Aielman15

3x speed is nice, but I can already do that on emulators.

If this is the same port that was sold on consoles, you can speed the game up while maintaining the music at the correct pace, which you cannot do on an emulator. It makes the game 100% more bearable.

"The developer made fun of the death of Charlie Kirk" is not a hateful comment just a fact.
"This developer is a fascist" is more hateful then the stated review above.

Ok.

No, I'm offended by you talking like a 17yo who just discovered Kant.

But go on, please, talk about the ethics of moderating hateful, bigoted, racist rhetoric on the biggest gaming platform.

I already answered your questions, but you seem more intent at discussing abstract ethics like an armchair philosopher rather than the real problem at hand.

Whereas the armies of content moderators tend to be incredibly poorly paid. The entire way this kind of work is done is that it nearly always either entirely or largely is done by the lowest bidder, in the poorest places possible.
[...]
So... your ethical calculus seems to conclude that stopping the spread of bigotry and fascist rhetoric in richer countries is worth the cost of the sanity of workers in poorer countries.

Why is the assumption that those workers must be poorly paid? If Valve, the multi billion dollar company whose owner owns multiple yachts as well as the company producing them, doesn't pay its workers adequately, then Valve is at fault. The solution shouldn't be to throw up hands and go home. There is a solution but they aren't willing to take it because it would require them to spend money, which is what I said in my first comment.

Your ethical calculus seems to be that if 100s of users of a website/platform don't get banned rapidly for violating TOS, then the website/platform should be held legally liable for that [...]

You know damn well what I meant but you keep this enlightened bullshit going on.

Valve literally got reports about those reviews and ignored them. They are at fault. Full stop.

If confronting the actual ugliness of them challenges you, makes you defensive and accusatory, good. That means you likely never thought about the totality of the situation here that deeply.

Please stop this enlightened philosopher bullshit. It's painful to read and makes you look dumb.

It's the dictionary definition of whataboutism.

"Steam has a problem with moderation, these are hateful reviews that have been reported but ignored by Steam support team"
"But what about fascists?"

The original user didn't answer and ran with their tail between their legs, because they didn't want to admit that Steam has a problem with moderation.

Your entire comment reeks of "we shouldn't fight fire because that puts firefighters at risk".

There are no 100% ethical solutions to every problem, real life is a compromise. You can get better ethical results by allowing those workers to get adequate monetary compensation for their work and seek medical help if they need it. Otherwise what's the solution, allow everyone to read the same stuff? Why is that more ethical? Is it more ethical for the random user (who may also be a suggestible kid, or a person belonging to a persecuted minority) who reads it? Is it more ethical for the developers who get their game review bombed by fascists and bigots, and see their source of revenue diminish or fizzle out because of it?

As for the legal responsibility, it becomes so when the platform is complicit with the users writing hateful stuff. You are not responsible for the random shithead declaring his love for Mein Kampf. You are responsible for the hundreds of users who do, while you repeatedly ignore the reports of their misconduct, thus implicitly accepting and normalizing their behavior.

Additionally, when hateful behavior is accepted and normalize, human shit stains will come in drove and multiply the problem tenfold. By moderating their spaces, they would prevent a lot of those hateful messages from being written in the first place.

Do we have any proof those reviews were from people following that curator? I imagine that information has also been posted elsewhere online.

Why does that curator exist in the first place? Why are those reviews still up?

Do you think off topic reviews or curator recommendations should be allowed for things you approve of? Say if a review points out the developer is a secret fascist?

Great comeback! I really love whatabaoutism.

Oh please, moderating a forum unpaid for 5 mins every now and again is so easy it's how this whole platform and Reddit function.

Please, kindly refrain from talking about things you know jack shit about.

If you're truly an indie dev without the resources to moderate your own space, Steam allow you to simply close the forums and forbid discussions.

Steam forums are a resource for devs to interact with the community, get feedback, etc...
Closing them means losing a resource. What you suggest is that devs big enough to employ a community manager should have access to that resource, while small/solo devs should just accept that they can't have it. Sounds like second class citizen treatment to me.

It would be a lot easier if Steam got their shit together and started moderating their online spaces, which is something they should've been doing this whole time.

Alabaster Dawn! I'm eagerly waiting for it.

Fox + Bunny = Funny

Curators are hidden by default, only people who follow the curator see curator recommendations. They also don't affect store visibility or the review score in any way.

Cool! Will you also read the rest of the quote?

This encouraged others to post further reviews and comments related to Kirk (and not the game).

But apparently nobody wants to read the article, so here's my screenshot:

spoiler

Steam leaves moderation of forums to the developer/publisher to moderate as they wish, as if they interfered you bet they'd get complaints about Valve stepping on their toes. If a developer/publisher decides they want to allow hatred in their Steam forums, you should probably blame them.

Yes, I also blame the poor indie dev who barely gets enough money to keep existing instead of the multi billion dollar company that apparently is content with misogyny, racism and bigotry running rampant on every facet of their platform.

Ha ha, you're right, sorry :P

It was CrossCode! It single-handedly reignited my interest in gaming after a few slow years. Then left me disappointed when no other game managed to capture my heart as it did :(

This exact same article was already shared a week ago here, and it got this same reply.

Negative reviews can have consequences on how the game sells. The article (which apparently nobody reads, because Lemmy has a hard on for Steam and refuses to admit that Lord Gabe can do wrong) is NOT talking about random comments, it makes very specific examples (with links) to specific games that have received negative reviews for things unrelated to the game at hand, such as antisemitism and political content.

“I’m not new to online harassment,” says designer Nathalie Lawhead, who spent two years trying to get reviews removed from their games’ pages. Both reference allegations of sexual assault that Lawhead made in 2019. “I assumed reporting Steam abuse might have its own issues. But when people suggested that I open a ticket, I did have hope that this would be the way to get it resolved.”
One of the reviews, published in 2023, read, “cringe game, made by a liar”. The other, a review of Lawhead’s game Blue Suburbia posted in 2024, said: “A women [sic] who seeks to destroy other’s [sic] career made this. It’s very poorly put together. She also probably has dual Israeli citizenship with how pointy her nose is.”
Despite Steam’s code of online conduct and community guidelines prohibiting “abusive language or insults”, public accusations or “discrimination”, moderators initially cleared both reviews after Lawhead reported them.

Some games have been targeted by Steam curators. Ethan, the developer of Coven, a first-person action-horror set in the 1600s, says he has been targeted by “CharlieTweetsDetected”, a curator devoted to recommending games based solely on whether their developers are perceived to have correctly mourned the assassination of rightwing activist Charlie Kirk.
CharlieTweetsDetected’s review of Coven, a first-person action-horror game set in the 1600s, read simply “Celebrated Sept 10th on blue sky [sic]”. This encouraged others to post further reviews and comments related to Kirk (and not the game). “I even mentioned it to Steam support,” Ethan says, “how it stemmed from that curator list, but they weren’t interested.” Instead, Steam support claimed that “off-topic” constituted “a recipe for cookies, or something completely unrelated to video games that is clearly trolling.” Reviews referencing Kirk, including one reading simply “RIP Charlie Kirk” alongside a negative rating, did not fit that criteria according to Steam; all remain in place today.

The problem is not even that Steam forums are a cesspool (which they are, by the way), but that Steam adamantly refuses to moderate the shit that gets posted on their site, going so far as to ignore that shit even when it gets reported, because ultimately they gain money from those people, so they don't care.