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Steam’s latest update to user reviews doesn’t find your “jokes, memes, ascii art and other content” as funny as you doThis happened to my buddy Eric
This happened to my buddy Eric
Steam’s seeing a good few sweeping changes of late. They’verecently added a ‘Trending Free’ tabto separate the no money down and no, money down playables. And, as of September, they’re crackingdown on links to other websitesin 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.
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 questions, 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 express an opinion about the game, but don’t always have the words to describe their experience with the game, or aren’t interested in writing much. Their indication of whether they would recommend the game is still valuable data, even if they are not able to articulate why.
Valve reiterate that you’ll still be able see “humorous, but unhelpful posts,” just less frequently. They also point out that the changes won’t impact the overall review score for a given game - “it is simply changing the order that reviews appear on each store page.”
