bigoted reviews posted on games’ Steam pages, which can hugely affect sales for their developers; and Steam curators (self-appointed taste-makers on the platform) directing campaigns against games they perceive to lean left or pursue inclusion.
This fucking shit again. Reviews affect sales? Well, good. You don’t get to carefully select a few most-read outlets who’ll give you the thumb up. Also, chud curators are “directing” only those who follow them. This argument is about a failing industry that’d like to control what can be said about their products. Make no mistake, Steam’s openness in this regard is, for me as a customer at least, added value.
To be perfectly honest, the odds of me buying a game are significantly higher if I see reviews about “toxic femininity” or “woke politics”
I use those “wokism tiers” that you usually see from bigoted idiots to check out new games that I’ll probably like
I occasionally go through the lists posted by chud curators for small indie titles that would have escaped my notice. I don’t have time to scrutinize every title on Steam, but these guys seemingly have infinite time to ensure every unheard of title with a case of LGBTQ+ representation gets criticism from them. Ironically, they’re fantastic for finding small, progressive passion projects I would have otherwise missed.
They probably have infinite time because seemingly everything is too woke for these fucks, certainly seems like they don’t actually play games
I agree with that, but negative reviews also affect the algorithm. If enough of those reviews drown out positive ones it will reduce the chance you see the game at all.
Not as much as you’d think. I get recommended games that are negative way to often. What matters most is people who play the same games you do playing it. People who play city builders will get recommended a new city builder even if its review is overwhelmingly negative.
If you know that you explicitly disagree with somebody on certain aspects, their opinion will be just as useful to you as if you liked exactly what they like.
This is why I always look at negative reviews. I often come across “downsides” that aren’t downsides to me or outright appealing.
There’s a big list of “woke games” that would be a great source for finding new games to play, if it didn’t include almost every game ever made making it meaningless.
They’re not just trying to remove negative reviews for being negative though, this is about bad actors weaponizing the review system to push bigotry. That should not be platformed.
platformed
That’s cutesy newspeak for they should be censored. And wanting to censor them is bigotry, as in “the fact of having and expressing strong, unreasonable beliefs and disliking other people who have different beliefs or a different way of life”. The chuds should have been more loved by their mothers, they should have been exposed to culture so they don’t become racist assholes, sure. But really, I feel using mealymouthed therapyspeak to remove bigots from sight and pretend they don’t exist has been thoroughly attempted and the result is grifters ascend on a ladder of their frustrations to rearrange the society into a chaotic dystopia. Sorry, video games?
I dislike people normalizing hate speech through this kind of space, but I largely agree. If people want to follow a curator that will make sure they aren’t emotionally blindsided by a female protagonist showing affection towards another woman, for example, that’s a choice they can make. We wouldn’t want the chuds to get their feelings hurt, afterall.
But in all seriousness, that’s kind of their choice. Obviously, any comments that suggest violence against people who make/play/are represented in that kind of game needs to get shut down immediately, but you’re allowed to not like LGBTQ+ representation. It’s not illegal to clutch your pearls at the sight of non-heteronormative sexuality. It’s just reprehensible.
what seems to “smell” funny more and more lately is that I can’t tell what is a full fledged game I want to play and what is AI/Slop created to jump on a bandwagon. Rimworld. Great game. Are the “rims in space” variants real? Just reskins? Why is everything in instant early access these days? And for years sometimes. Look, as a sw eng myself, I get it. But my adhd knows the game too. Something becoming “useable” before its finished means I never finish it. Looking at my own git repos… yep lol.
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.
Skullgirls?
Yup.
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.
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.
Multiple game creators describe ineffective moderation on the platform, resulting in unchecked hatred in forums and…
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).
for a more recent example, the negative reviews under Relooted are fucking sickening. one of the top ones is a joke making fun of George Floyd’s death.
what does steam do? nothing. valve is one of the most profitable companies per employee out there, and they have no pressure from investors to botch their work, they could absolutely moderate.
they actively choose not to, because despite what bootlickers on lemmy would have you believe, gabe newell is a libertarian dipshit who values “free speech” over the safety of marginalized people.
