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

Steam’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 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.”

My main take here is that Valve have conveniently absolved me from needing to have one, since there’s a toggle to decide whether to use the changes or not. My other, actual take is that this sounds broadly good, although I do still wish they’d do something about those aggressive clown emojis, which sort of reinforce the clout-chasing Valve are presumably trying to avoid here, just from the opposite end of the spectrum. The jester reaction’s “once jovial smile is now perma-wrenched into a mocking rictus by anonymous puppeteers intent on using it for assorted acts of wankery,” as I put it here.