Imagine having nothing better to do than writing negative reviews for something that is not even intended for you…
Karen: “I don’t like spicy food… Can someone give me a list with restaurants in my area that serve it, so that I can give them bad reviews?”
Does anybody wanna know the actual mechanics of why Steam is poorly user-content moderated?
Its because they primarily rely on automated systems, and a very, very small team of inhouse moderators/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 generated content have done moderation, for decades.
Nowadays such platforms are also using those human moderator workforces to train LLMs to be better at auto-moderating or at least auto-flagging things.
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, 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?
Offshore and concentrate the hate and suffering?
Other genuine question for everyone: What actual technical solution do you think should be implemented?
Should Valve run a massive LLM, an AI, to either directly moderate or screen all user generated content on Steam?
Final genuine question: Does your answer involve the concept that all user content on a platform, or website, should be the legal responsibility of the platform/website operator?
Because if your answer to that last question is yes, well then you’re basically saying we should overturn Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which would mean, amongst other things, any lemmy instance hosted in the US should itself be taken down if any of its users say something like ‘I hope Donald Trump dies a horrible death, soon.’
Because that’s almost certainly going to be viewed as a direct death threat by the current administration, if not just by the currently existing .world mod team.
I 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.
Well ok, that sounds reasonable to me!
What kinds of tools do you mean?
Like, I’m not trying to be duplicitous, I genuienly want Steam to not be a cesspool.
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/community_moderation
There’s an overview of what currently exists.
Yeah, a lot of it is based on having to manually flag things as harassment or bigotry or something like that, especially when it comes to actual game reviews, and it is obviously the case that whatever automated systems Valve currently has in place to auto flag things… are not sufficient.
And just for more context, here is the feed of Steamworks itself, which… more or less, is the sprt of update pipeline for Steam itself, as game devs would interface with it, which is also the system that would be the thing getting updated with new content moderation concepts.
https://store.steampowered.com/news/group/4145017
And here is basically the Steam Group for Steamworks/Steam itself, more or less, that may also be relevant:
Your entire comment reeks of “we shouldn’t fight fire because that puts firefighters at risk”.
There are no 100% ethical solutions to every problem, real life is a compromise. You can get better ethical results by allowing those workers to get adequate monetary compensation for their work and seek medical help if they need it. Otherwise what’s the solution, allow everyone to read the same stuff? Why is that more ethical? Is it more ethical for the random user (who may also be a suggestible kid, or a person belonging to a persecuted minority) who reads it? Is it more ethical for the developers who get their game review bombed by fascists and bigots, and see their source of revenue diminish or fizzle out because of it?
As for the legal responsibility, it becomes so when the platform is complicit with the users writing hateful stuff. You are not responsible for the random shithead declaring his love for Mein Kampf. You are responsible for the hundreds of users who do, while you repeatedly ignore the reports of their misconduct, thus implicitly accepting and normalizing their behavior.
Additionally, when hateful behavior is accepted and normalize, human shit stains will come in drove and multiply the problem tenfold. By moderating their spaces, they would prevent a lot of those hateful messages from being written in the first place.
I think thats quite an unfair characterization.
Primarily because firefighters, firefighting, tends to be a fairly exclusive field, that requires a lot of training, that tends to pay pretty darned well.
Whereas the armies of content moderators tend to be incredibly poorly paid. The entire way this kind of work is done is that it nearly always either entirely or largely is done by the lowest bidder, in the poorest places possible.
As compared to firefighters, who… at least in terms of municipal firefighters, well that tends to be fairly local.
(* * * With the massive glaring exception of using prisoner labor to fill in gaps in often extremely dangerous firefighting conditions, which is more comparable to exploiting those who don’t really have better options * * *)
I am pointing out that yes, the problem exactly is that none of the potential solutions here are ethically wonderful, that this is not a kind of ‘oh well obviously they could just do this simple and easy fix and everyone would be happy’ kind of situation.
So… your ethical calculus seems to conclude that stopping the spread of bigotry and fascist rhetoric in richer countries is worth the cost of the sanity of workers in poorer countries.
