Steam provides the forums; not mods. The developers are supposed to moderate their forums. The only forums I actually see moderated are the Steam specific ones (like the support board). Game specific ones are hit or miss. Most devs just seem to ignore that they even exist.
‘This shouldn’t be normal’: developers speak out about bigotry on Steam, the world’s biggest PC gaming storefront
Submitted 2 weeks ago by RubberDuck@lemmy.world to games@lemmy.world
https://www.theguardian.com/games/2026/feb/16/bigotry-steam-pc-moderation-developers-speak-out
Comments
Kolanaki@pawb.social 2 weeks ago
dupelet_comments@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
The article is referring to reviews, not forums, which devs have no control over.
Kolanaki@pawb.social 2 weeks ago
Multiple game creators describe ineffective moderation on the platform, resulting in unchecked hatred in forums and…
TyrianMollusk@infosec.pub 2 weeks ago
Steam provides the forums; not mods. The developers are supposed to moderate their forums.
No, all of Steam’s forums default to Valve moderation, unless a dev chooses to bring/do their own moderation. If the dev moderates, they have total control and can do anything they want, regardless of community rules. If Valve moderates, you basically get eventual, low effort checks for flagrant rule violations in reported posts (which many trolls even exploit, knowing Steam mods don’t read threads or history or anything).
Katana314@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
The main reason Valve doesn’t step in on these is they have a firm philosophy of giving the community the tools to form their own outcomes, rather than directing them in every issue. So they might be dissatisfied with people writing “Woke TRASH!” braindead reviews, but also not want to take action on them.
The least they’ve done is remove the clown award so people have less incentive to troll. But I’d also like them to implement community blocklists; If you nag a game for “Having/not having LGBT representation”, you go on a blocklist 90% of the community is using.
real_squids@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
They also famously allow you to work on whatever you want, I doubt many Valve employees want to spend their days cleaning shit like that
paultimate14@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
They also have guidelines for “user generated content” which includes reviews, and you can report people for violating those guidelines.
Sure Valve does not pay for moderators to check things proactively. I quite like that they don’t have AI or some other half-assed attempt at “moderation” like other platforms have. I hate the way that the whole Internet has moved to censor “fuck” and made up the word “unalive” because the automated systems of platforms I don’t even use have decided they are the arbitora of what language is allowed.
I think the responsibility to monitor reviews should lie with whoever controls the Steam page: I would assume the publisher most of the time? The publisher and developer should be looking at reviews anyways. Add in the ability for users to vote reviews as helpful or unhelpful and I think it’s one of the better systems left on the internet.
Katana314@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
Lileath@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
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
Kolanaki@pawb.social 2 weeks ago
You know you can “block all communication” from users and it blocks them EVERYWHERE on Steam, right? Not just in games, but in Friends and on the forums, too.
GreyEyedGhost@piefed.ca 2 weeks ago
I think what they mean by “community blocklist” is a blocklist maintained by the community which users can have applied to them. This means, rather than everyone having to deal with blocking the trolls individually, only one user has to and the rest get the benefit of that.
Katana314@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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”.
Baguette@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
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
TyrianMollusk@infosec.pub 2 weeks ago
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
Profile clown awards say nothing more than some jerk spend points on being a jerk. Not at all a good reason to think people were flagged scammers, especially since you can just hide any profile awards with a checkbox.
But no, while clown awards are still there, you can’t give them anymore. Maybe “funny” will be the new clown, or maybe people will spend fewer points just to be jerks.
Ryoae@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
If Valve so badly doesn’t want to be responsible for moderating things on their own platform, then yes, they should be giving tools to the players to better self-moderate.
I’m envisioning it right now. The idea where someone sees a review of a game, negative or positive, adding nothing to what decision someone could have before buying a game. They can just close that review out and they’d never see it. It’d automatically block the person too, why not, their input isn’t valuable.
I didn’t know they got rid of the jester award until I checked today. I kinda wish we could just delete the awards such as them from our reviews that got flagged with those shitty things. I’d also take away the ‘funny’ marker too because I feel it adds nothing to reviewing games, it only enables the trolls and other shitty people from abusing it.
carotte@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
for a more recent example, the negative reviews under Relooted are fucking sickening. one of the top ones is a joke making fun of George Floyd’s death.
what does steam do? nothing. valve is one of the most profitable companies per employee out there, and they have no pressure from investors to botch their work, they could absolutely moderate.
they actively choose not to, because despite what bootlickers on lemmy would have you believe, gabe newell is a libertarian dipshit who values “free speech” over the safety of marginalized people.
paultimate14@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
There are guidelines on Steam that ban such content, and you can report people for violating them.
So no, Steam does not do “nothing” as you claim. A very basic Internet search can confirm that.
