Steam needs to shut down their forums. It’s clear they have no intention of moderating them and they are so incredibly toxic, hateful, and disgusting that I feel bad about using the platform at all.
I pretty much agree, I literally cannot think of a single time me engaging with the Steam forums has resulted in anything good at all.
Best case scenario you get absolute idiots who know nothing about how games work acting like they do, worst case scenario you run into something akin to Terrorgram.
I was completely serious in my other post when I said 99.9% of steam forums are worse than worthless.
Just say, hey, everything in any steam forum, discussion group, basically anything other than comments on steam workshop stuff and guides and your own posted screenshots and your own profile… yep, in 90 days, it all goes away, make your backups now, if you want to, here’s a tool thingy to do that.
We have other platforms for lengthier discussions now, if a game wants to run its own community, fucking buy a domain, set up some forums, set up a discord, a reddit, a lemmy, whatever, do it yourself, its not worth steam potentially getting nuked or massively censored because it allows basicslly auto generated forums for every half baked idiot that makes some game.
I honestly don’t think I’ve ever been on a steam forum.
This shits generally everywhere nowadays, there’s no hiding from it. It’s like a worldwide pandemic of brain rot at this point. Everyone is polarized, and that’s never going to lead to anything good. I’m still not sure we should all be this connected to each other.
Social media in moderation and with responsibility and rational thought, there’s nothing wrong with that. But people don’t seem to be able to self police themselves, it’s turned into a massive addiction that’s maybe somehow just as bad as the opioid crisis in some ways. It’s infection has circled the globe, turning a lot of otherwise decent people into mindless meme chodes and racism repeaters.
The people who run social media sites knew all the stuff in your 2nd paragraph would happen from about 2010 onward.
I… remember reading blogs of people working for them, explaining how a human brain can’t really handle knowing or having more than roughly 50 to 100 friends, after some threshold is passed, your brain switches into another mode of social thinking.
… And they knew that, and so much more, and exploited the fuck out of literally everyone, first to sell ads, then they realized data was the new oil.
Yeah, basically, social media was a mistake.
Algos will always naturally ‘conclude’ that the best way to drive engagement is to promote things that make people paranoid and angry, and speak to their insecurities, and make them worse.
Now we can literally buy an AI neck pendant friend for $99, for people who are so pathetic and so in need of validation they will just literally buy a simulacra of a friend, because socialization itself has been destroyed.
We are living through a kind of cyberpunk dystopia somehow more insidious and fundamentally debasing of what it even means to be human than any author I’ve read predicted or warned against.
My response so far has been ‘the only winning move is not to play’, I will never tie my real identity directly to any web presence ever again, nuked all my shit, everywhere, when Cambridge Analytica broke.
They have been social engineering with supercomputers for a decade now, and it is more or less making them so much money they literally do not know what to do with it, as it hollows out everyone and everything, acts as gasoline on their accelerationist fire.
… call this a parasocial relationship if you want, but I miss David Bowie.
I am old enough that I remeber having to actually memorize phone numbers, used a phone booth a few times, could navigate around my town and generally on highways without a GPS/Map mounted to the dash.
The kids barely ever knew the analog world, and its not like us Millenials are any better parents than ours were.
When the infrastructure starts to give out, from climate disasters, or people can’t afford it any more due to economic depression…
A bunch of people are basically going to go into withdrawl and become feral.
Why think, why learn? AI does it for you!
Untill that service is no longer available in your area.
I’m old enough I can remember operating an 8-track deck in my dad’s truck. Didn’t have GPS accessible until oh geez, probably my later 20s? My kids are very young, so they only know the touchscreen world.
I don’t think there’s any going back. If we had to, like if there was a bad event or whatever, I’d like to think we could all eventually adapt, but it would be rough for sure. A lot of people wouldn’t make it.
I don’t go there for discussions but have found useful fixes from it that wasn’t on pcgamingwiki, which I’ve added to pcgamingwiki linking back to the steam forum. So it has its uses.
