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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
That is literally how I discovered Signalis. It was included in one of those anti-woke curators’ “not recommended” list, then I saw that it was an indie title, and overwhelmingly positive… I was sold immediately.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Steam forums are about game mechanics, advice and tech support right? Or am I being filtered the on-topic stuff?
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.
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
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.
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.
Part of the reason I don’t play many multi-player games is the idiocy and racism
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.
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
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
If Valve so badly doesn’t want to be responsible for moderating things on their own platform, then yes, they should be giving tools to the players to better self-moderate.
I’m envisioning it right now. The idea where someone sees a review of a game, negative or positive, adding nothing to what decision someone could have before buying a game. They can just close that review out and they’d never see it. It’d automatically block the person too, why not, their input isn’t valuable.
I didn’t know they got rid of the jester award until I checked today. I kinda wish we could just delete the awards such as them from our reviews that got flagged with those shitty things. I’d also take away the ‘funny’ marker too because I feel it adds nothing to reviewing games, it only enables the trolls and other shitty people from abusing it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
For anyone else not familiar, here’s the first line of Relooted’s description:
Reclaim real African artifacts from Western museums in this Africanfuturist heist game.
The forum is full of exactly what you’d expect.
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.
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.
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)
Stems need a better tools to moderate. It’s a pain to manually go thru.
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
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.
People are allowed to engage in discussion about the games they play and deserve to do so without being hampered by shitlords. Easy idea.
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.
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.
not at all surprising, we’re talking about a company that almostly solely hires white cis men and refuses to tackle that
Then uhhhh…ban the pieces of shit?
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.
