Steam Forums are slowly devolving into one of the worst right-wing incubators because they refuse to proactively moderate. Any time a game gets declared a target by the post-Gamergate crowd, the boards become flooded with propaganda, and Valve does not care.

Good. Lawyers for companies are too quick to demand that you get rid of things that might make anyone slightly upset, and it ruins online places. It's why NSFW games went away, and why everything needs a thousand warnings. It's why companies are so happy to add age verification, because it "CYA"s them.

Good on Gabe there. That's your job, to protect the company if they get sued, not make content decisions

The forums are moderated (or in many cases not moderated) by the game publisher, not Steam. If they don't want to moderate they could technically close the forum for their game but very few publishers do so.

Maybe they're supposed to be moderated by devs/publishers, but I'd guess as high as 99% of steam communities are unmoderated or simply auto moderated for specific slurs. Basically every game I've ever looked at has just piles of threads asking "Is ThIs GaMe WoKe???" or "PLEASE ADD LGBTQ2IABBQ+ CHARACTERS!!!" as award farming shitposts. Heaven forbid its a competitive game because those forums get rancid. It also happens I'm the discussion of basically every news update for any game with a remotely active community.

There is zero or nearly zero accountability for the state of the community hub and Valve simply saying "devs should do it" is just passing the buck.

Don't get me wrong, I definitely agree with you, but Steam is not the only place with this problem and Steam isn't the only one with lackluster moderation for it. We literally wouldn't be in the global political situations were in right now if it wasn't for propaganda flooding every facet of the internet. Gamers are a minority internationally and most actual gamers think the steam forums are not even worth looking at.

I'm just saying don't blame only blame Steam. There's an issue with this type of shit literally everywhere and nobody in charge gives a shit.

I'm glad this was over what sort of games Steam sells and pushing back against payment processors, but the flipside to this is how Steam has far too lax moderation of its community forums as well (which is explicitly part of Gaben's position here). Billionaires aren't your friends, Gabe is politically a weird libertarian that people just happen to like, and Steam's community is one of its most toxic features.

Right, it's just that otherwise ostensibly "liberal" or "leftist" people still jerk off Valve and Newell specifically despite them having a lot of the same issues as other corporations that people dislike other corporations for.

They should become a payment processor... I'd have a valve card. Hell, I wouldn't mind if it even had a relatively high cost at this point, just to say fuck you to visa/mc/amex

Have you seen what Steam's forums look like? They NEED better moderation. They need to put an end to all the racism and other hateful shit on there. It's a fucking disaster.

Deleted by moderator

The default is that Valve does moderation, and if you don't opt-out of it, they consider those kinds of topics to be completely on-topic and valid, removing the reports. All of the relevant Steamworks pages aimed at publishers (eg Steam Community) are publicly available and are really enough to blame Valve for the whole state of things.

Even if a publisher opts-out of Valve moderation, they don't have the tools to deal with sockpuppets or organized attacks, and being banned from one game forum just means those same accounts move elsewhere. Valve could absolutely deal with it by doing community-wide bans, but they don't.

Just get rid of the forums and let the devs/publishers link to their own: problem solved.

that is different kind of moderation

I never said Steam was the only website on the internet with problems. But I'm replying to a thread specifically about Steam.

And the only solution anyone will have an appetite for in the coming years is applying automated AI agents to do the work.

It’s otherwise really expensive and labor intensive to do proper moderation.

They shouldn’t enable these forums by default IMO.

did gabe save your dog from a burning building? this is weird

Article is talking about what games they have on the platform. Separate moderation issues.

A big part of legally protecting a company is being proactive about things that will get you sued. The lawyers were correctly operating in our bad criminal Justice system.

That ain't what the topic is about. Though for your topic specifically, Valve did remove gaining points from community awards. This was in direct response to people posting intentionally controversial stuff in order to farm clown/saucy awards.

award farming shitposts

Valve did respond to this by removing points from community awards a while ago. It won't clean up the posts already there, because that's the game's developer's job, but it's no longer a viable point farming strategy to just make a big thread on a new game calling it woke to generate a bunch of clown awards.

I personally encourage you to learn more about which you speak before forming such passionate stances. There's merit to what you say, but it's not relevant to the context of the discussion you responded to.

My brother or sister or enby in Christ, it's 2026 and this is Lemmy. Stop using political compasses like a 4chan poster. Talking about "the axes" is so childish and unserious I actually read your comment as satire at first.

There is more to political ideology than a 2-axis compass. To explain the differences between Libertarianism and Anarchism to another adult involves talking about the ideas and history, not a chart you saw on 4chan.

they need to do better there too. there have been multiple explicitly racist games on steam, and valve has done nothing.

Okie-dokie, still not the conversation they were having in this article.

To be fair, their job is also to recommend the course of action least likely to get Valve sued.

This isn't about this type of moderation, it's about NSFW censorship from payment processors.

It's complicated I guess. People often use the "Nazi bar" analogy and I kinda get it. But I am also conflicted. Yes I disagree with their opinions and wish they will stop having those opinions. But on the other hand moderating them will just make them move to somewhere else, and they will still be having those opinions, and arguably in a worse environment. Because it would be more of a bubble with nobody countering them.

you can't be an anarchist and a billionaire honey.

