Gaming communities can be rough, but I can’t think of another forum like Steam which is across so many games consistently incredibly toxic towards developers, even if their product is fine with only minor issues and no predatory monetization. They are my least favorite place of conversation.
What would you do to improve the culture around them?
Without proper moderation, it will always be terrible. I don’t think Valve is going to change that given their hands off approach to this kind of stuff.
There used to be a game called Domina on Steam, the developer used his forum and the game changelog to complain about trans people and spread conspiracy theories about covid vaccines. It took months and several verbal warnings from Valve before they finally shut down the store page and its forums.
That is what it took for Valve to draw a line. They do not care about xX_gamerfart13_Xx screaming that their Dell from 2004 can’t run GTA V.
I’d love to be wrong, but I think Valve is more likely to shut down the forums feature than bother with moderation.
You can’t fix it. People are just awful and it’s getting worse.
It’s not the people in general are awful, it’s that awful people will eventually Congregate at poorly moderated places.
Kicking out the trolls and racists doesn’t get rid of them, just moves them and as more and more places kick them out, they slowly, naturally, end up at the same place, because it’s the only place that will let them in anymore.
I get the need to frame these types of people as isolated and not typical, but that’s you trying to cope with the thought that I’m right.
To put it plainly, no one thinks they’re a bad person but there are bad people out there.
I didn’t do any of that.
I said there are bad people and they congregate in unmoderated places.
Sometimes I get drunk and go to the discussions, not to post, but to report trolls. Every time a mod reviews a report you get a notification, which is archived in your profile, and I made it my mission to get as many pages of reports as possible. Iirc there are 20 per page, and I have over 8 pages.
Actually punishing those with poor behavior? Perhaps a ban from the forums should extend to their steam account?
I don’t see that happening. Maybe a karma system? Normally I dislike those systems but they do a decent job at regulating users. If someone gets downvotes or has low discussion karma, just hide their post. Shouldn’t be that hard to do either.
I don’t see that happening.
A man can dream :(
People need to be held accountable for their actions. Valve has the money and should invest in a proper moderation team.
Relying on karma has a whole slew of issues, especially in something that is already a proper Wretched Hive of toxic bullshit. Look at Reddit, for example.
You don’t have to do karma the way Reddit does it. Reddit actually suffers from it in two ways. The first is that the easiest way to get karma is empty posts or reposts. With steam, I think that’s harder to do. Best way to get karma would just be to make decent guides for games. Write good or funny reviews. Etc.
The other way it suffers from it is that it shows you the actual number. You don’t need to do that. You can just have levels ranging from “very bad” or “very good” karma. And people with “very good” karma have to maintain it and maybe get something from it.
I think it’s still better than hiring a ton of people to moderate every small community discussion. It’s also better than leaving it as it is or using reports. At the very least people with frequent downvotes or posts with downvotes should be promoted less or hidden or shadowbanned.
Take a look at explodingheads. If nothing else is changed in a toxic community except karma, that’s probably what you get
The problem with that is, devs and publishers moderate their own forums, and since anyone can release a game, that means that anyone can target anyone else’s steam profile.
I wasn’t suggesting we take the existing system as it is then just start banning people. Obviously the team would be under Valve and would moderate the forums in their entirety outside of devs and publishers.
stop using them? :)
Pretty much nothing, it was always bad. Although, it has gotten worse after they added steam points and the ability to put a special emote on someone’s comment/post which gives them steam points so now people often purposefully post some cringe just to get clowned upon and collect the points, or plagiarize/make meme posts so actual information becomes rare.
The truth of the matter is that the core demographic for steam forums are either children or gopniks, everyone else rarely even look at Steam let alone post/comment. Very little moderation doesn’t help things also.
Agreed on the 2nd last sentence.
I believe the circumstances such as lack of moderation lead to degradation and more reasonable people abandoning the platform further.
Simple… Bring back the good ol’ SPUF.
