Gamergate never ended, and the lack of moderation on Steam has made it a very attractive place for fascists to spread propaganda. It’s been a serious problem for a very long time and Valve just isn’t doing anything about it.
it sounds like this developer goes out of their way to look for hateful comments to be offended about and report. you’re not going to magically fix trolling on on the internet by having people mass report individual comments.
trolls existed before the internet and they will be annoying shits for centuries to come. this dev needs to stop looking for stress and learn to report and move on.
Active moderation requires effort and funds. Throwing up your hands saying thats how it’s always been and nothing can be done is enabling the bullshit. Victim blaming the dev when this is widespread is disingenuous at best.
Imagine having nothing better to do than writing negative reviews for something that is not even intended for you…
Karen: “I don’t like spicy food… Can someone give me a list with restaurants in my area that serve it, so that I can give them bad reviews?”
‘Steam Store Front’ should be shortened to ‘Stormfront’. At least then no one would be shocked when they discover it’s teeming with illiterate bigots.
All I can suggest is that you report and block as much as you can. If there’s a game, like Relooted, that’s a bug light for scumbags, go to its forums when you have 10 minutes free and just report the shitstains you come across. Steam does take action sometimes.
It’s actually funny how many shitstains try to add me to their friend list so they can presumably harass me (my profile is VERY gay) but they have a gigantic notice saying they basically can not interact socially on Steam because they were softbanned for violating the TOS. It’s weird they can even send requests at all when they are literally blocked from using the chat system.
Does anybody wanna know the actual mechanics of why Steam is poorly user-content moderated?
Its because they primarily rely on automated systems, and a very, very small team of inhouse moderators/admins, as opposed to other comparable platforms (social media networks, basically), that have armies of contracted moderators in low income countries, whose job is to get more and more PTSD every day.
Thats how platforms with comparable amounts of user generated content have done moderation, for decades.
Nowadays such platforms are also using those human moderator workforces to train LLMs to be better at auto-moderating or at least auto-flagging things.
Valve absolutely should devote more time and energy to restructuring stages of automated review for user posted comments and content, to improving those review processes, and honestly, should probably just sunset the Steam Forums system, and rethink an entire new approach to it.
But… at the same time, the scale is a significant problem.
Steam has a comparable number of overall daily active users to a major social media platform.
… and the ones that do content moderation, well, they have armies of poor people manually reviewing everything, getting PTSD from that work, and nowadays, training an LLM to be a better auto content moderator.
Genuine question for everyone: Do you think that’s an ethically justifiable solution to the problem?
Offshore and concentrate the hate and suffering?
Other genuine question for everyone: What actual technical solution do you think should be implemented?
Should Valve run a massive LLM, an AI, to either directly moderate or screen all user generated content on Steam?
Final genuine question: Does your answer involve the concept that all user content on a platform, or website, should be the legal responsibility of the platform/website operator?
Because if your answer to that last question is yes, well then you’re basically saying we should overturn Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which would mean, amongst other things, any lemmy instance hosted in the US should itself be taken down if any of its users say something like ‘I hope Donald Trump dies a horrible death, soon.’
Because that’s almost certainly going to be viewed as a direct death threat by the current administration, if not just by the currently existing .world mod team.
I believe the answer is simply to give better moderation tools to the developers on their own games’ Store and Forum pages, since it’s developers who seem to have an issue with current moderation.
Well ok, that sounds reasonable to me!
What kinds of tools do you mean?
Like, I’m not trying to be duplicitous, I genuienly want Steam to not be a cesspool.
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/community_moderation
There’s an overview of what currently exists.
Yeah, a lot of it is based on having to manually flag things as harassment or bigotry or something like that, especially when it comes to actual game reviews, and it is obviously the case that whatever automated systems Valve currently has in place to auto flag things… are not sufficient.
And just for more context, here is the feed of Steamworks itself, which… more or less, is the sprt of update pipeline for Steam itself, as game devs would interface with it, which is also the system that would be the thing getting updated with new content moderation concepts.
https://store.steampowered.com/news/group/4145017
And here is basically the Steam Group for Steamworks/Steam itself, more or less, that may also be relevant:
This solves the current problem but reintroduces the one that steam reviews exist to solve: giving the game’s developers control over the most visible discussion channels for the game allows for removal of negative reviews or user backlash. Think about how bad subreddits can be about “removing toxicity” after a GAAS cranks the monetization dial up when the devs are on the mod team.
At some point, the responsibility is gonna end up landing on the consumer to actually read some negative reviews and dismiss the game’s “negative reception” entirely if all the thumbs-downs are yammering on about “woke devs” or “DEI” or “the chinese translation is bad”.
Oh boy, more censorship.
“racism and bigotry must be protected at any cost”
Some would say that, yes.
Racism and bigotry outside government institution doesnt really do much, it’s kind of self defeating in most situations that actually mean anything.
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That is legitimately one of the single dumbest statements I’ve ever read in my entire life.
First day on the internets?
How the fuck do you mega brained genius think racist and bigoted ideas get spread and propagated ?
It’s a residual product of almost 200 years of government sanctioned racism. I’d explain more but if you were interested you wouldn’t have came out so hot.
What kind of organism do you think the government is made of? That’s right - People. Where do you think today’s Republicans and cops grew up?
Every person that’s managed to exit cults of toxicity has admitted they inherited a poisoned worldview because it surrounded them - they never would have felt “Black people are subhuman” if they didn’t have messaging all around them saying it so.
If you have resigned yourself to the idea none of these people will ever change, and they’re fated to be that way from birth, stay in your own bubble and stop commenting anywhere about it because by your own admission conversation doesn’t do anything.
What kind of organism do you think the government is made of? That’s right - People.
Yeah people who hold a ton of power that can compel you to do something. The difference is a tech billionaire or your next door neighbor can’t do that.
People being in charge is irrelevant. If you’re argument is that human beings are imperfect and corruptable than every form of deterring racism cannot work; so I reject your idea.
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If you think racist talk by private citizens doesn’t spread racist and bigoted ideas, then you’re not worth talking too.
I said absolutely nothing even approaching a dramatic leap to that conclusion.
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Spoken like somebody who hasn’t experience racism or bigotry.
