Steam’s latest update to user reviews doesn’t find your “jokes, memes, ascii art and other content” as funny as you do
rockpapershotgun.comSteam’s seeing a good few sweeping changes of late. They’ve recently added a ‘Trending Free’ tab to separate the no money down and no, money down playables. And, as of September, they’re cracking down on links to other websites in store pages. Now, horror of horrors, they’re coming for your ascii gigachads and “nobody is going to read this review so I’ll just say I’m gay” bangers. The changes are part of their ‘New Helpfulness System’, outlined here.
The new system, which will be enabled by default but can be toggled off, aims to “help potential players make informed decisions about the games they are considering purchasing by understanding the attributes of the game that other players like or don't like.” Ah, so a sort of ‘review’, if you will. I like it!
Historically, Steam has sorted reviews by the number of ‘helpful’ community votes. The (absolutely unexpected, wildly unpredictable, who could have ever foreseen this?) side-effect of this system has meant a lot of “jokes, memes, ascii art and other content that might not be the most helpful for a potential purchaser” being bumped to top billing. Steam love jokes, they’re eager to remind. They’re on the level, and feel that such tomfoolery is “often a lot of fun for existing customers of a game”. But, they say, “it doesn’t always help new players in making informed purchasing decisions.”
Now, user reviews that are “identified as being unhelpful for potential customers, such as one-word reviews, reviews comprised of ASCII art, or reviews that are primarily playful memes and in-jokes, will be sorted behind other reviews on the game’s store page.” The post later clarifies that “identified” here means a combination of user ports, moderation, and “some machine learning algorithms to help scale the human judgment calls.” It’s worth reading the full list of question, but I did find this one interesting:
Q. If you've identified a review as unhelpful, why not delete the review?
A. We have found that many players want to
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