Steam launches helpfulness system to deprioritize uninformative reviews with ASCII art and memes

Valve continues to work on improving Steam in terms of user experience. The company is currentyl testing a new feature aimed at filtering out uninformative reviews.

Shortly after announcing its decision to ban links in text description on game pages, Valve revealed a its way of combating what it calls “unhelpful reviews.”

According to a new blog post, this category includes one-word reviews, as well as those comprised of ASCII art, memes, and in-jokes. All of them will be automatically sorted behind other reviews on each game’s page.

“This change doesn’t impact how review scores are generated for each game; it is simply changing the order that reviews appear on each store page,” Valve explained.

The new feature is now enabled by default. However, every user will be able to use an option on the store page to include “unhelpful” reviews when browsing.

“Categorization work is a mix of techniques, including user reports, the Steam moderation team looking closely at a lot of reviews, and some machine learning algorithms to help scale the human judgement calls,” the company noted, adding that it will take some time for the team to evaluate all the existing and newly posted reviews.

Steam allows every user who purchased a game to “Recommend/Not recommend” it and leave a text review. All reviews are displayed on the store page and can be filtered by type, language, date, playtime, and other parameters.

With its new system, Valve hopes to make this section more helpful to customers. Instead of deleting “unhelpful” reviews, the company wants to highlight more informative posts.

“We’ve seen that many players use reviews for sharing jokes, memes, ascii art and other content that might not be the most helpful for a potential purchaser,” Valve explained. “That content is usually fine, and often a lot of fun for existing customers of a game, but it doesn’t always help new players in making informed purchasing decisions.”