There are guidelines on Steam that ban such content, and you can report people for violating them.
So no, Steam does not do “nothing” as you claim. A very basic Internet search can confirm that.
Even better, users can rate reviews as helpful or unhelpful. Which is great for a wider variety of reasons, but is also good for reviews that get into a grey area or use dog whistles to hide their true intentions.
as the article mentions, if you’d bothered to read it, steam rarely enforces their guidelines, which is the problem here
The article is behind a paywall. Do they have any statistics or evidence backing that sentiment or is it just vibes?
You can find articles and reddit posts claiming this same exact thing going back years, and yet personally when I go through the store and look through reviews it’s really hard for me to come across hate speech, especially if you don’t specifically look at reviews that have been downvoted to hell. It’s never going to be perfect, but I encounter less hate speech on Steam than most other platforms.
i didn’t have any paywall, maybe it’s a regional thing? here’s a version that shouldn’t have it.
anyways, here’s a screenshot of the Relooted review i talked about. if you check the game’s negative reviews and sort by most pertinent, it’s the 3rd one. it was here yesterday, and despite me reporting it, it’s still here today, and in fact has been here since february 11th. as time of writing, it has 373 people who found it useful, and 115 who found it funny. some of the comments under that review are critical, but most just say “based” and the like.
CW: screenshot of a racist review, makes fun of George Floyd's death
it’s an anecdotal evidence, but as you said, “you can find articles and reddit posts claiming this same exact thing going back years”, doesn’t that mean it’s a recurring problem?
That’s it? I kind of expected something worse with the whole stink your making about it.
It just your typical kiddie hater comment, not worth paying attention to and certainly not worthy of a moderator’s time.
If you pump enough money into Linux gaming and do regular sales, a lot can be forgiven apparently. Steam Discussions are one of the most miserable places on the internet I go to semi-regularly and I don’t understand how Steam just gets a pass for the stuff that’s normal there.
Steam discussions can be moderated in any way a developer/publisher wants though? Their choice to not do so is weird to blame Valve for.
So devs not only have to give Steam 30% percent of every sale, but they also have to provide the additional labour of keeping hate speech off the platform in perpetuity.
If Valve doesn’t want to do moderation, they shouldn’t have got into the social media business. It’s their platform and they’re ultimately responsible for it.
they also have to provide the additional labour of keeping hate speech off the platform in perpetuity.
The developers can choose to lock down and effectively disable discussions entirely if they want.
Steam simply provides devs a service, easy access to host a forum for their game w/o having to manage that separately. Using it is completely optional.
Social media is an apt comparison, as Steam is at the size where human moderation isn’t really viable so they’d have to use AI like everyone else in that space.
And I’d rather a few anti-woke weirdos shout into the void than have to type “unalive” in the Steam forums.
Not to mention if Valve moderated every game developers would complain about Valve stepping on their toes and moderating their forum in a way they dislike.
Some dev theoretically might not like a mod decision Valve theoretically makes, so the only logical solution is to expect every single dev that publishes on the platform to commit to moderating Valve’s game-specific forums forever.
Yes, good moderation is expensive. Externalising that cost onto devs is, frankly, exploitative. Also, “a few anti-woke weirdos” is a massive understatement. The modern reactionary movement is heavily tied to gaming and Steam plays a major role in that.
Reddit and the threadiverse have human mods.
Both act like Steam currently, they don’t have paid moderators but leave it to communities to moderate themselves.
What do you want Steam to do? Be the judge and executioner of what lives and what dies? There is no agreed upon guidelines for what is chud behavior and not so how does Valve make that call?
