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Not to excuse any hate speech of any kind, but looking around at social media and the effect it has especially on young people and saying “steam forums are the problem” seems like missing the forest for the trees
who said steam forums are “the” problem?
Me. There’s just an irony in pointing out the failure of Steam to effectively moderate (true) when Twitter has a much larger footprint, seems to be actively encouraging hate speech not just tolerating it, and is being rewardered for such behavior. The article points this out too:
There’s an aspect of irony to the complaint: Elon Musk turned Twitter into a haven for racism and far-right rhetoric, after all, and he’s being rewarded with a high seat in the incoming US government.
Senators only have so much time to pick and choose which issues to raise awareness about, so Steam seems like a weird fight to pick given the wider landscape ¯_(ツ)_/¯ . Could just be there’s a much higher chance of getting an actual change from Steam than a larger social media platform.
yeah I think it’s fair to argue there are bigger problems that steam.
Civilization as we know it is an unsafe space for most humans
Damn you, Sid Meier!!!
It is dangerous indeed, I have lost hours without noticing
Those hours were safely recalled from your memory by the government Bureau of Memetics to protect your peace of mind. Thank you for your understanding.
twitter, facebook, instagram, etc are not a problem. steam is 👍
I know they’re not entirely related but it’s the first thing that came to mind so I had to make it.
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I mean yeah, no shit. The steam forums could be removed at no loss to the human race, in fact it’d remove a non-negligible percentage of all really shitty talk on the internet if they deleted everything entirely.
The steam forums are fucking cancer. I was looking for info about a bug I was having with a newly released game. I instead saw an entire thread about how the game is woke and you shouldn’t buy it. The game has an implied lesbian character. Who gives a fuck? The game was pretty good btw.
I’ve seen whole threads in game forums dedicated to Nazism, and I myself have been called a “groomer” and the t-slur because people knew be as a boy before I transitioned. Legitimately horrible place, they absolutely need to take more action against this.
Sorry to hear about your experience. Are the forums moderated at all? All I see is people being terrible to each other. I also saw someone requesting a Brazilian Portuguese translation for a game and people calling them a fucking idiot and telling them to learn english.
It’s up to each game dev to police their forums, AFAIK.
Can they disable their steam forums if they don’t want to moderate them?
That’s a good question. I would hope so!
Yes, some are completely read only
There’s almost no moderation on Steam at all. Sometimes threads advocating violence get removed, or threads with a lot of hate get locked but it’s almost always long after the damage has been done and often times the ones doing nasty shit don’t end up getting banned.
I don’t use steam forums. But I have questions. Do the steam forums have any moderation at all? Is there a report button? Can you report comments or forum threads?
I want to know because I feel like a lot of social media has the same problem as steam forums and these tools exist on the majority of those. They rely on the moderation of fellow users.
I also question whether or not steam actually has an automod or anything like that. Or human moderators.
Please keep in mind that I don’t use the forums so I really have no idea. This is the first time I’m hearing about this, and I’m interested in knowing more.
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While I agree with you that some people are too thin skinned to handle some conversation online… Steam forums or YouTube comment sections are really the very worst of the worst.
If all you read is trash tier content on a platform even if you understand it, it still sucks and remain quite infuriating.
Basically, steam forums are mostly trolling so at this point it’s not about the sensitivity of people but rather that these platform are particularly bad.
I think it really depends on the game (genre?).
I mostly play economic strategy / tycoon games and the forums are pretty chill. The most “controversial” threads revolve around gameplay mechanics discussion or perhaps complaints about lack of updates.
I don’t think I’ve even seen anything approaching what you are describing in economic strategy game forums.
I would most definitely oppose shutting down the steam forums.
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Be careful of not putting plain hate for no reason at the same level than an overzealous minority advocating for rightful social changes.
There is some important ounce of knowledge there.
Let’s say a majority.
For anyone who wants an example, go to the Helldiver’s 2 patch logs on the Steam Community Hub.
No matter which one.
Right wing and not understanding second degree, name a more iconic duo
Edit: Lemmy users and not understanding who people are talking about, name a more iconic duo! I’m talking about the right wing Steam users commenting on the patch notes.
Edit: Lemmy users and not understanding who people are talking about, name a more iconic duo!
I’m laughing with how relevant this feels to me.
Which is exactly why the US senator that said this is a left-wing Democrat, right?
Politics is so tiresome.
I’m talking about the users commenting on Helldivers patch notes. Just like with Starship Troopers, people on the right see Helldivers as inspiring when the real message behind the media is anti fascism.
Try to follow the conversation, that should have been very clear considering the comment I was replying to.
I really like that there was a whole thing about building a super-weapon where players had to complete quests or whatever to contribute to its development. Then enough players compete the quest and the weapon was completed, and it turned out to be an orbital bombardment that killed enemies and players indiscriminately.
A lot of players were pissed but it’s so aggressively in-character I can’t imagine how they didn’t see it coming.
