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US Senator Warner Presses Valve to Crack Down on Hateful Accounts and Rhetoric Proliferating on Steam
(www.warner.senate.gov)
this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2024
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We can start with larger, much more influential social media platforms. How about Twitter?
Steam Forums really are a hellhole that has allowed the worst toxicity to incubate and spread. They've got to crack down.
Every fucking game lately has a "This game woke?" post in the discussions... Then they go on a circle jerk about how having options is disgusting and dei brown people ruin everything.
They're such gross hate filled people...
And they need to kick out all of the shitty moderators who can't moderate. They're all complicit by letting the shit pile up.
Steam has moderators?
You know what? Normally I don't like politicians sticking their nose in games because historically speaking, they tend to side with the crowd that blames video games for nearly everything.
But this, yes, I'm fucking for this. I'm permanently banned from the Steam Forums because I made an honest suggestion to remove the stupid jester award. Because it was being used to brand all of my game reviews, while trolls were antagonizing me and being all snarky with how they've participated in the discussion.
And this went on for a good week and a half. Who did the moderators side with? The fucking trolls of course! Now while I don't think Warner in particular has anything of interest in cases like mine. But I'll tell you one thing about trolls online, is that they tend to be part of the groups listed in what Warner wrote to Valve. Because they are pieces of fucking shit that like to ruin everyone in trying to be a community and act like a clique of assholes who tend to have traces of racism, sexism, xenophobic .etc because they all make it out to be a joke.
Feels like the Steam community groups and discussions are so massive that it's going to be an impossible job to start managing it now, unless they just nuke the entire thing and start over.
It got noticeably worse in the summer of last year. I have no idea what actually changed around then, but that was the first time the Steam forums were so toxic that it may not have been worth asking your question.
Steam forum have been massively toxic for years my brother-in-law work for a company that do moderation for steam and it's mostly extreme racist shit mix with some Pedo shit they would need 10 000 more staff just to start getting the upper hand
At this point the best time to start is now.
They do but it's a bad paying job with heavy mental health tax for the worker so not a lot of people want to do it.
At this point they should just close the forum ( finding game info is pretty easy anyway ) or maybe try use AI to do a part of it
What's it pay? Give me a ban hammer and one week, and I'll get rid of them Nazis for you!
If anyone read the report about the hate comments, you would know that they consider Pepe to fall into this category and was the OVERWHELMING majority of the percentage of what they refer to as hate speech... and it is just a frog. Pepe was 1st in percentage while swastikas were 2nd at 9% - just to give you an idea. Also steam has over a billion users, over a hundred million active users and if you crunch the numbers, it is less than a percent of accounts posting this thing of material. I'm not saying racist shit on steam isn't a problem, but they're blowing it up way out of its actual scope.
Politicians would be better focusing on things that matter like how the Democrats lost the election to Trump and how they're going to win the midterms.
A crappy paper finding rude words and phrases on steam is not really worthy of anyone's attention but Valve's
"Millions" of examples sounds dramatic until you look at how many billions of exchanges have been made in valves forums and comment pages. It needs addressing but it's not of international or even national importance.
Instead of virtue signalling, Warren should be asking how the Dems managed to allow Biden a free ride through the primaries, held on til the bitter end blocking alternatives and then endorsing Harris blocking any debate.
I'd rather Warren focus on fixing the Democratic Party. A bit of democracy in the Democrat party would be a start.
Just a quick correction, this is Mark Warner, not Elizabeth Warren. Otherwise I agree with you though.
Guy wrote an essay on an article he didn’t read.
It's a shame we can only work on one thing at a time
Virtue Signaling has to be one of the worst new phrases this decade. People are just trying to do good and they get accused of maliciousness for it
As nice as this would be, free speech is free speech. IDK how they'd begin to moderate something so large.
This is the central myth of "free speech" under the 1st Amendment.
The 1st Amendment only protects individuals exercising speech and expression from laws being passed or used to silence said speech or expression and from agents of the government abridging the rights. That is a lot, but it is also all. Private citizens are allowed to abridge each other's speech as much as we like. Private companies can censor whatever they want. This is why the guy wrote a letter to Steam, because literally ANY larger action would have crossed the line.