The forums are moderated (or in many cases not moderated) by the game publisher, not Steam. If they don’t want to moderate they could technically close the forum for their game but very few publishers do so.
Maybe they’re supposed to be moderated by devs/publishers, but I’d guess as high as 99% of steam communities are unmoderated or simply auto moderated for specific slurs. Basically every game I’ve ever looked at has just piles of threads asking “Is ThIs GaMe WoKe???” or “PLEASE ADD LGBTQ2IABBQ+ CHARACTERS!!!” as award farming shitposts. Heaven forbid its a competitive game because those forums get rancid. It also happens I’m the discussion of basically every news update for any game with a remotely active community.
There is zero or nearly zero accountability for the state of the community hub and Valve simply saying “devs should do it” is just passing the buck.
Yeah, that really should be an option. I don’t think it’s infeasible for Valve to employ their own moderators and ensure the communities are less toxic. Short of that though, letting developers/publishers disable them is the bare minimum they can do.
Valve did respond to this by removing points from community awards a while ago. It won’t clean up the posts already there, because that’s the game’s developer’s job, but it’s no longer a viable point farming strategy to just make a big thread on a new game calling it woke to generate a bunch of clown awards.
Pretty sure they can’t close the forums, actually. I’ve never seen a Steam forum be outright disabled, despite seeing many devs/publishers who would absolutely close that down as a place of critique. I haven’t even seen delisted but viewable games close down their forums from new posts. Are you sure Valve doesn’t have an agreement with publishers that they are required to keep the forum open for their games?
The discussion I have seen from publishers is that the automated moderation on Steam is literally nonexistent from their end, and the global automation is far too lax. So they push their player base to platforms that are actually capable of dealing with problematic behavior.
The default is that Valve does moderation, and if you don’t opt-out of it, they consider those kinds of topics to be completely on-topic and valid, removing the reports. All of the relevant Steamworks pages aimed at publishers (eg Steam Community) are publicly available and are really enough to blame Valve for the whole state of things.
Even if a publisher opts-out of Valve moderation, they don’t have the tools to deal with sockpuppets or organized attacks, and being banned from one game forum just means those same accounts move elsewhere. Valve could absolutely deal with it by doing community-wide bans, but they don’t.
The forums are moderated (or in many cases not moderated) by the game publisher, not Steam. If they don’t want to moderate they could technically close the forum for their game but very few publishers do so.
Maybe they’re supposed to be moderated by devs/publishers, but I’d guess as high as 99% of steam communities are unmoderated or simply auto moderated for specific slurs. Basically every game I’ve ever looked at has just piles of threads asking “Is ThIs GaMe WoKe???” or “PLEASE ADD LGBTQ2IABBQ+ CHARACTERS!!!” as award farming shitposts. Heaven forbid its a competitive game because those forums get rancid. It also happens I’m the discussion of basically every news update for any game with a remotely active community.
There is zero or nearly zero accountability for the state of the community hub and Valve simply saying “devs should do it” is just passing the buck.
Do devs have the ability to turn forums/communities off? If so, I feel like that’s the best option if they don’t want to moderate it.
They don’t. I know one indie developer once privately told me they wished they could.
Yeah, that really should be an option. I don’t think it’s infeasible for Valve to employ their own moderators and ensure the communities are less toxic. Short of that though, letting developers/publishers disable them is the bare minimum they can do.
I was close to saying infeasible was not a word but then I looked it up. My bad
Valve did respond to this by removing points from community awards a while ago. It won’t clean up the posts already there, because that’s the game’s developer’s job, but it’s no longer a viable point farming strategy to just make a big thread on a new game calling it woke to generate a bunch of clown awards.
Pretty sure they can’t close the forums, actually. I’ve never seen a Steam forum be outright disabled, despite seeing many devs/publishers who would absolutely close that down as a place of critique. I haven’t even seen delisted but viewable games close down their forums from new posts. Are you sure Valve doesn’t have an agreement with publishers that they are required to keep the forum open for their games?
The discussion I have seen from publishers is that the automated moderation on Steam is literally nonexistent from their end, and the global automation is far too lax. So they push their player base to platforms that are actually capable of dealing with problematic behavior.
The default is that Valve does moderation, and if you don’t opt-out of it, they consider those kinds of topics to be completely on-topic and valid, removing the reports. All of the relevant Steamworks pages aimed at publishers (eg Steam Community) are publicly available and are really enough to blame Valve for the whole state of things.
Even if a publisher opts-out of Valve moderation, they don’t have the tools to deal with sockpuppets or organized attacks, and being banned from one game forum just means those same accounts move elsewhere. Valve could absolutely deal with it by doing community-wide bans, but they don’t.
deleted by creator