Despite the terrible discussions which I don’t use it for it is still at the end of the day place people do ask for help and do receive it when that’s the topic of the thread.
I’m glad its helped you, but every time I am so desperate as to end up at the Steam Comm pages looking for help, I am met by a bunch of overconfident idiots explaining solutions to problems I did not describe, or just people telling me it isn’t a problem, it can be fixed by uninstslling my soul from my body, etc.
It literally is not Valve’s problem to handle what goes on off their platform.
If somebody wants to attempt that, uh, good luck? The US is currently run by fascists, all the fascists in government probably are not going to prioritize policing younger, dumber fascists.
If you just put all this burden on Steam, what you end up with is Steam gets massively censored in way more ways than just discussion forums.
But yes, I agree, I say, also just get rid of Steam Groups, entirely.
Just, boink, gone, don’t need em.
Nobody ever uses them for anything serious, they are basically always shit post zones, at best.
Thats what I meant where I elsewhere more or less said ‘nuke everything that isn’t your personal profile and stuff you publish personally’.
Sure, keep some ability for commenting on like, user’s screenshots, stuff people upload to the workshop, mods, comprehensive guides.
But, its the uploader’s job to moderate them, just offer something like ‘hold all comments for personal vetting or keyword filter scan’ before they appear.
Pretty sure those options already exist in other contexts on Steam, but yeah, I am fully down with Steam just cleaning house on almost everything.
I also think that asking for more serious moderation on more platforms is a good idea, but the problem is always going to be having the resources to do that, as well as uh, facsists aren’t going to investigate themselves.
Only other paradigm is to basically require a kind of NetID that either is your government ID or is tied directly to it, for all kinds of public discussion software, and once you do that, well, again, the government is fascists, so now if you criticize them, off to jail for you.
You initially said whales who buy tons of games, I assume you mean individuals with 1000+ games on their steam account, buys all the dlc and mtx and loot crates, that kind of whale.
Now you are reffering to… the US government as a whale?
What are you suggesting… be done?
… and by whom?
Are you suggesting Valve functionally commit hara-kiri by … some kind of intentionally angering the fascist government?
What are you suggesting, that Valve fund investigators to link Steam accounts to other platforms and websites, and then… report that knowledge to… the government?
They wouldn’t do anything other than sue Valve out of existence for being antifa.
Valve cannot like… arrest people, issue themselves search warrants, … and if they did set up a system to do something like this, kablamo, now it is instantly turned around to hunt down trans people after Valve is sued into a government buy out or being purchased by fucking Larry Ellison.
Please, explain to me what you are trying to suggest, I don’t get it.
I would think that them just getting rid of much of their discussion ‘zones’ would be something they could do without pissing off the fascists, and also just being a net good in general…
… whereas if they kept all their steam groups and discussion forums, but instead, specifically began to more heavily moderate / remove right wing extremists from those discussion zones, I would think that would be much more likely to piss off the fascists.
Basically, I don’t think the fascists in government really even understand fully what Steam is, everything it does, but, if they heard it was cracking down specifically on fascists, that would draw more heat to them than if they just removed features which are, imo, just a net negative anyway.
Steam needs to shut down their forums. It’s clear they have no intention of moderating them and they are so incredibly toxic, hateful, and disgusting that I feel bad about using the platform at all.
Removed by mod
I pretty much agree, I literally cannot think of a single time me engaging with the Steam forums has resulted in anything good at all.
Best case scenario you get absolute idiots who know nothing about how games work acting like they do, worst case scenario you run into something akin to Terrorgram.
https://www.propublica.org/article/telegram-terrorgram-collective-bratislava-murders-neo-nazi-online-hate
EDIT:
I was completely serious in my other post when I said 99.9% of steam forums are worse than worthless.
Just say, hey, everything in any steam forum, discussion group, basically anything other than comments on steam workshop stuff and guides and your own posted screenshots and your own profile… yep, in 90 days, it all goes away, make your backups now, if you want to, here’s a tool thingy to do that.
