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.

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.

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.

Yup.

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.

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.

Or it becomes a popular trolling target with a cry of "they can't take us all down" and it gets worse.

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...

If it continues to get bad enough, you can lock the forum down from new accounts so they can't make alts.

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.

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

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.

Do you have evidence of this? I thought the Guardian was pretty left-wing?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Compare this to fedi, shared block lists for admins helps a lot.

Should each game have to clean their forum individually?

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".

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.

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"

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.

A controversial game has controversial community? Shocked I must say

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).

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.

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.

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?

No wolfenstien?

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.

“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?

I can rely on plenty of people's description of Ayn Rand to know that I don't have to read any for myself.

Reddit and the threadiverse have human mods.

They probably have infinite time because seemingly everything is too woke for these fucks, certainly seems like they don't actually play games

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.

Not sufficiently. We need to torch all rags that don't meet certain purity standards.

Part of the reason I don't play many multi-player games is the idiocy and racism

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.

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.

Unviewable web page with paywall

You can knee-jerk but you can't give informed criticism.

You can't even separate "You shouldn't obsess over avoiding ideas" from "You have an obligation to absorb everything."

I agree valves platform moderation is terrible but getting upset over some negative reviews from "charlietweet" and "toowoke" is bubblewrap levels of soft.

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 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.

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

Both act like Steam currently, they don't have paid moderators but leave it to communities to moderate themselves.

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.