Your ethical calculus seems to be that if 100s of users of a website/platform don’t get banned rapidly for violating TOS, then the website/platform should be held legally liable for that, which would mean that you believe that basically every website platform with over roughly half a million DAU, that doesn’t use a complex layered system of LLMs with absurd economic and environmental costs, or have a sizeable to massive human moderator team, that they should all be sued or fined into non existence.
… Unless you maybe want to clarify more exactly what you mean here.
You also don’t directly address at all the idea of using an LLM for these tasks… which is what all of the megaplatforms with much more active consistent, rapid, and often overzealous or erroneous moderation do.
I’m just trying to present the actual totality of the moral ramifications of the involved systems and practices relevant to this topic.
If confronting the actual ugliness of them challenges you, makes you defensive and accusatory, good.
That means you likely never thought about the totality of the situation here that deeply.
I already answered your questions, but you seem more intent at discussing abstract ethics like an armchair philosopher rather than the real problem at hand.
Whereas the armies of content moderators tend to be incredibly poorly paid. The entire way this kind of work is done is that it nearly always either entirely or largely is done by the lowest bidder, in the poorest places possible.
[…]
So… your ethical calculus seems to conclude that stopping the spread of bigotry and fascist rhetoric in richer countries is worth the cost of the sanity of workers in poorer countries.Why is the assumption that those workers must be poorly paid? If Valve, the multi billion dollar company whose owner owns multiple yachts as well as the company producing them, doesn’t pay its workers adequately, then Valve is at fault. The solution shouldn’t be to throw up hands and go home. There is a solution but they aren’t willing to take it because it would require them to spend money, which is what I said in my first comment.
Your ethical calculus seems to be that if 100s of users of a website/platform don’t get banned rapidly for violating TOS, then the website/platform should be held legally liable for that […]
You know damn well what I meant but you keep this enlightened bullshit going on.
Valve literally got reports about those reviews and ignored them. They are at fault. Full stop.
If confronting the actual ugliness of them challenges you, makes you defensive and accusatory, good. That means you likely never thought about the totality of the situation here that deeply.
Please stop this enlightened philosopher bullshit. It’s painful to read and makes you look dumb.
Why is the assumption that those workers must be poorly paid?
Because that is how this always works out, in practice, under the currently existing economic reality.
Human content moderators basically work on the same paradigm as Amazon MTurk’ers, as DoorDash drivers. Independent subcontactors of contractors.
Its not a job that needs highly trained people. Its a job that needs a massive volume of people to handle a massive volume of content, then you have a tiny number of data scientists running analytics on associations or trends and patterns, to fine tune and condense an aggregate of many human decisions into systems of heuristics for an auto content moderating system.
This just is how this industry works.
Having some other kind of paradigm with say, less, more highly paid human content moderators is not scalable, it does not work to handle the sheer volume of shit being squeezed through the pipes.
That is just the practical reality as it currently is.
If Valve, the multi billion dollar company whose owner owns multiple yachts as well as the company producing them, doesn’t pay its workers adequately, then Valve is at fault.
I mean, to an extent, I agree with you, see my original post that you responded to you where I said Valve should absolutely place more focus and effort on developing better automated systems and changing up the paradigm of how all of it works, so that its more effective.
The solution shouldn’t be to throw up hands and go home. There is a solution but they aren’t willing to take it because it would require them to spend money, which is what I said in my first comment.
Mhm. Yep. Anyway, your now seemingly proposed solution of… I dunno, paying Valves existing human moderator team more money?
Won’t solve the problem.
Or… do you want them to just hire thousands to tens to hundreds of thousands of human moderators?
Because that is the scale of the # of humans Valve would need to hire.
What should their wages be?
Should they just burn through all of the money that they have set aside to throw at developing innovations in the industry, should they stop inventing/manufacturing Steam Machines, Steam Frames, Proton, etc?