VALUE PER EMPLOYEE MEANS NOTHING IN THIS CONTEXT. You are saying that fact to imply “rich people need to be the adults if they are going to have that money” and that is absolutely Monarch/Authoritarian enabler thinking. Fuck that.
Valve is not responsible for the shit other people say. Report them if you don’t like it. As with democracy, with enough votes things will change. But one person mad at what another person says so they plead to a central authority to shut it down? The Internet has seen this decision turn into legal battles over speech after one trolling shithead decides to use the system against innocent people.
Stop listening to racists and this all goes away.
What do you want Steam to do?
Moderate, like every other half-decent platform does.
Every platform of Steam’s size or bigger has mostly replaced human moderation with AI at this point because it’s the only way to moderate at that scale.
And I’d rather a few anti-woke weirdos get to post their by default hidden curator reviews than have to start saying “unalive” in Steam forums.
They do moderate, threads disappear out of thin air, locked due to specific reasons. I’ve reported many, from minor insults to racism, and many of the times they take action. And I considered Steam more heavily moderated than both Lemmy and Reddit, unless you are in a beleaguered community.
The review section, though, is a dev problem; it can be a bit of a wildland, and that is true.
just a reminder: moderation happens with only the priority valve will give it, determined by a feedback loop involving profit, not content. they are a corp just like the rest of them.
pressure from investors
This unfortunately trades one group of scumbags for another.
Fucking hell. You were not kidding. This was posted five days ago! The comments on that review are even more vile, to the point where I don’t even think I can show them here.
That review is no longer there, probably someone reported it. I think lots of these suffer from bystander effect, where people see it get indignant about being there but don’t report them, so they stay there.
It’s also easy to think nothing is happening because Valve takes their sweet time getting around to reports, and while they will eventually tell you “something was done” if something was done, they won’t give you any way to find out what was done or what report they’re even referring to. You just get that generic “something was done” message.
The main reason Valve doesn’t step in on these is they have a firm philosophy of giving the community the tools to form their own outcomes, rather than directing them in every issue. So they might be dissatisfied with people writing “Woke TRASH!” braindead reviews, but also not want to take action on them.
The least they’ve done is remove the clown award so people have less incentive to troll. But I’d also like them to implement community blocklists; If you nag a game for “Having/not having LGBT representation”, you go on a blocklist 90% of the community is using.
They also famously allow you to work on whatever you want, I doubt many Valve employees want to spend their days cleaning shit like that
The main reason Valve doesn’t step in is because it would cost them money. Moderating content is expensive as hell and these corporations will bend themselves backwards finding any and every way to avoid it.
They also have guidelines for “user generated content” which includes reviews, and you can report people for violating those guidelines.
Sure Valve does not pay for moderators to check things proactively. I quite like that they don’t have AI or some other half-assed attempt at “moderation” like other platforms have. I hate the way that the whole Internet has moved to censor “fuck” and made up the word “unalive” because the automated systems of platforms I don’t even use have decided they are the arbitora of what language is allowed.
I think the responsibility to monitor reviews should lie with whoever controls the Steam page: I would assume the publisher most of the time? The publisher and developer should be looking at reviews anyways. Add in the ability for users to vote reviews as helpful or unhelpful and I think it’s one of the better systems left on the internet.
One of the problems with that is, many publishers don’t care about curating a discussion community. Many didn’t even want to generate a “forum” when publishing their small indie game. So, it’s entirely possible, and even likely, for many game discussion forums to be filled with hate speech, or even recruiting into extremist cults.
I’m all with you about word-based censoring, and I honestly want to see a bit more use of AI there to lower that burden; to better pick up hateful context separating “Fuck you, random user” and “This boss fight is fucking hard”. That should only be in place to better alert real moderators, though, since I’m sure many people don’t like getting directly banned by silicon.
The Steam forums have been full of Nazis for years now. The employees and Newell are just accepting or even embracing the fact that they give fascists a platform
You know you can “block all communication” from users and it blocks them EVERYWHERE on Steam, right? Not just in games, but in Friends and on the forums, too. IDK why you’d need community specific blocks over the normal blocking method already available.
