Steam is 'an unsafe place for teens and young adults': US senator warns Gabe Newell of 'more intense scrutiny' from the government if Valve doesn't take action against extremist content
It's a great place to create extremists, there is basically no moderation and people say some fucking awful shit on Steam forums. I think this is a long time coming, honestly.
Frankly I'm shocked people don't recognize how prevalent it is. So many game releases have discussion forums plagued with "anti-woke" bullshit plastered everywhere. I just write off the forums for any game that features a black or female main character, let alone LGBT representation.
No, I don't. That's my point, they're so unmoderated it's all just bullshit, and the problem is that it frequently and regularly devolves into hateful bullshit. I wish Valve would have a more robust moderation system so the forums could be more useful. However, Valve just pushed the problem to the developers and doesn't ensure any baseline level of quality between games.
As much as I do actually like Valve and Steam, this is a big issue and has been forever.
In the comment I initially responded to, you made a specific point of calling out
I just write off the forums for any game that features a black or female main character, let alone LGBT representation.
As if it was only shit in those cases. There's no need to call that out specifically if you're trying to make the point that they're all shit on Steam (which we're in agreement on).
Usually a statement like that implies the inverse, in this case that you don't write off the discussion forums for games that don't fit that criteria. Hence my confusion and my call out that the Steam discussion forums have always been shit.
I agree that it's for the reason you called out here, that Steam just relies on the devs to moderate their own discussion forums. At the very least, they should default to not creating them unless the dev specifically opts in.
My point was that I didn't even have to look at the forums to know they were fuckin miserable for those games, not that they're the only bad parts. Just write it off as a fuckin nasty cesspit not even worth digging through for troubleshooting threads
I never look at any discussions on Steam. I've never seen ANY discussions/comments on Steam. I just browse the games, look at the overall rating, watch the promo video, buy, and play.
Many people also don't know how to recognize thinly veiled hate speech or dog whistles. So it flies over most people's heads and looks like normal discussions, even though it isn't.
Go to Gmod, TF2, CS2, Call of Duty. Popular fighting games. Gmod and TF2 have some of the worst offenders there in my experience.
Though the Dustborn forum is basically a 4chan clone with how much people hate that game, not even because the game isn't good but because they hate queer people and are racist pigs.