Jesus, that’s a lot of people afraid of gay people.
can you link one? I’m on community hub looking for hate and can’t find it.
found someone spamming for LGBT stuff but most people just ignored it
https://steamcommunity.com/app/553850/eventcomments/4635986512580739894?snr=2_9_100003_
Steam forums and groups have become a place to organize far right raiding groups that have harassing people and bullying women and minorities or straight up nazism glorification as their sole objective and Steam just does not care.
Of course they don’t, companies only care when Pepsi Co and P&G take away their ad revenue for serving extremist content and catering to extremists. Valve has no ad revenue and is the only real PC game store on the block, so no one can make them “care” the way YouTube and Twitch, and other platforms are made to “care”.
Got some links… I wanna see. I probably normally don’t venture on these forums where that happens.
If you follow the links, they refer to copy pasta’s of hatefull stuff including swastikas but no breakdown of what is counted, the use of the happy merchant (a meme with an antisemitic origin used to convey greed) and the use of pepe the frog in profile pics (pepe is a symbol of hate according to the ADL).
The issue I have with the whole here is that I don’t subscribe to the premise on which the analysis is based.
IF you assume pepe is a hate symbol, then each case it is used is an expression of hate and furtherance of that hate. I however reject the premise that pepe is a symbol of hate.
The use of the happy merchant is a bit more of a problem, because I see the antisemitic message it has. However I also see a lot of stupid people that don’t… and have seen the image used (probably in antisemitic context referring to greed) but people associate it with greed primarily… so this one is an issue, I think I refuse part of the premise, namely that the antisemitism part is a dominant factor when the image is used.
These are the 2 main examples, a lot more in the report that have similar caveats.
Boomers saying and thinking boomer things.
I am not a boomer, but I am starting to be an old fart myself.
Guess what the older generations said about video games back then? Satanic, create violence, hyper sexualization…
And at the end of the day, we didn’t end up as violent atheists watching porn on a portable device…
(For the people wondering, this post is a joke)
Come back when you can argue without the “but the kids” line of thinking.
I would have agreed if they replaced steam with discord.
Or twitter
Or Facebook
To be fair, Discord has been feeling the heat for a while, on multiple fronts and for multiple reasons. Not the least of which was a dumbass leaking classified information to his teenage buddies.
Crunchyroll removed their comments section recently. They said it was because of all the hateful comments for one show. Sony just didn’t want to deal with it, so gone, which is a real shame. If the comments are not part of the product being sold, then they will end up getting dropped if abused.
I mean, if your gonna go for the worse of it all, 4chan is right there.
Valve hasn’t openly stated they are like 4chan though, they may correct it if pressured since it wasn’t their explicit goal to be a right-wing safe haven. Maybe it is but they haven’t been open about it yet. 4chan is a lost cause when it comes to this, same as kiwifarms. They do not care and will not budge. Valve might since they need Governemnts not to ban them or publishers not to pull out else they lose money.
And 4chan has already been the recipient of government scrutiny, including a lawsuit attempting to shut them down.
“…some men aren’t looking for anything logical, like money. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.”
Stop having fun you god damn nazis.Never forget, Steam allowed Alex Jones to publish his “anti-woke” video game there. And it was as disgusting as you can imagine.
Worst part is, it seems like it’s still up on the platform for purchase. They legitimately do not care. It’s funny though that they decided to ban one developer and their games because the person was being openly transphobic, so it seems like they’re trying to make people think they care, despite not actually caring.
Sort of like every business and corporation that has a booth at Pridefest. Many of them are hostile to the LGBTQ+ community, yet they’re at Pridefest just for the PR.
Yeah, sort of. Though they’re a bit more honest since they don’t even pretend to care about us. Probably hoping that if they stay quiet long enough the problem will go away and won’t hurt them.
If there’s one thing I hate about Steam, it’s their lack of moderation. There’s Nazi shit everywhere, every game who’s using “woke” elements like neutral terms for body types or giving people the choice of their pronoun, or having gay characters, or people of color, or women in positions of power, etc. etc. gets the inevitable flood of constant woke crying threads, comments & review bombing. There’s many people who glorify the RuZZian invasion of Ukraine as well through their profiles, while I could not even have a freaking avatar depicting a person dangling from a tree, which was graphically maybe a small step ahead of a stick figure from a hangman game. And even outside of politics it’s full of trolls and clown farmers (they should really remove that one anyway). You ask for technical help, and everyone tells you basic shit or attacks you. It’s a cesspool.
Agreed, they really need to step it up when it comes to moderation of this type of content, including giving out permanent bans to people who make threats or harass others. Most people get a slap on the wrist if anything. I was literally harassed the last time I logged in to steam because the people I knew before knew me as a boy and I come back as a girl (I’m transfem) and they really didn’t like that, ended up calling me a groomer and the t-slur. Awful experience, even though I reported it Valve did absolutely nothing about it.
