Steam?

You mean the platform with critically acclaimed titles such as ‘Hitler My Friend’ ‘Heal Hitler’ ‘Hitler is my crush’ ?

I would never have guessed that the platform had a problem with far right communities. Surely the Sniper Elite folks have something to say.

I pretty much agree, I literally cannot think of a single time me engaging with the Steam forums has resulted in anything good at all.

Best case scenario you get absolute idiots who know nothing about how games work acting like they do, worst case scenario you run into something akin to Terrorgram.

How a Global Online Network of White Supremacists Groomed a Teen to Kill

The murders of two people outside an LGBTQ+ bar at first looked like the act of a lone shooter. A ProPublica and FRONTLINE investigation shows they were, in fact, the culmination of a coordinated, international recruiting effort by online extremists.

ProPublica (www.propublica.org)

EDIT:

I was completely serious in my other post when I said 99.9% of steam forums are worse than worthless.

Just say, hey, everything in any steam forum, discussion group, basically anything other than comments on steam workshop stuff and guides and your own posted screenshots and your own profile… yep, in 90 days, it all goes away, make your backups now, if you want to, here’s a tool thingy to do that.

We have other platforms for lengthier discussions now, if a game wants to run its own community, fucking buy a domain, set up some forums, set up a discord, a reddit, a lemmy, whatever, do it yourself, its not worth steam potentially getting nuked or massively censored because it allows basicslly auto generated forums for every half baked idiot that makes some game.

I don’t go there for discussions but have found useful fixes from it that wasn’t on pcgamingwiki, which I’ve added to pcgamingwiki linking back to the steam forum. So it has its uses.

Despite the terrible discussions which I don’t use it for it is still at the end of the day place people do ask for help and do receive it when that’s the topic of the thread.

I’m glad its helped you, but every time I am so desperate as to end up at the Steam Comm pages looking for help, I am met by a bunch of overconfident idiots explaining solutions to problems I did not describe, or just people telling me it isn’t a problem, it can be fixed by uninstslling my soul from my body, etc.

Can’t believe you havent included my all time favourite game - sex with hitler

I don’t follow.

You initially said whales who buy tons of games, I assume you mean individuals with 1000+ games on their steam account, buys all the dlc and mtx and loot crates, that kind of whale.

Now you are reffering to… the US government as a whale?

What are you suggesting… be done?

… and by whom?

Are you suggesting Valve functionally commit hara-kiri by … some kind of intentionally angering the fascist government?

What are you suggesting, that Valve fund investigators to link Steam accounts to other platforms and websites, and then… report that knowledge to… the government?

They wouldn’t do anything other than sue Valve out of existence for being antifa.

Valve cannot like… arrest people, issue themselves search warrants, … and if they did set up a system to do something like this, kablamo, now it is instantly turned around to hunt down trans people after Valve is sued into a government buy out or being purchased by fucking Larry Ellison.

Please, explain to me what you are trying to suggest, I don’t get it.

It’s weird I just never see any of this at all. Is it just for certain games? Admittedly I barely ever go into the forums and when I do I’m looking for a specific answers to specific questions, so maybe it’s just people who use Steam for General communication? But I don’t know why anyone would do that so…

I comprehend you’re saying that Valve should get rid off forums and groups.

I’m saying they can’t, the “US” will

sue Valve out of existence for being antifa.

freeze their assets, revoke their business licences, put them on a watchlist, and deathcamp Valve & affiliates.

Valve’s hands are fascistically tied to 🇺🇲’s RMVP.¹

¹ def. of RMVP

Steam?

You mean the platform with critically acclaimed titles such as ‘Hitler My Friend’ ‘Heal Hitler’ ‘Hitler is my crush’ ?

I would never have guessed that the platform had a problem with far right communities. Surely the Sniper Elite folks have something to say.

It’s weird I just never see any of this at all. Is it just for certain games? Admittedly I barely ever go into the forums and when I do I’m looking for a specific answers to specific questions, so maybe it’s just people who use Steam for General communication? But I don’t know why anyone would do that so…

Ooooh, ok.