Even better, users can rate reviews as helpful or unhelpful. Which is great for a wider variety of reasons, but is also good for reviews that get into a grey area or use dog whistles to hide their true intentions.
carotte@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
as the article mentions, if you’d bothered to read it, steam rarely enforces their guidelines, which is the problem here
flamingos@feddit.uk 2 weeks ago
If you pump enough money into Linux gaming and do regular sales, a lot can be forgiven apparently. Steam Discussions are one of the most miserable places on the internet I go to semi-regularly and I don’t understand stand how Steam just gets a pass for the stuff that’s normal there.
doublah@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
Steam discussions can be moderated in any way a developer/publisher wants though? Their choice to not do so is weird to blame Valve for.
ChicoSuave@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
What do you want Steam to do? Be the judge and executioner of what lives and what dies? There is no agreed upon guidelines for what is chud behavior and not so how does Valve make that call?
VALUE PER EMPLOYEE MEANS NOTHING IN THIS CONTEXT. You are staying that fact to say “rich people need to be the adults if they are going to have that money” and that is absolutely Monarch/Authoritarian enabler thinking. Fuck that.
Valve is not responsible for the shit other people say. Report them if you don’t like it. As with democracy, with enough votes things will change. But one person mad at what another person says so they plead to a central authority to shut it down? The Internet has seen this decision turn into legal battles over speech after one trolling shithead decides to use the system against innocent people.
Stop listening to racists and this all goes away.
Clbull@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Nibodhika@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
Furbag@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
tb_@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.ameancow@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
I don’t think I’ve read a steam forum post in close to a decade, and even then it was a very niche thing I was looking for. I have long since stopped feeling any enjoyment or novelty in seeing completely random people’s thoughts, since in the last few years particularly, people have no intention to communicate and broadly just want attention, which has become monetized so the problem is far worse than it used to be.
Seriously, at some point we’re going to have to accept that the internet is dead or too close to death to be useful for interacting with other humans. I think we all need to stop communicating online on forums and discord and the like, it’s all become weaponized and not enough people are left without agendas and campaigns they’re trying to push. Let’s go back to how we did it for thousands of years and just talk to each other and make real-world friends, leave the assholes and shills and sock-puppets to fight among themselves.
samus12345@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
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.
Gathorall@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Steam forum is about game mechanics, advice and tech support right? Or am I being filtered the on-topic stuff?
purplerabbit@piefed.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
Reminder that The Guardian is a dogshit paper that pretty much systematically misgender trans people and keeps tripling down on backing up TERFs. You don’t get to talk shit about the bigots when you’re among them.
rozlav@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
I would very much like to read something about it !
abbotsbury@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
Clbull@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Do you have evidence of this? I thought the Guardian was pretty left-wing?
kazerniel@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
The US Guardian is strongly pro-trans, while the UK Guardian is more mixed. It had (maybe still has?) some TERFs in prominent positions for a very long time, and they kept churning out their transphobic opinion pieces week after week.
There was even some intra-Guardian clash about this in 2018, when their US reporters called out their UK colleagues: Why we take issue with the Guardian’s stance on trans rights in the UK
Funksylvania@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
Breaking News: Bigots increasingly comfortable, some mods bigots too.
It’s a shame there isn’t real moderation when people feel harassed, but I no longer care about those reviews as a consumer anyway. A negative review by some loser probably means I’ll like it more.
And I continue to support challengers to monopolies. Hope Steam gets a real competitor someday so I can take my money elsewhere.
radiouser@crazypeople.online 2 weeks ago
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 csn find the screenshots later I’ll update my post.
kazerniel@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Hey, you might want to contact the Sentinels of the Store group about this - they do reports on Steam’s developer and customer issues, and occasionally have direct communication with Valve.
In fact they covered this article in a recent post: SteamWatch - Developers Accuse Steam of Failing to Tackle Bigotry
radiouser@crazypeople.online 2 weeks ago
Thanks, I really appreciate it, I’m just going to bed now but I’ll be sure to check this out ASAP.
Fizz@lemmy.nz 2 weeks ago
I agree valves platform moderation is terrible but getting upset over some negative reviews from “charlietweet” and “toowoke” is bubblewrap levels of soft.
Rakonat@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
If I’m not mistaken devs have the ability to remove inflammatory comments or mark reviews as being irrelevant to be scrubbed.
kazerniel@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
mark reviews as being irrelevant to be scrubbed
as the article details, in the case of reviews flagged by devs, Steam gets to decide if they want to remove them or not, and often they don’t, even when they contain open bigotry or personal attacks towards the developer
Ryoae@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
Reviewing generally anything should be a way to help beacon those who’re unsure as to whether or not they should bother spending their hard-earned money on something and time they’re not getting back.
