Valve/Steam Punishing Users for Marking Negative Review Useful | Hacker News Reader

Valve/Steam Punishing Users for Marking Negative Review Useful

steamcommunity.com

70 pointsROTMetro22 comments

Similar to how YouTube collectively punsihed users for downvoting videos by getting rid of public downvote counts.

This is a complete different problem. The theory in the case of youtube was that the collective downvoting was in someways spurred by being able to see the total. They didn't remove the ability to downvote, just the reward for doing so. Users are not penalized for downvoting.

In the case of steam users are negatively impacted by a moderation decision.

While I respect the contrast you're highlighting I disagree that they're therefore fundamentally different. In both cases its a form of social coercion to shape user behaviour to misrepresent the collective sentiment.

If it was a regular thing, perhaps. In this case it's collateral damage and not policy. Hanlon's law applies here -- it's far more likely to be incompetence than malice.

There are plenty of other negative reviews on that game.

Not sure why you're getting greyed out, you're right. Lot of admin overreach on YouTube.

Right, but unrelated to this issue. One is about feature removal while the other is about censorship, intimidation, and lies.

I didn't downvote, though.

The goal of the feature removal is obviously to hide (censor) the displeasure of the audience towards certain videos, so I disagree that it is unrelated.

Because it isn’t similar to this case at all.

It is though?

This was bound to happen eventually. Marketplace that makes money on people buying any stuff not just good stuff and selling sales to publishers needs stuff to have good reviews regardless of its goodness to drive the sales it's justifying its cut of the revenue for.

It's a risky play because a platform where the reviews are high signal drives sales based on that alone. You can only nudge so much before expectations adjust and would-be buyers have to turn to 3rd party reviews which adds friction.

I imagine it's incredibly tempting to heavily moderate reviews instead of letting gamers do what they do and meme like it's a Reddit thread but that kind of thing is actually fairly high signal albeit low seriousness. Silly comments about having 1k hours in the game but not recommending actually does tell you something real about the game.

I doubt it makes a difference to Valve/Steam. If I have $20 to spend on games, and I don't buy a game because of bad review... then I'm going to buy something else.

My guess would be that some automation somewhere went wrong and that's all about it.

Publishers care though. Publisher reports it, moderator rubber-stamped it, automation punishes the review author and anyone who up-voted it.

Seems like Valve should acknowledge their mistaken decision to punish up-voters.

Valve is probably one of the few companies that can allow itself to not cater to publishers. They have tried to cut Valve in multiple occasions but the community never accepted alternative stores like Origin or Uplay no matter how much it was shoved down their throat. Even the Epic store hate is still fresh in most of my friend circle.

Yea, they have room to put their foot down if publishers make Valve look bad. They do still have to at least pretend to be on the publisher’s side though.

Comment from the developer:

> We are investigating the reason for the moderation with valve. We don't know why they concluded what they did. Still, we suspect it was because the reviews had a lot of misinformation about the anti-cheat, which was fixed long before the review was created.

So complaints about rootkits^W anti-cheat is a banned topic now?

Now it seems Valve reversed the suspension for the user who made the comment, but hasn't reinstated the comment itself. They're also doubling down on the lie that the comment was against the TOS.

> However, It appears that your account was locked for promoting or posting malicious content on Steam, which we do not allow per our Rules & Guidelines: https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=4045-USH...

> We've gone ahead and removed the lock. In the future, please make sure you are not spamming or advertising content or the account could face further exclusion from the Steam Community.

So now we know this was an intentional act, not incompetence.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/1675900/discussions/0/6980058...

It’s funny the more time goes by the more censorship I see happening in these “traditional” platforms.

One off incidents don't reflect evidence of increasing censorship. There is little to no evidence that this IS censorship and not an attempt to mitigate misinformation that has gone awry.

Some level of moderation is important on this and all user contributed platforms.

In my experience Steam has been a very responsible custodian of it's community. And benefits just as much as users from negative reviews that help it decide what to suggest to users.

What other examples do you have of bad censorship from Steam?

what have we learned from this?

Do not give back to the community. Write no guides, no mods, no reviews. Vote on nothing, participate in nothing

This is exactly what we should do to fight back. Why should we do something at our cost to make someone-else's product better, especially when they simply don't care or even take user hostile actions? I used to provide lots of feedback but I stopped doing that for a while as it turned out in most of the cases, they simply did not care at all.

Is this because the OP edited their post and then the 2500 upvotes pointed to a new, different thing? just my guess

No. But even if that was the case, why punish anyone who upvoted it by restricting their account?

From the page and other articles, the review details the malware installed as part of the drm/anti-cheat system, and how it is not removed. There's an update now in which Valve falsely claims that the review information was wrong (which as far as I can tell it isn't) and deleted it presumably because they don't want people to not buy games just because they install malware. They're offloading that on to some "moderator" rather than themselves which I assume means either moderators are unpaid, or they have a contracting layer that allows them to claim a different entity it (even if it was according to rules Valve sets as a contractor relationship would imply).

But the important message being sent here is very clear: if you upvote a review detailing malware installed by a game your account can be restricted, so don't ever do that. You can only upvote positive reviews.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com