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Does anybody wanna know the actual mechanics of why Steam is poorly user-content moderated?
Its because they primarily rely on automated systems, and a very, very small team of inhouse moderators/admins, as opposed to other comparable platforms (social media networks, basically), that have armies of contracted moderators in low income countries, whose job is to get more and more PTSD every day.
Thats how platforms with comparable amounts of user generated content have done moderation, for decades.
Nowadays such platforms are also using those human moderator workforces to train LLMs to be better at auto-moderating or at least auto-flagging things.
Valve absolutely should devote more time and energy to restructuring stages of automated review for user posted comments and content, to improving those review processes, and honestly, should probably just sunset the Steam Forums system, and rethink an entire new approach to it.
But… at the same time, the scale is a significant problem.
Steam has a comparable number of overall daily active users to a major social media platform.
… and the ones that do content moderation, well, they have armies of poor people manually reviewing everything, getting PTSD from that work, and nowadays, training an LLM to be a better auto content moderator.
Genuine question for everyone: Do you think that’s an ethically justifiable solution to the problem?
Offshore and concentrate the hate and suffering?
Other genuine question for everyone: What actual technical solution do you think should be implemented?
Should Valve run a massive LLM, an AI, to either directly moderate or screen all user generated content on Steam?
Final genuine question: Does your answer involve the concept that all user content on a platform, or website, should be the legal responsibility of the platform/website operator?
Because if your answer to that last question is yes, well then you’re basically saying we should overturn Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which would mean, amongst other things, any lemmy instance hosted in the US should itself be taken down if any of its users say something like ‘I hope Donald Trump dies a horrible death, soon.’
Because that’s almost certainly going to be viewed as a direct death threat by the current administration, if not just by the currently existing .world mod team.
I believe the answer is simply to give better moderation tools to the developers on their own games’ Store and Forum pages, since it’s developers who seem to have an issue with current moderation.
This solves the current problem but reintroduces the one that steam reviews exist to solve: giving the game’s developers control over the most visible discussion channels for the game allows for removal of negative reviews or user backlash. Think about how bad subreddits can be about “removing toxicity” after a GAAS cranks the monetization dial up when the devs are on the mod team.
At some point, the responsibility is gonna end up landing on the consumer to actually read some negative reviews and dismiss the game’s “negative reception” entirely if all the thumbs-downs are yammering on about “woke devs” or “DEI” or “the chinese translation is bad”.
It could allow to hide the content of the review, but still count it in the total (recommended / not recommended).
Personally I am not in favour, and I see negative bigoted reviews as legitimate reviews. I wouldn’t hold on the same level professional reviews, but it’s only random players we are discussing here. Let’s not pretend that the positive reviews are always constructive, either.Yeah, but if you can remove negative reviews text but not the contribution to “mostly positive” or whatever, the audience has to take it on faith that you “only censored the racists don’t worry. We’re getting brigaded”
Without the ability for devs to delete text, the customer can always… Read the reviews. If the good ones are all “lol cute dog” and the bad ones are actual criticisim, skip the game. If the good ones are actual reviews and the bad ones are “waaaah there’s a black guy in my medieval pseudo-euro fantasy waaaah”, you can be certain the game’s actual reception among non-idiots is higher than “mostly positive”.
Reviewers that aren’t the developer’s friends or mouthpieces are the main useful feature of Steam Reviews at all. Seeing “chuds are mad about this” next to the “buy now” button should be a selling point for some people, but actual bad videogames (including predatory games, ai asset flips, early access abandonware) should have a bunch of paragraphs that might hurt the game’s sales right there.
Oh boy, more censorship.
“racism and bigotry must be protected at any cost”
Some would say that, yes.
Racism and bigotry outside government institution doesnt really do much, it’s kind of self defeating in most situations that actually mean anything.