They aren’t going to get anything out of XxNoLife42069xX’s “review” of a game when they splerg about things not related to the game.
TheSeveralJourneysOfReemus@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
and we don’t try to moderate reviews based on accuracy
Than, it’s not a review, it’s a social media feed. Calling that a review would imply that it must have passed some check. If there is none, it’s a post, on a social media. Even than they’d try to moderate that if they cared.
Removing reviews, the response claimed, could be seen as “censorship”.
Fact checkig and moderation isn’t censorship, it’s moderation.
Recourse for developers is limited. Some are looking into their own security, shoring up protections for developers on their team against being doxxed or hacked by trolls. Or, in the case of the developers of Caves of Qud, paying their own moderators to handle forums and the hate that spills out of Steam
Which is guess for small teams or single devs is less feasable the less resources they have. That is to say, you’re alone out there.
sturmblast@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Part of the reason I don’t play many multi-player games is the idiocy and racism
Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
Moderate your own forum, honestly its kinda based of Valve to be as hands off as they are. You set your own guidelines rather than having Valve force their own on you. It makes sense too given the variety of games on Steam.
radiouser@crazypeople.online 2 weeks ago
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.
dupelet_comments@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
It’s about reviews, not forums, which devs have no control over
Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
They list both, and the developers have direct control over the forum. Less over reviews but you can report them if they are inappropriate.
peacefulpixel@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
not at all surprising, we’re talking about a company that almostly solely hires white cis men and refuses to tackle that
KeenFlame@feddit.nu 2 weeks ago
Unviewable web page with paywall
TheKingBee@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
there’s no paywall, there’s a donation ask, but you can just close it.
baatliwala@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
? Guardian advertises itself as not having a paywall
KeenFlame@feddit.nu 1 week ago
Hmm I cannot close it without signing up unfortunately
Ryoae@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
Then uhhhh…ban the pieces of shit?
yelling_at_cloud@programming.dev 2 weeks ago
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.
KelvarCherry@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
No countries are going to block Steam for not preventing alt-right hate-groups from leaving hate comments on store pages. Reddit and TikTok are regularly censoring users criticizing alt-right hate groups and international Satanic pedophiles, and no nation has even considered blocking them AFAIK.
yelling_at_cloud@programming.dev 2 weeks ago
I hope you’re right! I saw something flashing by about the UK suing Steam over price fixing, with the threat of enormous fines or being banned if they don’t pay them. Steam has many flaws, but I believe the world is better with them than without them.
zecg@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
This fucking shit again. Reviews affect sales? Well, good. You don’t get to carefully select a few most-read outlets who’ll give you the thumb up. Also, chud curators are “directing” only those who follow them. This argument is about a failing industry that’d like to control what can be said about their products.
JustAnotherKay@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
To be perfectly honest, the odds of me buying a game are significantly higher if I see reviews about “toxic femininity” or “woke politics”
AbsolutelyNotAVelociraptor@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
I use those “wokism tiers” that you usually see from bigoted idiots to check out new games that I’ll probably like
rtxn@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
That is literally how I discovered Signalis.
Glide@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
I occasionally go through the lists posted by chud curators for small indie titles that would have escaped my notice. I don’t have time to scrutinize every title on Steam, but these guys seemingly have infinite time to ensure every unheard of title with a case of LGBTQ+ representation gets criticism from them. Ironically, they’re fantastic for finding small, progressive passion projects I would have otherwise missed.
Paradachshund@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
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.
Don_alForno@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
If you know that you explicitly disagree with somebody on certain aspects, their opinion will be just as useful to you as if you liked exactly what they like.
Klear@quokk.au 2 weeks ago
There’s a big list of “woke games” that would be a great source for finding new games to play, if it didn’t include almost every game ever made making it meaningless.
Glide@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
I dislike people normalizing hate speech through this kind of space, but I largely agree. If people want to follow a curator that will make sure they aren’t emotionally blindsided by a female protagonist showing affection towards another woman, for example, that’s a choice they can make. We wouldn’t want the chuds to get their feelings hurt, afterall.
But in all seriousness, that’s kind of their choice. Obviously, any comments that suggest violence against people who make/play/are represented in that kind of game needs to get shut down immediately, but you’re allowed to not like LGBTQ+ representation. It’s not illegal to clutch your pearls at the sight of non-heteronormative sexuality. It’s just reprehensible.
flandish@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
what seems to “smell” funny more and more lately is that I can’t tell what is a full fledged game I want to play and what is AI/Slop created to jump on a bandwagon. Rimworld. Great game. Are the “rims in space” variants real? Just reskins? Why is everything in instant early access these days?