Valve bars Steam developer who posted anti-trans rant in patch notes | Hacker News Reader

Valve bars Steam developer who posted anti-trans rant in patch notes

arstechnica.com

24 pointsseretogis11 comments

I feel like news like this shouldn't even be reported on, it gives unnecessary exposure to the developer and game. They breached the ToS of Valve, they rightfully got a ban, let them sink into oblivion and not make a big story out of it. This will probably get them some extra sales on a different platform by people who support this type of messages.

Also, the headline is misleading.

The issue wasn't the anti-trans rant; Valve specifically called out the fact that the patch notes included personal attacks.

For better or worse, Valve is intentionally very lax when it comes to censorship (they ban illegal content and trolling, and that's about it):

https://www.polygon.com/2018/6/6/17435324/valve-steam-policy...

For the heck of it, and to confirm nothing has changed, I looked and took me about 10 seconds to find some trans-phobic stuff they host.

Link to the anti-trans content and let's get it sorted then.

What do you mean “get it sorted”? It doesn’t violate policy, even though I disagree with it.

If it is transphobic, it is almost certainly against this: https://store.steampowered.com/online_conduct/

*targeted at specific people. It's both harassment, not the venue, and the reasons plainly wrong, using a "protect the children!" trope. It's designed to get people uninformed on the subject to hop on the hate train.

Good on valve for putting good community first.

I think most people would agree that regardless of one's feelings on the matter, patch notes for a game are not the appropriate venue for this sort of thing. Seems like Valve did the right thing here.

Patch notes are an encouraged place for political statements, as long as they're against the right people. It's easy to find lots of major and minor studios that made statements that were pro-abortion and pro-BLM when those were in the news.

> Patch notes are an encouraged place for political statements...

Wouldn't a blog post or a social media post be a more appropriate place for something like that, given the larger focus on interaction and outreach on those, versus something that is generally (in my experience) just used to list a bunch of changes between two versions of software?

That said, I agree with Valve that there really shouldn't be a place for harassment or really toxic behavior on the platform, at least when it's possible to limit it. Interpretations of what counts and what doesn't might vary, but this seems like a decent example of moderation action.

Is that targeted harassment? No? Then it probably doesn't violate the ToS.

Jlawson is responding to the argument being made about whether or not patch notes are an appropriate place for political, philosophical, or moral perspectives NOT whether or not the ToS was violated.

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