We have other platforms for lengthier discussions now, if a game wants to run its own community, fucking buy a domain, set up some forums, set up a discord, a reddit, a lemmy, whatever, do it yourself, its not worth steam potentially getting nuked or massively censored because it allows basicslly auto generated forums for every half baked idiot that makes some game.
I honestly don’t think I’ve ever been on a steam forum.
This shits generally everywhere nowadays, there’s no hiding from it. It’s like a worldwide pandemic of brain rot at this point. Everyone is polarized, and that’s never going to lead to anything good. I’m still not sure we should all be this connected to each other.
Social media in moderation and with responsibility and rational thought, there’s nothing wrong with that. But people don’t seem to be able to self police themselves, it’s turned into a massive addiction that’s maybe somehow just as bad as the opioid crisis in some ways. It’s infection has circled the globe, turning a lot of otherwise decent people into mindless meme chodes and racism repeaters.
The people who run social media sites knew all the stuff in your 2nd paragraph would happen from about 2010 onward.
I… remember reading blogs of people working for them, explaining how a human brain can’t really handle knowing or having more than roughly 50 to 100 friends, after some threshold is passed, your brain switches into another mode of social thinking.
… And they knew that, and so much more, and exploited the fuck out of literally everyone, first to sell ads, then they realized data was the new oil.
Yeah, basically, social media was a mistake.
Algos will always naturally ‘conclude’ that the best way to drive engagement is to promote things that make people paranoid and angry, and speak to their insecurities, and make them worse.
Now we can literally buy an AI neck pendant friend for $99, for people who are so pathetic and so in need of validation they will just literally buy a simulacra of a friend, because socialization itself has been destroyed.
We are living through a kind of cyberpunk dystopia somehow more insidious and fundamentally debasing of what it even means to be human than any author I’ve read predicted or warned against.
My response so far has been ‘the only winning move is not to play’, I will never tie my real identity directly to any web presence ever again, nuked all my shit, everywhere, when Cambridge Analytica broke.
They have been social engineering with supercomputers for a decade now, and it is more or less making them so much money they literally do not know what to do with it, as it hollows out everyone and everything, acts as gasoline on their accelerationist fire.
… call this a parasocial relationship if you want, but I miss David Bowie.
If they only still made them like Bowie…
I agree with everything that you’ve said, it’s sad and pathetic, but we’ve invited the monster inside. The calls are coming from inside the house now.
Black Mirror?
Oh, you mean the phone you hold in front of your face all the time, everyday, right?
When the screen’s not on… literally black, glossy, relflective…
Please tell me I am not the only person who immediately made that association when that show came out.
You definitely aren’t.
I really do feel terribly for Gen Z and A.
I am old enough that I remeber having to actually memorize phone numbers, used a phone booth a few times, could navigate around my town and generally on highways without a GPS/Map mounted to the dash.
The kids barely ever knew the analog world, and its not like us Millenials are any better parents than ours were.
When the infrastructure starts to give out, from climate disasters, or people can’t afford it any more due to economic depression…
A bunch of people are basically going to go into withdrawl and become feral.
Why think, why learn? AI does it for you!
Untill that service is no longer available in your area.
I’m old enough I can remember operating an 8-track deck in my dad’s truck. Didn’t have GPS accessible until oh geez, probably my later 20s? My kids are very young, so they only know the touchscreen world.
I don’t think there’s any going back. If we had to, like if there was a bad event or whatever, I’d like to think we could all eventually adapt, but it would be rough for sure. A lot of people wouldn’t make it.
I don’t go there for discussions but have found useful fixes from it that wasn’t on pcgamingwiki, which I’ve added to pcgamingwiki linking back to the steam forum. So it has its uses.
Despite the terrible discussions which I don’t use it for it is still at the end of the day place people do ask for help and do receive it when that’s the topic of the thread.
I’m glad its helped you, but every time I am so desperate as to end up at the Steam Comm pages looking for help, I am met by a bunch of overconfident idiots explaining solutions to problems I did not describe, or just people telling me it isn’t a problem, it can be fixed by uninstslling my soul from my body, etc.