Valve is estimated to have a net worth of roughly $10 billion. Estimated yearly revenue in 2025 of $17 billion. No estimates exist of their yearly costs, as far as I can tell.
So ok, lets say they have… $1 billion a year, they can devote to paying an army of moderators.
If you pay them $25 an hour, thats $52k for a full time year. Thats 19,230 people.
That also makes ~98% of their employees those people.
Thats a massive shift to what the company even is.
… this is another huge reason why companies use contractors for this.
Also, 20k people might kinda help, but you’d probably need more like 5x to 20x that.
You know damn well what I meant but you keep this enlightened bullshit going on.Valve literally got reports about those reviews and ignored them. They are at fault. Full stop.
Did they intentionally ignore them?
Or is their moderator team and automated systems maybe stretched beyond capacity, and needs a comprehensive overhaul?
If you are talking about this:
https://bsky.app/profile/alienmelon.bsky.social/post/3mc2eaesex22u
Yeah that’s a bot response, an automated response, with a random first name attached to it.
I’ve had several encounters with Steam Support before.
This is how it works, you have to keep poking and pleading pretty damn persistently to get any kind of response that does not read like a standard boilerplate canned response to a set of basically most prominent tags as to the type of thing you are contacting them for.
Now, is this a shitty thing to do, have a bot pretend to be a person?
Yes.
… its also extremely common, across all kinds of industries, to do this.
Hence, why my initial comment, again, called for overhauling this system.
Please stop this enlightened philosopher bullshit.
You may note that I’ve made nearly 0 attempt at actual philosophy, an actual prescriptive system to define and evaluate morals and moral decisions.
I am just describing the complexity and details of the situation.
Meanwhile, to you, this is ‘rich company bad, can fix if wanted to’.
… While I’m giving you the specifics of … well it matters what exactly the situation is, how you solve the problem is the important and also complicated part.
Just identifying that a thing is bad and should be fixed is facile, obvious.
Trying to come up with a potentially feasible solution, muchless an optimal one, is complicated, involves nuance and detail that you seem to be offended by.
Gamergate never ended, and the lack of moderation on Steam has made it a very attractive place for fascists to spread propaganda. It’s been a serious problem for a very long time and Valve just isn’t doing anything about it.
‘Steam Store Front’ should be shortened to ‘Stormfront’. At least then no one would be shocked when they discover it’s teeming with illiterate bigots.
All I can suggest is that you report and block as much as you can. If there’s a game, like Relooted, that’s a bug light for scumbags, go to its forums when you have 10 minutes free and just report the shitstains you come across. Steam does take action sometimes.
It’s actually funny how many shitstains try to add me to their friend list so they can presumably harass me (my profile is VERY gay) but they have a gigantic notice saying they basically can not interact socially on Steam because they were softbanned for violating the TOS. It’s weird they can even send requests at all when they are literally blocked from using the chat system.
Stormfront is the first Dresden files novel 😀
it sounds like this developer goes out of their way to look for hateful comments to be offended about and report. you’re not going to magically fix trolling on on the internet by having people mass report individual comments.
trolls existed before the internet and they will be annoying shits for centuries to come. this dev needs to stop looking for stress and learn to report and move on.
This exact same article was already shared a week ago here, and it got this same reply.
Negative reviews can have consequences on how the game sells. The article (which apparently nobody reads, because Lemmy has a hard on for Steam and refuses to admit that Lord Gabe can do wrong) is NOT talking about random comments, it makes very specific examples (with links) to specific games that have received negative reviews for things unrelated to the game at hand, such as antisemitism and political content.
“I’m not new to online harassment,” says designer Nathalie Lawhead, who spent two years trying to get reviews removed from their games’ pages. Both reference allegations of sexual assault that Lawhead made in 2019. “I assumed reporting Steam abuse might have its own issues. But when people suggested that I open a ticket, I did have hope that this would be the way to get it resolved.”
One of the reviews, published in 2023, read, “cringe game, made by a liar”. The other, a review of Lawhead’s game Blue Suburbia posted in 2024, said: “A women [sic] who seeks to destroy other’s [sic] career made this. It’s very poorly put together. She also probably has dual Israeli citizenship with how pointy her nose is.”
