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this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2025
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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?
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'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.
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.
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 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.
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.
And there we go.
Would you rather Valve, with their dominant market position, be opinionated about what games and speech they allow? Or would you rather they act more like a public market, where publishers decide what is allowed in their corner of the market? Does this preference change depending on whether they align with you?
If a publisher wants to attract Nazis, let 'em. If they want to attract leftist extremists, let 'em. If a publisher wants to discourage all forms of extremism according to their own opinion of what "acceptable" means, let 'em. But the choice should be for the publisher to make, not the platform, especially if that platform has a dominant position.
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)