Steam is 'an unsafe place for teens and young adults': US senator warns Gabe Newell of 'more intense scrutiny' from the government if Valve doesn't take action against extremist content
Steam is 'an unsafe place for teens and young adults': US senator warns Gabe Newell of 'more intense scrutiny' from the government if Valve doesn't take action against extremist content
US Senator Mark Warner comes less than a week after an ADL report accusing Steam of "normalizing hate and extremism in the gaming community."
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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.
Well, not really. There was a time when it was Valve staff and volunteer moderators under their direction. But that was before their discussion forums got integrated into Steam directly and there was a bajillion games on it.
Though I am confident they could actually hire people to handle it if they wanted to. Or were forced to. Steam makes a bit of profit, I'm sure.
You know, I think you are right.
I meant to say when the discussion forums were integrated and basically autogenerated for any game, when Steam went from 'this is our game launcher' to 'soon we will sell every pc game that has ever and will ever exist.'
But when it comes to hiring people to moderate things?
Insanity.
Facebook does this by hiring tens, hundreds of thousands of moderators in economically undeveloped nations, managed by a few thousand based in the US or EU.
Its a horror show sweatshop of constant exposure to the most horrible content imaginable, which basically drives many employees to suicide or insanity.
There is no AI that can do this.
... Valve could maybe? probably? afford to hire hundreds of thousands of low cost moderators following Facebook's model.
But I'm pretty sure that they would basically go, oh, we are now legally responsible for what is said on our platform?
Fuck it, nuke 99% of it from orbit, do a bit of redesign, hire a much smaller cadre of moderators, who will manage a vastly stripped down and more cumbersome and more restrictive ability to comment on or discuss things.
... What would be the downside to that?
12 year olds and morons with no impulse control now use discord instead of the steam forums?
People maybe go back to making their own game based community websites/forums?
... Who is going to stop using Steam because the discussion forums dissapear?
Because all the default comment posting and viewing settings for all the other ways you can leave a public message now flip to being restrictive and time delayed?
I really do stand by my other statement in this thread: You could erase everything that is not from a human, manually pinned discussion thread and nothing of value would be lost.