
Kinda stretching it aren't they?

Kinda stretching it aren't they?
Oh fuck off. The US is an unsafe place, not Steam.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Where? Where at tho? I've been using steam and playing valve games for like 16 years or something like that and I don't see it anywhere. Maybe the one troll in user made guides but that usually goes away just like any other platform
you can go through the community hubs/reviews of basically any WW2/military shooter or strategy game and see multiple people with Hitler avatars, swastikas, black suns, anything you can think of. it's extremely prevalent.
hell, just going through the HOI4 community hub and in the first 30 seconds of scrolling I've come across at least 3 nazi posts. the forums are completely unmoderated, going through the discussions and I've already found multiple instances of straight up holocaust denial/glorification. it's absolutely rampant.
You guys can't even keep nazis out of government. Why should it be steams responsibility to keep them from playing a game?
That's the whole point. Sure there's Nazis in the government but look over there, a Nazi! Look over there a Nazi! It's Nazis from top to bottom. Wanna let us censor the Internet to stop them? No? You're a Nazi sympathiser then.
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.
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?
Translation: Our corpo overlords don't like that you can review bomb our shitty games and force us to take losses when we do shitty corpo things. Appease my bosses or they'll make me be bottom again with no lube.
Yes, people say mean things on the internet. That's never going away. Teach your children how to deal with it.
I don't think that Nazi shit or promotion of terrorism falls under "mean things on the internet" that would be over-trivializing, and I do say that because I have indeed seen many people doing these things in my years on Steam, as well as encouraging violence towards me for being a girl and having "used to have been a boy" (being transgender).
On Jan. 3rd, this will switch to a Republican senator saying the same thing, but the "extremist content" will be "woke."
Literally turning america entirely into an unsafe place then threatening others for it. Are they trying to do a government take over of a shiny appealing money maker? It sure seems like they actually want the nazis everywhere else, I bet if they actually do anything they will keep the nazis if they actually exist in the first place.
ADL report
Opinion discarded. Those ADL fucks lie about damn near everything.
Steam discussion forums on every game are a complete dumpster fire. Someone needs to do better, whether it is Steam themselves or moderators.
Meanwhile in Ohio...
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/11/18/us/columbus-ohio-neo-nazi-march-hnk/index.html
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.
they go after my hobbies and i will turn into extremist
Yeah let's suggest these kids spending their time somewhere way safer like Matt Gaetz's mansion.
Hitler My Friend is a 99 cent game on Steam with an 8/10 positive rating.
A 3D shooter that will change your ideas about alternative history! In this game you will climb into the boots of the unforeseen Adolf Hitler.
There's more, but I'm not sifting through more dog shit. This is a good thing.
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