The forums are to be avoided. You can’t even have an honest non-political discussion in them because it is filled with immature asshole trolls with somehow too much time on their hands. I’m permabanned from Steams official forums because of just suggesting we get rid of the jester award. Cue in legions of fuckheads storming in 16 pages worth of my reviews and flagging nearly all of them with jester awards. Fuck that shithole.
It’s even astounding how one of the trolls, was married and has a kid. What a life that guy has to find so much time to be an asshole online while having a family. “Uh sorry honey, I’m too busy owning someone online because they had an opinion I don’t like, I’m not going to have dinner with you tonight.”
while I respect your right to have an opinion removing the jester award, is in my opinion, stupid
I’ve never considered even using the forums and am only vaguely aware of them. It’s a store, not a social platform. I buy my games, I run the games. Anything else is…kind of weird honestly.
Steam workshop’s always awesome, I use those forums for bug reports. Modders tend to be chill people.
Steam Forums are one of the worst hellholes I’ve seen on the modern internet, and Valve does nothing. Any game that gets declared a target by the post-Gamergate crowd ends up having its board seiged until it’s unusable for any kind of actual discussion.
Valve’s hands-off philosophy with almost all of their social components is one of those massive double-edged swords, as anyone who trades steam items will tell you as well.
It allows anyone to take charge in participation, but that’s EVERYONE, including those who enjoy belittling others, which sucks.
Don’t the developers have moderation capabilities?
Yes, but they are almost never exercised unless it involves legal requirements - Valve’s ideals are very much “We will not bother anyone unless we have to”, which is nice for people who want to forge spaces but sucks when people show up to be shitheads.
Valve could easily fix it by making game discussions default to owners only, but they’ve always been a shitty company so they dont bother
If they would, no one could ask anything pre purchase.
But I also don’t like the forum in there because of the bad atmosphere. Also I don’t know whether it is because of a special group or because the general communication style in games is toxic, dumb, aggressive and egoistical as fuck… Like in almost every ingame chat.
I think it’s just the games you play I’ve just had a look at the town to city forum, and it’s fine, as to be expected.
Yeah, to me the Steam forums seem like one of the least toxic “gamer” spaces online.
Every discussion board has several categories by default General/bugs/events/trading Simply moving the default category or locking it massively decreases trolling and appropriate category use. The main problem with discussion trolling is that valve never deals with the rampant spam bots or people who continually post egregious material. I’ve seen bots last years posting update edits on every large game news post. The only way to fix it is to lock it to game owners/account age/community engagement. But valve will never do this unless it negatively affects their image because their leadership have become deluded weirdos (exempting art lead and gabe newell)
Wahhh, people are saying things I don’t like on the internet!
I don’t have to read any of it, but it bothers me that it’s happening at all!
How can we pressure the people in charge to censor things we don’t like?
Shut up bitch ass troll.
This is why you sleep alone every night.
I don’t see how it’s Valves problem. They are a marketplace and essentially rent a store front to developers. Forum moderation for a specific game should be up to the developer/publisher.
It’s like if you rented a spot in a stripmall, and you want the stripmall owner to come clean the floors when people come into your shop and piss on your floor. Don’t want to manage your own forum, then disable user posts entirely.
Don’t want to manage your own forum, then disable user posts entirely.
I don’t believe that’s an option. I know one indie dev that actually told me they wished they could just not have a Steam forum because they hate it.
Valve does nothing
It’s not Valve’s job to provide a liberal education and loving community for the young’uns, the only thing Valve can do is censor discussions and ban people for what they are saying. Like tiktok is doing with “Israel is controlling the U.S. through AIPAC”.
the only thing Valve can do is censor discussions and ban people for what they are saying
Except they don’t, which is the problem. Moderation of the forums is pushed off on developers, publishers and volunteers, and Valve only gets involved if they absolutely have to. It makes effective moderation of the forums dedicated to games made by small and solo devs functionally impossible, and allows for rampant abuse of the systems by publishers, such as Take Two marking negative reviews as “off-topic”.
no shit, the forums are cancer
Removed by mod
I understand the importance of actually performing rigorous studies (haven’t checked their methodology) but… no fucking shit?
GabeN is a pretty established Libertarian Tech Bro and Valve only moderates to the bare minimum requirement. Of course chuds are going to thrive under those circumstances.
Its why I STILL laugh my ass off when people go on an anti-Epic rant about how EGS doesn’t have forums or whatever. Like… you REALLY telling on your ass if you think the steam forums are something anyone should want more of.
I dunno. I increasingly think the answer is to burn it all down (on a lot of subjects). The idea of going to the store to ask questions or get recommendations feels like one of those “remember yesteryear?” that never actually happened. I NEVER had a good experience talking to a sales person in a Circuit City or Electronics Boutique (I’ll never stop being annoyed over going to pick up KOTOR 2 on launch day and having to tell the cashier, five different times, that I would not be buying WoW or Starcraft…).
Back in the day? I looked at boxes and if the price was right just got it. Otherwise I read through PC Gamer or EGM to find out what games were good.
These days? I look through the store front and if the price is right, I do a quick skim of the review scores and get it. Otherwise I have a few influencers I “trust” to review/showcase games for me. What IS new is that sometimes I go to a message board (generally reddit for volume) and ask if someone can point me at a youtube that goes deeper into a feature. But even that isn’t dissimilar from a schoolmate who probably became a neo nazi who couldn’t stop talking about how good IL-2 was.
