The US Guardian is strongly pro-trans, while the UK Guardian is more mixed. It had (maybe still has?) some TERFs in prominent positions for a very long time, and they kept churning out their transphobic opinion pieces week after week.

There was even an intra-Guardian clash about this in 2018, when their US reporters called out their UK colleagues: Why we take issue with the Guardian’s stance on trans rights in the UK

Hey, you might want to contact the Sentinels of the Store group about this - they do reports on Steam’s developer and customer issues, and occasionally have direct communication with Valve.

In fact they covered this article in a recent post: SteamWatch - Developers Accuse Steam of Failing to Tackle Bigotry

mark reviews as being irrelevant to be scrubbed

as the article details, in the case of reviews flagged by devs, Steam gets to decide if they want to remove them or not, and often they don’t, even when they contain open bigotry or personal attacks towards the developer

This is why I always look at negative reviews. I often come across “downsides” that aren’t downsides to me or outright appealing.

Just constant “Is this AI?”

Tbf a ton of games with AI-generated graphics are not flagged as that despite Steam’s rules, so I’m not surprised that people want more reassurance.

Devs can moderate their forums, but not their reviews. They can only flag those for Steam to look at, but Steam is extremely hands-off with its moderation, see the examples listed in the article.

It not necessarily about evil intentions, instead that without an easy off-ramp for users, a platform is eventually guaranteed to get enshittified, especially if they rely on investor money (which Bluesky does, see their post 1, post 2).

Cory Doctorow wrote a few pieces about the topic:

• Fool Me Twice We Don’t Get Fooled Again
• Bluesky and enshittification