which is probably what I would have given it after playing the demo.
The forums are just full of bigotted trolls who want to see the game fail.
For anyone else not familiar, here’s the first line of Relooted’s description:
The forum is full of exactly what you’d expect.
A controversial game has controversial community? Shocked I must say
It “controversial” because racists and bigots made it that way. There was no controversy about other heist games, there’s no “controversy” about games with all-white characters. But put in a diverse group of character, that steal back what was stolen and suddenly that’s “controversial”.
Well, that’s what controversial means. Things like lgbt rights, abortion rights, etc. are also controversial, but objectively fair/correct
If any group complaining about something makes it “controversial”, then everything is controversial and the word loses all meaning.
There are entire studies on “at which point does x become a controversy”, I’m not gonna go there
It’s probably filled with vile stuff, so I simply won’t go there. There’s awful stuff to be found everywhere on the internet if you seek it out, you can just not go there.
Sure, I won’t travel to Gaza and say “wow, so many dead people here” and act surprised, but if I stumble upon a dead body on a playground, you betcha it’s at least a little surprising.
I clicked a random thread and it looks like a lot of posters don’t even own the game. I’ve seen this a lot of times, people flaming and trolling on a game’s forum don’t even own the game. Thought the simplest fix would be to just not let them post and restrict game forums to those who bought it.
They do have an “Owners” forum (the default is the Non-Owners for those who don’t own the game). I imagine the non-owners forum is there to provide an opportunity for non-owners to ask genuine questions about the game, but that obviously isn’t happening. Maybe you’re right and they should just make it owners only. I don’t know if it would be visible to others though.
There are valid use cases for non owners, but I think they don’t outweigh the cost. Sometimes you have to sacrifice something and this is something I could live with.
I’m of the opposite opinion. It’s a much bigger problem than just Steam community moderation and it needs to be addressed more broadly. (Monkey’s paw curls)
Stems need a better tools to moderate. It’s a pain to manually go thru.
The reason it got this bad was because they didn’t nip it in the bud sooner. If they had been more proactive from the start, there wouldn’t be 700+ threads.
At this point, just nuke them all and ban everyone who made a bigoted troll thread. It’s gonna be a game of whack-a-mole for a little while, but once you start handing out bans, the trolling will start die down.
Compare this to fedi, shared block lists for admims helps a lot.
Should each game have to clean their forum individually?
Or it becomes a popular trolling target with a cry of “they can’t take us all down” and it gets worse.
If it continues to get bad enough, you can lock the forum down from new accounts so they can’t make alts.
Breaking News: Bigots increasingly comfortable, some mods bigots too.
It’s a shame there isn’t real moderation when people feel harassed, but I no longer care about those reviews as a consumer anyway. A negative review by some loser probably means I’ll like it more.
And I continue to support challengers to monopolies. Hope Steam gets a real competitor someday so I can take my money elsewhere.
Than, it’s not a review, it’s a social media feed. Calling that a review would imply that it must have passed some check. If there is none, it’s a post, on a social media. Even than they’d try to moderate that if they cared.
Fact checkig and moderation isn’t censorship, it’s moderation.
Which is guess for small teams or single devs is less feasable the less resources they have. That is to say, you’re alone out there.
not at all surprising, we’re talking about a company that almostly solely hires white cis men and refuses to tackle that
Steam provides the forums; not mods. The developers are supposed to moderate their forums. The only forums I actually see moderated are the Steam specific ones (like the support board). Game specific ones are hit or miss. Most devs just seem to ignore that they even exist.
The article is referring to reviews, not forums, which devs have no control over.
No, all of Steam’s forums default to Valve moderation, unless a dev chooses to bring/do their own moderation. If the dev moderates, they have total control and can do anything they want, regardless of community rules. If Valve moderates, you basically get eventual, low effort checks for flagrant rule violations in reported posts (which many trolls even exploit, knowing Steam mods don’t read threads or history or anything).
I agree valves platform moderation is terrible but getting upset over some negative reviews from “charlietweet” and “toowoke” is bubblewrap levels of soft.
Reviewing generally anything should be a way to help beacon those who’re unsure as to whether or not they should bother spending their hard-earned money on something and time they’re not getting back.
They aren’t going to get anything out of XxNoLife42069xX’s “review” of a game when they splerg about things not related to the game.
If I’m not mistaken devs have the ability to remove inflammatory comments or mark reviews as being irrelevant to be scrubbed.
as the article details, in the case of reviews flagged by devs, Steam gets to decide if they want to remove them or not, and often they don’t, even when they contain open bigotry or personal attacks towards the developer
Unviewable web page with paywall
there’s no paywall, there’s a donation ask, but you can just close it.
? Guardian advertises itself as not having a paywall
Hmm I cannot close it without signing up unfortunately
I wouldn’t mind some moderation, but for the love of god I hope countries won’t block Steam over this. I have so many games there, and I can’t remember the last time I bothered to read a review.
No countries are going to block Steam for not preventing alt-right hate-groups from leaving hate comments on store pages. Reddit and TikTok are regularly censoring users criticizing alt-right hate groups and international Satanic pedophiles, and no nation has even considered blocking them AFAIK.
I hope you’re right! I saw something flashing by about the UK suing Steam over price fixing, with the threat of enormous fines or being banned if they don’t pay them. Steam has many flaws, but I believe the world is better with them than without them.
Part of the reason I don’t play many multi-player games is the idiocy and racism
Then uhhhh…ban the pieces of shit?