Despite Steam’s code of online conduct and community guidelines prohibiting “abusive language or insults”, public accusations or “discrimination”, moderators initially cleared both reviews after Lawhead reported them.Some games have been targeted by Steam curators. Ethan, the developer of Coven, a first-person action-horror set in the 1600s, says he has been targeted by “CharlieTweetsDetected”, a curator devoted to recommending games based solely on whether their developers are perceived to have correctly mourned the assassination of rightwing activist Charlie Kirk.
CharlieTweetsDetected’s review of Coven, a first-person action-horror game set in the 1600s, read simply “Celebrated Sept 10th on blue sky [sic]”. This encouraged others to post further reviews and comments related to Kirk (and not the game). “I even mentioned it to Steam support,” Ethan says, “how it stemmed from that curator list, but they weren’t interested.” Instead, Steam support claimed that “off-topic” constituted “a recipe for cookies, or something completely unrelated to video games that is clearly trolling.” Reviews referencing Kirk, including one reading simply “RIP Charlie Kirk” alongside a negative rating, did not fit that criteria according to Steam; all remain in place today.The problem is not even that Steam forums are a cesspool (which they are, by the way), but that Steam adamantly refuses to moderate the shit that gets posted on their site, going so far as to ignore that shit even when it gets reported, because ultimately they gain money from those people, so they don’t care.
I like Steam. I’ve used it since the ol’ orange box came out. But the forums do desperately need moderation. They’re rarely worth looking at if you actually want to be informed about something. The whole thing is worse than YouTube comments. You shouldn’t even go there unless you hit it from a search engine request about a very specific issue.
Some games have been targeted by Steam curators
Curators are hidden by default, only people who follow the curator see curator recommendations. They also don’t affect store visibility or the review score in any way,.
The problem is not even that Steam forums are a cesspool
Steam leaves moderation of forums to the developer/publisher to moderate as they wish, as if they interfered you bet they’d get complaints about Valve stepping on their toes. If a developer/publisher decides they want to allow hatred in their Steam forums, you should probably blame them.
Curators are hidden by default, only people who follow the curator see curator recommendations. They also don’t affect store visibility or the review score in any way.
Cool! Will you also read the rest of the quote?
This encouraged others to post further reviews and comments related to Kirk (and not the game).
But apparently nobody wants to read the article, so here’s my screenshot:
spoiler
Steam leaves moderation of forums to the developer/publisher to moderate as they wish, as if they interfered you bet they’d get complaints about Valve stepping on their toes. If a developer/publisher decides they want to allow hatred in their Steam forums, you should probably blame them.
Yes, I also blame the poor indie dev who barely gets enough money to keep existing instead of the multi billion dollar company that apparently is content with misogyny, racism and bigotry running rampant on every facet of their platform.
This encouraged others to post further reviews and comments related to Kirk (and not the game).
Do we have any proof those reviews were from people following that curator? I imagine that information has also been posted elsewhere online.
Do you think off topic reviews or curator recommendations should be allowed for things you approve of? Say if a review points out the developer is a secret fascist?
Yes, I also blame the poor indie dev who barely gets enough money to keep existing
Oh please, moderating a forum unpaid for 5 mins every now and again is so easy it’s how this whole platform and Reddit function. If you’re truly an indie dev without the resources to moderate your own space, Steam allow you to simply close the forums and forbid discussions.
Do we have any proof those reviews were from people following that curator? I imagine that information has also been posted elsewhere online.
Why does that curator exist in the first place? Why are those reviews still up?
Do you think off topic reviews or curator recommendations should be allowed for things you approve of? Say if a review points out the developer is a secret fascist?
Great comeback! I really love whatabaoutism.
Oh please, moderating a forum unpaid for 5 mins every now and again is so easy it’s how this whole platform and Reddit function.
Please, kindly refrain from talking about things you know jack shit about.
