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.