The purpose of a blocklist is to have a large group work on the large task of identifying a certain set of trolls, and then share that list automatically with themselves.
Individually blocking 8 or 9 trolls yourself as you browse 20 new indie games becomes a laborious task. But, if a community of hundreds all knows “Yeah, every time someone posts the ‘Please include LGBT!’ comment on these block-matching puzzle games, it’s a troll” then 99 people don’t even have to wait until they’ve identified trolling and blocked it each time.
Bluesky uses these sorts of blocklists, and it works pretty well. By having members opt into them, it evades the issue of Valve “promoting an army of hundreds of highly opinionated moderators”.
Does the clown award still exist on profiles? I used to get added by randoms everytime and they always had the clown award because that’s the easiest way for people to mark someone as a scammer
I used to get added by randoms everytime and they always had the clown award because that’s the easiest way for people to mark someone as a scammer
Profile clown awards say nothing more than some jerk spend points on being a jerk. Not at all a good reason to think people were flagged scammers, especially since you can just hide any profile awards with a checkbox.
But no, while clown awards are still there, you can’t give them anymore. Maybe “funny” will be the new clown, or maybe people will spend fewer points just to be jerks.
I’ve had a mildly expensive inventory in the past while trading so I’ve seen a lot of scammers. The clown award was the fastest way to tell if someone was suspicious. Obviously you don’t just base it on that, other telltale signs are no mutuals, private inventory, faked hours on cs, turned off commenting on profile, account level, 3p trust sites, etc.
I’ve yet to see a single profile that was legit that had the clown award. People usually don’t give out awards, at least the profile ones. The average person buys profile decor.
This was back in 2024 ish though, I don’t trade anymore so I block non mutuals adding me
That’s such poppycock I don’t even know if you’re subtly trolling. Anyone could put a clown on a profile for anything, and they come far more from bad actors than anything remotely legitimate. Steam forums are full of bad actors. Actually supporting that kind of petty toxicity by insinuating clowns mean something is gross.
Thankfully, profile awards can be hidden, and I’d expect they often are, so it’s hard to really say how many are given out. I certainly hid profile awards when the system was new, because it’s weird Steam just helps people deface your profile. Even having awards hidden hasn’t stopped the occasional spiteful clown award getting added.
So are you just gonna ignore all the other ways I’ve listed to tell a scammer?
Never said it was a one and dusted kinda thing if you had a clown award, just that it should immediately raise red flags if you have a relatively worth inventory and actively trading. MY experience is that all the randoms trying to add me that had the clown award displayed were in fact scammers.
This is in the context of trading once again, not steam forums or even general steam. Steam trading is functionally a different experience from general steam. No sane trader uses the forums to trade. Its all 3p sites. People adding you when you actively trade items are either people looking to trade or scammers. If you’re not trading in the mid to high tier range, none of what I’ve said applies to you. The clown award doesn’t mean anything then, because you’re not going to get 5+ daily friend requests
On a side note you should probably not use the forums, it’s been unmoderated for about 15 years.
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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.deleted by creator
I think we all need to stop communicating online on forums and discord and the like
They said while communicating online on social media.
No need to stop doing it, just be selective about it.
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whooosh
Steam forums are about game mechanics, advice and tech support right? Or am I being filtered the on-topic stuff?
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.
I would very much like to read something about it !
You don’t get to talk shit about the bigots when you’re among them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I agree valves platform moderation is terrible but getting upset over some negative reviews from “charlietweet” and “toowoke” is bubblewrap levels of soft.
If I’m not mistaken devs have the ability to remove inflammatory comments or mark reviews as being irrelevant to be scrubbed.
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
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Part of the reason I don’t play many multi-player games is the idiocy and racism
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not at all surprising, we’re talking about a company that almostly solely hires white cis men and refuses to tackle that
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