So get rid of all the social media bullshit attached to store fronts and just require devs to put a link to their social media of choice for reporting bugs or whatever.
I have no idea how Steam’s forums work since I only go there if I can’t find a solution to an issue elsewhere, but for that use case it’s totally fine?
GabeN is a pretty established Libertarian Tech Bro and Valve only moderates to the bare minimum requirement.
Isn’t that kind of what you want from a distributor? Looking up “Gabe Newell political views,” the top results were about him refusing to ban games, partly to avoid the Streisand effect, but also because he doesn’t believe in censorship. If Valve banned things based on company views, they’d quickly be at risk of an antitrust lawsuit.
I personally agree that Valve shouldn’t be involved in the forums. But I do think the publisher should be able to take over moderation if they so choose. Maybe that’s a thing, idk, I don’t know very much about the forums.
I do a quick skim of the review scores and get it
I’m the same way. I skim the first ten or so reviews, skipping low effort (one sentence) and try-hard (massive checklists and essays) reviews, and try to find a negative review or two. I’m looking for what the game is good and bad at to see if it likely justifies the price.
but also because he doesn’t believe in censorship.
Which is the problem.
Games have been banned (even before the current round of christofacist hell). So what rule says we can’t have “AOC Torture Sim 2025”? Is that the same rule as “Musk Torture Sim 2025”?
Okay, so unwritten rule that you can’t sell games about murdering actual human beings.
What about “Trans Raper 2025”?
The reality is that “being apolitical” IS being political. It is an inherently libertarian and conservative standpoint where you “don’t believe government should intervene” and “things are fine the way they are”. And creating an environment like that inherently benefits chuds who are much more detached when they talk about “I identify as an attack helicopter” and are super quick to criticize people for “getting emotional” when they care about their fucking right to exist.
Which is what the steam forums ARE. I had the misfortune of trying to debug Dragon’s Dogma 2 on Linux when it launched (actually ended up doing a LOT of testing and bug reporting). The forums were a cesspool of dog whistles and bigotry because the game had the audacity to have a character creator. And in between sifting through the hate to see who else had figured out what triggered a DRM activation, you know what I found getting moderated? No, not the bigotry and hate. The people who finally said “shut the fuck up”.
“Wheaton’s Rule Of The Internet” is the kind of thing that privileged white boys love to parrot around. But once you actually spend time giving a shit about anyone other than you, it all goes out the window and you start needing actual rules. And Valve have continued to not do that until there is a threat of legal action involved.
Okay, so unwritten rule that you can’t sell games about murdering actual human beings.
I assume those would be illegal, which seems to be the metric Valve uses when deciding whether to ban something. That means you could have different bans based on region, so China will have different bans than the UK, which will have different bans than Russia.
Which is what the steam forums ARE.
Which is why publishers should be able to take over moderation if they don’t like how the community is acting. I don’t know if that’s the case, because the only time I go to the forums is from an internet search looking for a fix to a specific issue. I don’t see 99% of the nonsense here, nor do I know how moderation happens (or doesn’t happen).
Libertarianism isn’t about leaving things alone, it’s about protecting rights. Valve has every right to moderate, but if was a government, it would not, outside of speech likely to directly incite violence (e.g. planning an assassination or terrorist attack) due to the right to free speech. It seems GabeN is holding Valve to theore strict standard of a government than the looser standard of a private company.
If Valve sees the platform as similar to a government, it should see a game-specific forum as a private space controlled by the publisher. If the publisher doesn’t want to take that responsibility, they can leave it up to Valve’s standard.
I think the hands off position is correct, provided the publisher can take over moderation. Players can choose with their wallet and their engagement and decide whether to buy a game or engage with the forums based on its community moderation.
Steam has a lot of value to me partly because there’s a ton of stuff there I find distasteful, which makes me feel like there’s a better chance things I like that others don’t will be allowed on the store. If a game isn’t on the store, that’s because the publisher didn’t publish it there, not because Valve blocked it. Platforms like Steam shouldn’t be opinionated, they should be as inclusive as possible, and that includes criticism of public figures the platform may like.
Which is why publishers should be able to take over moderation if they don’t like how the community is acting.
Mordhau is a game where the official forums had a long standing “show us your kni**a” thread and was full of bigotry and hatred. They only began to moderate after enough articles about it were getting popular at a time people remembered Chivalry 2 existed.
Let alone the Black Myth Wukong dev who was “mistranslated” when talking about all of the long history of misogyny and sexism coming from a studio that outright banned reviewers from talking about “feminism”
At the end of the day, it is Valve’s house. If there is a room full of nazis then clearly they are okay with it. End of story.
Libertarianism isn’t about leaving things alone, it’s about protecting rights.
And there we go.
Like… you REALLY telling on your ass if you think the steam forums are something anyone should want more of.
idk man I only use them when a game isn’t gaming right and there’s usually some posts about how to get the game to game correctly, sometimes even posts by the devs, let’s not pretend it’s *all* /v/ shit
Yeah, there’s definite value in having these boards to ask questions. It just… needs moderators to be more proactive in dealing with bad actors.
Wonder if having the game dev for their category on the steam forum have moderator status would be a good medium (could promote staff or community members to mod status)
