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this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2026
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Steam Forums are slowly devolving into one of the worst right-wing incubators because they refuse to proactively moderate. Any time a game gets declared a target by the post-Gamergate crowd, the boards become flooded with propaganda, and Valve does not care.
The forums are moderated (or in many cases not moderated) by the game publisher, not Steam. If they don't want to moderate they could technically close the forum for their game but very few publishers do so.
Maybe they're supposed to be moderated by devs/publishers, but I'd guess as high as 99% of steam communities are unmoderated or simply auto moderated for specific slurs. Basically every game I've ever looked at has just piles of threads asking "Is ThIs GaMe WoKe???" or "PLEASE ADD LGBTQ2IABBQ+ CHARACTERS!!!" as award farming shitposts. Heaven forbid its a competitive game because those forums get rancid. It also happens I'm the discussion of basically every news update for any game with a remotely active community.
There is zero or nearly zero accountability for the state of the community hub and Valve simply saying "devs should do it" is just passing the buck.
Do devs have the ability to turn forums/communities off? If so, I feel like that's the best option if they don't want to moderate it.
They don't. I know one indie developer once privately told me they wished they could.
Yeah, that really should be an option. I don’t think it’s infeasible for Valve to employ their own moderators and ensure the communities are less toxic. Short of that though, letting developers/publishers disable them is the bare minimum they can do.
I was close to saying infeasible was not a word but then I looked it up. My bad
Valve did respond to this by removing points from community awards a while ago. It won't clean up the posts already there, because that's the game's developer's job, but it's no longer a viable point farming strategy to just make a big thread on a new game calling it woke to generate a bunch of clown awards.
Pretty sure they can't close the forums, actually. I've never seen a Steam forum be outright disabled, despite seeing many devs/publishers who would absolutely close that down as a place of critique. I haven't even seen delisted but viewable games close down their forums from new posts. Are you sure Valve doesn't have an agreement with publishers that they are required to keep the forum open for their games?
The discussion I have seen from publishers is that the automated moderation on Steam is literally nonexistent from their end, and the global automation is far too lax. So they push their player base to platforms that are actually capable of dealing with problematic behavior.
The default is that Valve does moderation, and if you don't opt-out of it, they consider those kinds of topics to be completely on-topic and valid, removing the reports. All of the relevant Steamworks pages aimed at publishers (eg Steam Community) are publicly available and are really enough to blame Valve for the whole state of things.
Even if a publisher opts-out of Valve moderation, they don't have the tools to deal with sockpuppets or organized attacks, and being banned from one game forum just means those same accounts move elsewhere. Valve could absolutely deal with it by doing community-wide bans, but they don't.
It's complicated I guess. People often use the "Nazi bar" analogy and I kinda get it. But I am also conflicted. Yes I disagree with their opinions and wish they will stop having those opinions. But on the other hand moderating them will just make them move to somewhere else, and they will still be having those opinions, and arguably in a worse environment. Because it would be more of a bubble with nobody countering them.
Forcing the most radical extremists underground won't deprogram them, but it will make it significantly more difficult for them to spread propaganda. The point of deplatforming is to shut down the pipeline so that fewer people get radicalized.
I mean, 4chan isn't that hard to find. IMO instead of trying to shield people from these "dangerous ideas" so they don't get radicalized, why don't we try teach more people critical thinking skills? Quarantine vs vaccination, I guess.
🙄
Steam has far greater reach than 4chan. 4chan is the quarantine in your analogy, everyone else left that Nazi Bar after /pol/ happened.
If you think you can teach the average Steam user critical thinking skills, I welcome you to go ahead and try. Have fun.
that's a bit defeatist, isn't it. and you are underestimating 4chan, it has 86 million monthly active users, while steam has 132 million.
This isn't about this type of moderation, it's about NSFW censorship from payment processors.
Don't get me wrong, I definitely agree with you, but Steam is not the only place with this problem and Steam isn't the only one with lackluster moderation for it. We literally wouldn't be in the global political situations were in right now if it wasn't for propaganda flooding every facet of the internet. Gamers are a minority internationally and most actual gamers think the steam forums are not even worth looking at.
I'm just saying don't blame only blame Steam. There's an issue with this type of shit literally everywhere and nobody in charge gives a shit.
I never said Steam was the only website on the internet with problems. But I'm replying to a thread specifically about Steam.
And the only solution anyone will have an appetite for in the coming years is applying automated AI agents to do the work.
It’s otherwise really expensive and labor intensive to do proper moderation.
They shouldn’t enable these forums by default IMO.
did gabe save your dog from a burning building? this is weird
Right, it's just that otherwise ostensibly "liberal" or "leftist" people still jerk off Valve and Newell specifically despite them having a lot of the same issues as other corporations that people dislike other corporations for.