Video game news oriented community. No NanoUFO is not a bot :)
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My goal is just to have a community where people can go and see what new game news is out for the day and comment on it.
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Once again, a clueless boomer blames games.
How about YouTube? Why aren't we going after Google?
What about Twitter? Musk's platform is filled with extremist hate.
Plenty of extremist diarrhea spewing from the mouth of a President Elect.
It's almost like this kind of content on Steam is a symptom of a bigger problem.
Steam honestly has it really bad. You don't see blatant hate speech in play store reviews but you certainly do on steam. The same goes for their forums, which are almost totally unmoderated. Totally agree tho that this is a symptom of a larger problem and am always wary of the government seeking to impede free speech, even if it's speech I despise. If there are calls to violence and stuff I'm totally cool with that being prosecuted ofc.
Yes, agreed, it definitely needs moderation. But I don't think it needs singling out (again, not saying don't moderate).
The bigger picture is a proliferation of online extremist speech in general. And yes, Google may have done well to moderate play store reviews (anecdotally), but they certainly haven't done well with YouTube.
But I would suggest that focusing on any one online forum / store / outlet / etc. will naturally miss an important trend, and the reasons for that trend should be understood -- while concurrently doing everything possible to limit this kind of hate online.
Yes, people say mean things on the internet. That's never going away. Teach your children how to deal with it.
People need to understand that the internet is a public space. Family PCs should be in a shared space like the living room and kids need to have parental controls enabled on their smart phone. Beyond that, yeah people need to get thicker skins when it comes to social media (including steam in this).
On Jan. 3rd, this will switch to a Republican senator saying the same thing, but the "extremist content" will be "woke."
Kinda stretching it aren't they?
Pepe is a beloved internet meme, not a symbol of hate. Rightoid asshats need to leave pepe and doge the fuck alone. >:(
I thought it came from 4chan, but it actually comes from Myspace. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepe_the_Frog
Wtf pepe is considered alt-right because alt-right uses them sometimes??? I hear they also use English! Maybe English needs to get banned!
They didn't just use it sometimes, they were using it as an intentional dog whistle, that is the difference. Part of dog whistling is choosing something that, otherwise, has had no real relationship to the thing it is being used as a dog whistle for.
so they can choose anything and we just have to stop using it because its their dogwhistle now?
No, but you have to understand that it now comes with the context of being a WP dog whistle. The symbolism of the Nazis weren't anything to their ideology before hand. They had widespread use for thousands of years. Now they, especially the primary one, is all but verboten in the west, and people who use things, like the swastika, as religious symbols, even know to tread with caution using it in the west. White hoods, and robes, have been used in cultural/religious regalia forever. However, you don't use them in the US unless you consider being mistaken for a klan memeber.
Can we reclaim pepe? Probably, it was minor compared to the aforementioned things, and the creator has done a lot to kibosh the commercial use of it from right wing people. However, it was that, and that context doesn't just disappear because you don't like it.
They even admit that pepe can be used in perfectly normal ways, yet they show it's the number one most used one. That's crazy to me lmao
I know the article addresses it but... What about X'ter? Head of Twatter now has an official government position while his shitty company allows Neo Nazi, hate, homophobic, and misogynist behavior runs rampant!
What a fucking farce...
Wow this push against Valve kind of popped up quickly and suddenly didn't it?
Honestly it's about fucking time. The unmoderated hate speech on their platform has gone on long enough. Many people don't realize just how bad it is but I recently hopped on some servers and I got called "tranny" and "groomer" because people knew me and they knew I "used to be a boy" (not true, I never was a boy, just in-denial). I've also seen people pushing Nazi shit on Steam community discussions and in-game on official servers, it's insanely bad.
You know were the ones wholl get censored and not the nazis though
Afaik, the discussion boards for individual games are not moderated by Valve staff (outside of their own titles and the general discussions not tied to any specific game), but by the developer of the game. And it pretty much is ignored by everyone outside of a few indie devs that either just believe in transparency and use the boards themselves, or because they have huge egos and act like little tyrants being the worst kind of Reddit/Discord mod. The only in-between is the automated systems that work off reports and filters.
Bingo.
It's been that way since its inception, astronauts with gun meme or whatever.
As a long time Steam user, while I still really like Steam and think it's the more consumer friendly platform, it has devolved greatly. Especially discussion forums are nearly no different than reddit toxicity where people exhibit their worst behaviors. I miss the legitimate discussions and love for specific games. Now it's mostly complaining and complete disregard for developers being humans.
The flood of garbage games has also been fairly obvious over the last decade. Some filters on your account handle a lot of this at least for the adult ones, but not all of it. It reminds me of the Wii shovelware era, but far worse.
BUT I would remind the Senator they STILL don't even have a fucking budget passed for this fiscal year we are already a month and a half into and they oughta stay in their lane and do their first basic god damn job before pointing at the supposed failures of others.
I don't think anything good can come of the government deciding to crack down on Steam moderation in order to "save the children".
The current situation of Steam having a toxic forum community in places is better than whatever happens with "scrutiny".
If I may put on a tinfoil hat for a moment, this recent push to get Steam labeled as an extremist den that needs to be dealt with feels like yet another attack originating from competitors.
PCGamer really hates doing journalism mhm ? You have to figure out which link goes back to the actual article about the mentioned report, and then find which link directly goes to the report : https://www.adl.org/resources/report/steam-powered-hate-top-gaming-site-rife-extremism-antisemitism
The full report actually provides a lot more information and answers some legitimate questions, and other ignorant comments raised in here, there's an entire appendix about their method and how they fine tuned an ai model to review 150+ million profile pictures / 600+ million comments
There's also interesting info about the customization of Steam profile, which I don't remember Steam publicly sharing :
At the time of data collection, Steam Community had 458.32 million users. Of these, 418.4 million were public profiles and 39.68 million were private profiles (even if a profile was private, there was certain related information that was publicly available).
Many of Steam Community’s 458.32 million users have not customized their accounts extensively. Only 7.4% of public profiles have a summary, Steam Community’s equivalent of a social media bio. 41.8% of profiles use Steam community’s default profile picture, making it the most common avatar on Steam, present on 191.2 million profiles.
Most Steam Community users are also not particularly active. One proxy for activity is player level, which users can increase by activities such as buying games or collecting trading cards while playing games on Steam. Among the 91.69% of Steam Community users who publicize their level, the average level is 2.8 and the median level is 0.0 (the maximum level observed was 5,001). Our detections should be interpreted with this context in mind.
Old ass boomer fixating on games are evil I guess and finding it deserves more attention than places like Twitter and YouTube filled with influencers who have the captive audience of very susceptible individuals that they are molding them to their image. Maybe focus on the root cause.
Yeah let's suggest these kids spending their time somewhere way safer like Matt Gaetz's mansion.
Unsafe? Like is the game going to stab them?
It's a great place to create extremists, there is basically no moderation and people say some fucking awful shit on Steam forums. I think this is a long time coming, honestly.
What has Valve done right?
Overall, I prefer Valve and Steam over a Chinese holding firm that almost has the monopoly over the gaming industry and the company with a black logo that has a close-minded CEO and Sweeney'd to Tencent.
Their anti-cheat
Honestly, this seams a bit unfair. My understanding is that VAC is free or very inexpensive and pretty decent, while other options are potentially better for some cases and more expensive. Valve making a reasonable anti-cheat available is a good thing IMO.
So it existing is a good thing, it just may be the wrong fit for a given game (e.g. more popular games probably need a more intense anti-cheat).
If a game isn't detecting cheaters well enough, blame the game, not the anti-cheat system it uses.