If you’re truly an indie dev without the resources to moderate your own space, Steam allow you to simply close the forums and forbid discussions.
Steam forums are a resource for devs to interact with the community, get feedback, etc…
Closing them means losing a resource. What you suggest is that devs big enough to employ a community manager should have access to that resource, while small/solo devs should just accept that they can’t have it. Sounds like second class citizen treatment to me.It would be a lot easier if Steam got their shit together and started moderating their online spaces, which is something they should’ve been doing this whole time.
That’s not whataboutism because it is a related question. You can’t make a global rule dependent on taste so if you are against these you have to be against someone being outed as fachist too. Either you allow reviews about the developer or you don’t
It’s the dictionary definition of whataboutism.
“Steam has a problem with moderation, these are hateful reviews that have been reported but ignored by Steam support team”
“But what about fascists?”The original user didn’t answer and ran with their tail between their legs q, because they didn’t want to admit that Steam has a problem with moderation.
Negative reviews can have consequences on how the game sells.
And this is exactly why there’s a concerted effort to snuff out any negativity at all as it pertains to consumerism.
Negativity is bad for business.
actually, I did read the article. i wouldn’t have commented unless I had.
my opinion still remains the same. steam forums can absolutely be a cesspool. a lot of internet places can. most of them in fact. moderation goes a long way, but it’s my opinion that if you go looking for shitty comments and behavior, you will find it.
there’s a reason the saying is “don’t feed the trolls”. and I wouldn’t be surprised if harassment towards this developer increases tenfold due to this opinion article coming out.
i sincerely hope it doesn’t happen, but I feel it will.
You’re acting like harassment of the sort in the article is some kind of unavoidable natural phenomenon, and the only possible course of action is for the victims to suck it up and take it.
Steam is a platform owned, operated, and fully controlled by Valve. They have the ability and the money to take steps to improve the situation, but instead they seem perfectly happy to let it continue, including not even bothering to enforce the few rules they do have. It’s gross.
Active moderation requires effort and funds. Throwing up your hands saying thats how it’s always been and nothing can be done is enabling the bullshit. Victim blaming the dev when this is widespread is disingenuous at best.
Oh boy, more censorship.
“racism and bigotry must be protected at any cost”
Some would say that, yes.
Racism and bigotry outside government institution doesnt really do much, it’s kind of self defeating in most situations that actually mean anything.
That is legitimately one of the single dumbest statements I’ve ever read in my entire life.
How the fuck do you mega brained genius think racist and bigoted ideas get spread and propagated ?
That is legitimately one of the single dumbest statements I’ve ever read in my entire life.
First day on the internets?
How the fuck do you mega brained genius think racist and bigoted ideas get spread and propagated ?
It’s a residual product of almost 200 years of government sanctioned racism. I’d explain more but if you were interested you wouldn’t have came out so hot.
If you think racist talk by private citizens doesn’t spread racist and bigoted ideas, then you’re not worth talking too.
That’s one of the dumbest and nonsensical things I’ve ever heard anyone say. I’m genuinely flabbergasted that a functional adult could believe something so ridiculously and obviously idiotic.
You really think people like Andrew Tate or Ben Shapiro have zero role in spreading racist and bigoted ideals ? Fucking really ? Ya think Fox News has never convinced anyone of bigoted shit ? Ya think Alex Jones didn’t make people call in DEATH THREATS to the parents of murdered children ?
Incel forums have literally motivated mass shooters, you gonna tell me those incel forums were government run, or what ?
But yeah, sure. Racist and bigoted talk outside of government institutions is totally inconsequential.
If you think racist talk by private citizens doesn’t spread racist and bigoted ideas, then you’re not worth talking too.
I said absolutely nothing even approaching a dramatic leap to that conclusion.
You literally said, verbatim
racism and bigotry outside of government institutions doesn’t really do much
Unless you mean to tell me that the spread of these ideas “isn’t doing much”, which frankly, I’d consider even worse.
Spoken like somebody who hasn’t experience racism or bigotry.
