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Comment by pugets | Hacker News Reader

YT can counter brigades by giving viewers even more statistics about a video. Example: what’s the like to dislike ratio of a video in the past 7, 30, or 90 days, compared to all-time?

Steam (a video game store) does this already. They categorize reviews as either being recent (made in the last 30 days) or all-time. If a game has excellent all-time reviews, but mixed recent reviews, then you can suspect something has recently upset the playerbase.

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You can't, however, determine if what upset the player base is "the game developer is a woman" or "the game developer is gay" or "a streamer with a toxic following got mad at the game".

It is low signal all the way through, and relegating likes and dislikes to a signal for recommendations is wise.

I don't want video game recommendations from someone that wants to sell me a video game, because they have a financial incentive to sell me a $60 game that I'll like instead of a $10 game that I'll love. No, I would much rather trust the opinions of people who have bought and played the game. I want to know if 99%, or 90%, or 65% of players gave it a good recommendation.

Long-time Netflix subscribers might be having déjà vu right now. Old Netflix had a ratings system, and users could filter content by average rating and see the top-rated movies and shows. Netflix later replaced that system with a recommendation engine. Not only does the recommendation engine not get my taste right, but it sure seems to recommend to me a lot of Netflix Originals.

Umm... What? I have never seen any of those things you mentioned on a steam review, ever, in my ~15yrs on the platform.

The steam review graph is a fantastically useful tool for users with a huge SNR and I don't understand why you think otherwise.

You can probably google more, but here's a prominent example of why you're incorrect with your assumptions:

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2018-09-25-total-war-rome...

"Total War: Rome 2 has suffered a Steam review bombing run over women characters and a recent update - but it turns out the game is working as intended.

"Creative Assembly's PC strategy game, which came out in 2013, saw hundreds of new negative Steam reviews this week over the frequency with which women generals show up in the game and related claims about historical accuracy."

and another one:

https://www.techspot.com/news/91212-life-strange-true-colors...

"The reason behind the Chinese users' anger is the inclusion of a symbol banned in their country. On the main street of the game's Haven Springs setting is a shop called Treasures of Tibet, which displays a Tibetan flag prominently outside the store."

Valve has come out on more than one occasion to let customers and studios know that they are constantly working to mitigate brigading.

EDIT: While not the norm, as you were alluding, gamer toxicity and brigading can also be relatively mainstream. A popular website among such circles is

https://www.oneangrygamer.net/

Reading the posts and comments can be quite revolting.

Neither of the articles claim what you're claiming though ("game dev is a woman/gay", etc). What assumption have I made that you think is incorrect? I just made an observation that in my extensive history on the platform I've never encountered what you stated.

Really though, my main point I actually care about making is that the steam review system is far superior to a simple like/dislike system which YT implements.

At the bottom of your first article:

> Meanwhile, Total War: Rome 2 has an "overwhelmingly negative" recent reviews rating, with a "mostly positive" overall rating.

Ahh, so it seems the steam rating system is working! Even though these games got "brigaded", users are still able to see the overall and historical ratings to get a better picture of what's going on.

This actually lets you see the rating before the brigade started. And if the game is actually good, the brigaded ratings will amount to a blip amongst the other reviews. Case in point, here is the current steam page for R:TW2, with "very positive " overall rating: https://store.steampowered.com/app/214950/Total_War_ROME_II_...

"Neither of the articles claim what you're claiming though ("game dev is a woman/gay", etc). What assumption have I made that you think is incorrect? I just made an observation that in my extensive history on the platform I've never encountered what you stated."

-- Anecdotal evidence doesn't mean that it didn't happen. My personal experience of using steam since its inception (HL2 launch on Steam, 2004), so roughly 17 years, is that I've come across this on a more than a few occasions. I tend to collect digital goods in a hoarding method, so I'm up to over 3700+ games in my library and I check a lot of them out when I can, even if I have no time to really play them anymore. The firs thing I read?

REVIEWS!

As mentioned - this is not the norm, and I agree with your general premise, but please don't dismiss what actually happened and what I witnessed (no, I don't have screenshots because I wasn't documenting it happening in real time when it occurred). The examples I brought up were illustrative of some gamers' groupthink mentality (including oneangrygamer.net, which has in mid-2021 disabled comments because they were ridiculously toxic - misogynistic, sexist, homophobic and racist)

Also - I'm not OP, FYI. I was backing OP's point.

I can't be bothered to respond to the rest of your post, unfortunately, because it comes across as vapidly dismissive.

Look up GamerGate if you'd like more information on brigading and misogynistic groupthink among related sub-communities.

You can't vote for a game on steam unless you own it, that makes brigading mostly ineffective.

What you are thinking of is metacritic where anyone can post, it is very prone to brigading, but steam reviews isn't.

Except you can buy it, review and then request an almost unconditional refund.

How many times can you get away with this before steam wises up? My guess is not many. They also have your CC. Makes it a pain for anyone but criminals to successfully brigade en-masse.

Which is a huge hurdle compared to just clicking a button with zero possible consequences.

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