I would think that them just getting rid of much of their discussion ‘zones’ would be something they could do without pissing off the fascists, and also just being a net good in general…

… whereas if they kept all their steam groups and discussion forums, but instead, specifically began to more heavily moderate / remove right wing extremists from those discussion zones, I would think that would be much more likely to piss off the fascists.

Basically, I don’t think the fascists in government really even understand fully what Steam is, everything it does, but, if they heard it was cracking down specifically on fascists, that would draw more heat to them than if they just removed features which are, imo, just a net negative anyway.

Suuuuuuuuure “Study”

I pretty much agree, I literally cannot think of a single time me engaging with the Steam forums has resulted in anything good at all.

Best case scenario you get absolute idiots who know nothing about how games work acting like they do, worst case scenario you run into something akin to Terrorgram.

How a Global Online Network of White Supremacists Groomed a Teen to Kill

The murders of two people outside an LGBTQ+ bar at first looked like the act of a lone shooter. A ProPublica and FRONTLINE investigation shows they were, in fact, the culmination of a coordinated, international recruiting effort by online extremists.

ProPublica (www.propublica.org)

EDIT:

I was completely serious in my other post when I said 99.9% of steam forums are worse than worthless.

Just say, hey, everything in any steam forum, discussion group, basically anything other than comments on steam workshop stuff and guides and your own posted screenshots and your own profile… yep, in 90 days, it all goes away, make your backups now, if you want to, here’s a tool thingy to do that.

We have other platforms for lengthier discussions now, if a game wants to run its own community, fucking buy a domain, set up some forums, set up a discord, a reddit, a lemmy, whatever, do it yourself, its not worth steam potentially getting nuked or massively censored because it allows basicslly auto generated forums for every half baked idiot that makes some game.

Yes. Study.

Frontiers | Extremist identity creation through performative infighting on Steam

The video game marketplace Steam has long hosted a lively social network for the purpose of connecting game players and game developers. Over the past 5 year...

Frontiers (www.frontiersin.org)

I honestly don’t think I’ve ever been on a steam forum.

This shits generally everywhere nowadays, there’s no hiding from it. It’s like a worldwide pandemic of brain rot at this point. Everyone is polarized, and that’s never going to lead to anything good. I’m still not sure we should all be this connected to each other.

Social media in moderation and with responsibility and rational thought, there’s nothing wrong with that. But people don’t seem to be able to self police themselves, it’s turned into a massive addiction that’s maybe somehow just as bad as the opioid crisis in some ways. It’s infection has circled the globe, turning a lot of otherwise decent people into mindless meme chodes and racism repeaters.

The people who run social media sites knew all the stuff in your 2nd paragraph would happen from about 2010 onward.

I… remember reading blogs of people working for them, explaining how a human brain can’t really handle knowing or having more than roughly 50 to 100 friends, after some threshold is passed, your brain switches into another mode of social thinking.

… And they knew that, and so much more, and exploited the fuck out of literally everyone, first to sell ads, then they realized data was the new oil.

Yeah, basically, social media was a mistake.

Algos will always naturally ‘conclude’ that the best way to drive engagement is to promote things that make people paranoid and angry, and speak to their insecurities, and make them worse.

Now we can literally buy an AI neck pendant friend for $99, for people who are so pathetic and so in need of validation they will just literally buy a simulacra of a friend, because socialization itself has been destroyed.

We are living through a kind of cyberpunk dystopia somehow more insidious and fundamentally debasing of what it even means to be human than any author I’ve read predicted or warned against.

My response so far has been ‘the only winning move is not to play’, I will never tie my real identity directly to any web presence ever again, nuked all my shit, everywhere, when Cambridge Analytica broke.

They have been social engineering with supercomputers for a decade now, and it is more or less making them so much money they literally do not know what to do with it, as it hollows out everyone and everything, acts as gasoline on their accelerationist fire.

… call this a parasocial relationship if you want, but I miss David Bowie.

If they only still made them like Bowie…

I agree with everything that you’ve said, it’s sad and pathetic, but we’ve invited the monster inside. The calls are coming from inside the house now.