this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2026
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Steam Forums are slowly devolving into one of the worst right-wing incubators because they refuse to proactively moderate. Any time a game gets declared a target by the post-Gamergate crowd, the boards become flooded with propaganda, and Valve does not care.
The forums are moderated (or in many cases not moderated) by the game publisher, not Steam. If they don't want to moderate they could technically close the forum for their game but very few publishers do so.
Maybe they're supposed to be moderated by devs/publishers, but I'd guess as high as 99% of steam communities are unmoderated or simply auto moderated for specific slurs. Basically every game I've ever looked at has just piles of threads asking "Is ThIs GaMe WoKe???" or "PLEASE ADD LGBTQ2IABBQ+ CHARACTERS!!!" as award farming shitposts. Heaven forbid its a competitive game because those forums get rancid. It also happens I'm the discussion of basically every news update for any game with a remotely active community.
There is zero or nearly zero accountability for the state of the community hub and Valve simply saying "devs should do it" is just passing the buck.
Do devs have the ability to turn forums/communities off? If so, I feel like that's the best option if they don't want to moderate it.
They don't. I know one indie developer once privately told me they wished they could.
Yeah, that really should be an option. I don’t think it’s infeasible for Valve to employ their own moderators and ensure the communities are less toxic. Short of that though, letting developers/publishers disable them is the bare minimum they can do.
I was close to saying infeasible was not a word but then I looked it up. My bad
Valve did respond to this by removing points from community awards a while ago. It won't clean up the posts already there, because that's the game's developer's job, but it's no longer a viable point farming strategy to just make a big thread on a new game calling it woke to generate a bunch of clown awards.