Beep‘This shouldn’t be normal’: developers speak out about bigotry on Steam, the world’s biggest PC gaming storefront
sp3ctr4lDoes anybody wanna know the actual mechanics of why Steam is poorly content moderated?
Its because they primarily rely on automated systems, and a very, very small team of inhouse moderstors/admins, as opposed to other comparable platforms (social media networks, basically), that have armies of contracted moderators in low income countries, whose job is to get more and more PTSD every day.
Thats how platforms with comparable amounts of user content do moderation.
Valve absolutely should devote more time and energy to restructuring stages of automated review for user posted comments and content, to improving those review processes, and honestly, should probably just sunset the Steam Forums system, and rethink an entire new approach to it.
But… at the same time, the scale is a significant problem.
Steam has a comparable number of overall daily active users to a major social media platform.
… and the ones that do content moderation, well, they have armies of poor people manually reviewing everything, getting PTSD from that work, and nowadays, likely training an LLM to be a better auto content moderator.
Genuine question for everyone: Do you think that’s an ethically justifiable solution to the problem?
Other genuine question for everyone: What actual technical solution do you think should be implemented?
Kilgore TroutI believe the answer is simply to give better moderation tools to the developers on their own games’ Store and Forum pages, since it’s developers who seem to have an issue with current moderation.
poryThis solves the current problem but reintroduces the one that steam reviews exist to solve: giving the game’s developers control over the most visible discussion channels for the game allows for removal of negative reviews or user backlash. Think about how bad subreddits can be about “removing toxicity” after a GAAS cranks the monetization dial up when the devs are on the mod team.
It could allow to hide the content of the review, but still count it in the total (recommended / not recommended).
Personally I am not in favour, and I see negative bigoted reviews as legitimate reviews. I wouldn’t hold on the same level professional reviews, but it’s only random players we are discussing here. Let’s not pretend that the positive reviews are always constructive, either.
Personally I am not in favour, and I see negative bigoted reviews as legitimate reviews. I wouldn’t hold on the same level professional reviews, but it’s only random players we are discussing here. Let’s not pretend that the positive reviews are always constructive, either.