New Steam study alleges that Valve's store is home to extreme right-wing "wars"

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• missingno@fedia.io ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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.

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  • Truscape@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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.

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  • Alcyonaria@piefed.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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

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    • Nephalis@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      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.

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  • echodot@feddit.uk ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Don’t the developers have moderation capabilities?

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    • Truscape@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      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.

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  • zecg@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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”.

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    • Ganbat@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      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”.

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  • Brosplosion@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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.

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    • missingno@fedia.io ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      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.

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  • Katana314@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Now I wish Valve would implement Bluesky’s idea of blocklists.

    Basically, the community would pool together to make voluntary lists of “Anti-woke mobs” that just troll through forums with rage bait, and add them to that list. It would require a level of trust, and tools to confirm each addition (eg, highlight a worst-case post from that user) but could start to clean things up.

    They could also let users choose to hide posts from users below a certain Steam score, making it hard to occupy space with brand new accounts.

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  • sadfitzy@ttrpg.network ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Wahhh, people are saying things I don’t like on the internet!

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    • SoftestSapphic@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Shut up bitch ass troll.

      This is why you sleep alone every night.

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• Fyrnyx@kbin.melroy.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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."

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  • cheesorist@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    while I respect your right to have an opinion removing the jester award, is in my opinion, stupid

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• daggermoon@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  no shit, the forums are cancer

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• Tracaine@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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.

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  • Truscape@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Steam workshop’s always awesome, I use that for bug reports. Modders tend to be chill people.

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• NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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.

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  • abbotsbury@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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

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    • missingno@fedia.io ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      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.

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  • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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.

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    • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      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.

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• murvel@feddit.nu ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  HoI4 just has some severely autistic wehraboos who can’t help it.

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