I just use the search feature. Whether it is steam or regular search engine. Works well enough for me.
The conflict of interests is that they are whales that buy games, but never play. This is why Valve doesn’t want to ban them.
You don’t need to ban whales on steam who have tons of games.
Just get rid of or massively downsize steam community forums and group discussions.
They don’t need to exist.
Whales can still be whales and write an angry game review or whatever, but we don’t need discussion forums on Steam for every possible fucking thing.
Sure, but they’ll congregate on 8chan, discord, kiwifarms, their websites, etc… You’ll also need to tackle Steam groups too. Too many of them.
Nazis are worse than roaches, you need to eradicate everywhere lest you suffer their mob campaigns.
It literally is not Valve’s problem to handle what goes on off their platform.
If somebody wants to attempt that, uh, good luck? The US is currently run by fascists, all the fascists in government probably are not going to prioritize policing younger, dumber fascists.
If you just put all this burden on Steam, what you end up with is Steam gets massively censored in way more ways than just discussion forums.
But yes, I agree, I say, also just get rid of Steam Groups, entirely.
Just, boink, gone, don’t need em.
Nobody ever uses them for anything serious, they are basically always shit post zones, at best.
Thats what I meant where I elsewhere more or less said ‘nuke everything that isn’t your personal profile and stuff you publish personally’.
Sure, keep some ability for commenting on like, user’s screenshots, stuff people upload to the workshop, mods, comprehensive guides.
But, its the uploader’s job to moderate them, just offer something like ‘hold all comments for personal vetting or keyword filter scan’ before they appear.
Pretty sure those options already exist in other contexts on Steam, but yeah, I am fully down with Steam just cleaning house on almost everything.
I also think that asking for more serious moderation on more platforms is a good idea, but the problem is always going to be having the resources to do that, as well as uh, facsists aren’t going to investigate themselves.
Only other paradigm is to basically require a kind of NetID that either is your government ID or is tied directly to it, for all kinds of public discussion software, and once you do that, well, again, the government is fascists, so now if you criticize them, off to jail for you.
Yeah, that’s the precise whale I’m talking about. Imagine upsetting your landlord and despot.
I don’t follow.
You initially said whales who buy tons of games, I assume you mean individuals with 1000+ games on their steam account, buys all the dlc and mtx and loot crates, that kind of whale.
Now you are reffering to… the US government as a whale?
What are you suggesting… be done?
… and by whom?
Are you suggesting Valve functionally commit hara-kiri by … some kind of intentionally angering the fascist government?
What are you suggesting, that Valve fund investigators to link Steam accounts to other platforms and websites, and then… report that knowledge to… the government?
They wouldn’t do anything other than sue Valve out of existence for being antifa.
Valve cannot like… arrest people, issue themselves search warrants, … and if they did set up a system to do something like this, kablamo, now it is instantly turned around to hunt down trans people after Valve is sued into a government buy out or being purchased by fucking Larry Ellison.
Please, explain to me what you are trying to suggest, I don’t get it.
I comprehend you’re saying that Valve should get rid off forums and groups.
I’m saying they can’t, the “US” will
freeze their assets, revoke their business licences, put them on a watchlist, and deathcamp Valve & affiliates.
Valve’s hands are fascistically tied to 🇺🇲’s RMVP.¹
¹ def. of RMVP
Ooooh, ok.
I would think that them just getting rid of much of their discussion ‘zones’ would be something they could do without pissing off the fascists, and also just being a net good in general…
… whereas if they kept all their steam groups and discussion forums, but instead, specifically began to more heavily moderate / remove right wing extremists from those discussion zones, I would think that would be much more likely to piss off the fascists.
Basically, I don’t think the fascists in government really even understand fully what Steam is, everything it does, but, if they heard it was cracking down specifically on fascists, that would draw more heat to them than if they just removed features which are, imo, just a net negative anyway.