I agree valves platform moderation is terrible but getting upset over some negative reviews from “charlietweet” and “toowoke” is bubblewrap levels of soft.
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
Part of the reason I don’t play many multi-player games is the idiocy and racism
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.
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.
Then uhhhh…ban the pieces of shit?
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).
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.
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.
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.
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…
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
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.
You have to be way down the rabbit hole to think Signalis is too woke. Nothing it does would have been out of place in '02 or so.
Depends on where the curator draws the line, and you can’t apply sane criteria to what they consider “too woke”. Sometimes a game is put on a woke list because it has a female lead, or a physically strong female character, or non-heteronormative character dynamics, or people of color are present in it… I’ve seen one that was marked as woke because it referenced climate change and climate action. I think it was some popular shooter or something.
Some are more consistent than others.
Once you start making lists of games to avoid based on thematics, though, you’ve already taken a step to cuckoo land.I disagree. Avoiding media because of certain themes is perfectly fine. I for example will not play games like Hatred or Nazi Games, no matter how good they could be. It’s the kind of themes they try to avoid which show how scared they are of everybody around them.
No wolfenstien?
Yet by not playing it, you’re relying on somebody else’s description of what’s in it, which can be very misleading.
For example, the discourse around Horses.
Its fine not to like certain themes but obsessing over not seeing them to the point that you’re making lists is not really healthy.
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.
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.
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?
Surprisingly despite the forums the game has a “Very Positive” review, which is probably what I would have given it after playing the demo.
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.
A controversial game has controversial community? Shocked I must say
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.
Compare this to fedi, shared block lists for admins 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.
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.
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.
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”
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 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
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.
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
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 alreadg 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”.
I think what they mean by “community blocklist” is a blocklist maintained by the community which users can have applied to them. This means, rather than everyone having to deal with blocking the trolls individually, only one user has to and the rest get the benefit of that.
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.
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.
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.
Reddit and the threadiverse have human mods.
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.
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.
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.
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.
pressure from investors
This unfortunately trades one group of scumbags for another.