Forcing the most radical extremists underground won't deprogram them, but it will make it significantly more difficult for them to spread propaganda. The point of deplatforming is to shut down the pipeline so that fewer people get radicalized.

The lawyer is an asshole and we won't be working with him again.

This is regarding the porn games, chucklenuts. They already removed Hatred and the like.

As long as it's not illegal content like csam, they should allow it. Why not let the racist shitheads out themselves? It's not like valve would be forcing anyone to buy them, and don't need to promote it.

Besides, when you get into the area of banning simply "distasteful" content, then you get people asking to whitewash everything, including history. I don't want a historically accurate game to get censored. I don't want content to be arbitrarily censored by lawyers and credit card companies, or any dumbass individuals' sensitivities, for that matter.

I'm not asking for Steam to have to allow such content, either. If there's a game that's just celebrating being vile trash, I'm also fine with Steam telling them to fuck off the platform.

As is usual in the real world, the correct answer is no extreme.

Valve being Valve... So they keep winning, Thank you Valve. Fuck everyone who wants to stop them when they do the right thing. Content moderation anywhere on the internet just feel like straight up censoring nowadays.

Pretty sure they can't close the forums, actually. I've never seen a Steam forum be outright disabled, despite seeing many devs/publishers who would absolutely close that down as a place of critique. I haven't even seen delisted but viewable games close down their forums from new posts. Are you sure Valve doesn't have an agreement with publishers that they are required to keep the forum open for their games?

The discussion I have seen from publishers is that the automated moderation on Steam is literally nonexistent from their end, and the global automation is far too lax. So they push their player base to platforms that are actually capable of dealing with problematic behavior.

I thought this was going to be about the blatant Nazi posting, both in the community forums and and in asset flip/game spam in the store. Apparently the lawyer in question was bringing up accepting more censorship in the lead up to more pornographic content becoming available on Steam.

I don't typically care for Gabe, but yeah, I would have said the same thing. Probably not for the same reason tbf. But even if you don't have any political concerns outside of making money for your yacht collection... Hate speech isn't currently costing Valve money. Porn bans are directly effecting a market they have invested into. Why would you pay a legal expert to be so spineless?

I mean, 4chan isn't that hard to find. IMO instead of trying to shield people from these "dangerous ideas" so they don't get radicalized, why don't we try teach more people critical thinking skills? Quarantine vs vaccination, I guess.

Only if they ask for that advice, presumably

we got an anecdote from an anonymous former Valve employee of a time when Newell downright bit the head off Valve general counsel Karl Quackenbush

Quackenbush is a wild name.

There is zero or nearly zero accountability for the state of the community hub and Valve simply saying "devs should do it" is just passing the buck.

Do devs have the ability to turn forums/communities off? If so, I feel like that's the best option if they don't want to moderate it.

Well, at the risk of repeating the obvious, what do you pay a legal expert for? As in, what did you hire them to do?

If you hired them to do research on current laws and regulations to see what you must abide by / can get away with, then you've paid them for information, even if its information you don't want to hear.

If you hired them to represent your interests, to argue your case in court for you as their client, then yeah you can't really have a lawyer that's wishy washy on your position. As stupid as they sound, that's what Trump's DOJ is doing at great risk to their own careers. Which is why more and more of them are resigning.

Who uses steam forums anyway? I've stumbled across threads through search engine results before but I don't recall a single instance of finding useful information there. Best case scenario it's a description of a problem and 300 people saying "I have this issue too, did you find a fix?"

https://steamdb.info/app/4495510/

They allowed this game on their platform for two weeks and only removed it because the developer requested the removal lol

Plantation Simulator is a simple farming simulator where you motivate friends with kisses to pick your crops! Maintain a beautiful farm by repairing fences to keep friends focused. Choose multiple crops to grow and enhance upgrades to maximize your success!

Slavery simulator is an allowed genre on Steam.

Steam has far greater reach than 4chan. 4chan is the quarantine in your analogy, everyone else left that Nazi Bar after /pol/ happened.

If you think you can teach the average Steam user critical thinking skills, I welcome you to go ahead and try. Have fun.

They don't. I know one indie developer once privately told me they wished they could.

Billionaires should be extinct. Even GabeN.

I'm definitely writing that down for my next super scrabble with proper nouns at grandma's.

Slavery simulator is an allowed genre on Steam.

This has always been the case. Here's an incredibly popular game that allows slavery.

https://rimworldwiki.com/wiki/Slavery

Rimworld also includes forced organ harvesting and a host of other war crimes

They also allow murder simulators, drug dealing simulators, genocide simulators, etc

As far as games go, a game that dresses up slavery with a bunch of innuendo is incredibly mild.

it’s not even the only one. a few years ago People Make Games made a video on valve, mentioning among other things the game "tyrone vs cops" which is a blatantly racist "satirical" game, which was allowed on steam. i checked recently, to see if the game had been removed since.

not only is it still there, it’s gotten multiple sequels, and is officially rated as playable on steam deck. valve does not give a shit about racism on their platform.

a horrifically misogynistic rape simulator was left there untouched until a group of anti-porn puritans got the payment processors involved, which is what got us into this whole mess with nsfw games. had valve given a shit about moderating hate on their platform this likely wouldn’t have happened.