Steam's latest update to user reviews says it doesn't find your “jokes, memes, ASCII art, and other content” as funny as you do

Steam has been seeing a few sweeping changes lately. They recently added a ‘Trending Free’ tab to separate games that are playable with and without a down payment. And as of September, they’re also restricting links to other websites on their store pages. Now, horror of horrors, here they come for your ascii gigachads and “nobody’s going to read this review so I’ll just say I’m gay” hits. The changes are part of the ‘New Charity System’ outlined here .

The new system, which will be enabled by default but can be turned off, aims to “help potential players make informed decisions about games they're considering purchasing by understanding what game features other players like or dislike.” Ah, so you could call it a 'review' of sorts. I like it!

Steam has historically ranked reviews by the number of 'helpful' community votes. The (completely unexpected, wildly unpredictable, who could have predicted this?) side effect of this system has meant that a lot of “jokes, memes, ascii art, and other content that might not be the most useful to a potential buyer” have been pushed to the top. Steam loves jokes, they're keen to remind you. They're level-headed, and they find this kind of nonsense to be “often hilarious for existing customers of a game”. However, they say, “it doesn't always help new players make informed purchasing decisions”.

Now, “user comments that are determined to be of no use to potential customers, such as single-word comments, comments consisting of ASCII art, or comments that primarily contain amusing memes and inside jokes, will be ranked behind other comments on the game's store page.” The post then goes on to explain that “determined” here means a combination of user ports, moderation, and “some machine learning algorithms to help scale human judgment calls.” It's worth reading the full list of questions, but I found this interesting:

Q. If you don't find a review helpful, why don't you just delete it?

A. We’ve found that many players want to give an opinion about a game, but don’t always have the words or care to write much about their experience with the game. Their indication of whether they would recommend the game or not is still valuable data, even if they can’t explain why.

Valve reiterates that you may see “funny but unhelpful posts” less frequently. They also note that the changes won't affect the overall review score for a particular game — they “simply change the order in which reviews appear on each store page.”

My main point here is that Valve conveniently exempted me from needing to get one, since there's a toggle button for deciding whether or not to use the changes. My other, more real thought is that this looks good overall, but I still wish they'd do something about the offensive clown emojis, which kind of reinforce the clown-chasing thing Valve is probably trying to avoid here, from the exact opposite end of the spectrum. As the jester response puts it, “his once cheerful smile has now been permanently transformed into a mocking expression by anonymous puppeteers intent on using him for various acts of masturbation.”

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