I think an allow everything model, except what's illegal in your home country (USA), is far more noble than most platforms.

On the other hand, I completely agree with Valve's decision on this. Just like I think Amazon should sell books containing rape, advocating for a violent revolution, or otherwise $thingthatviolatesmymorality. Steam is saying they don't want to be a curator (which honestly they haven't been for quite some time) they want to be a distributor.

And it's great to see a platform moving to be more liberal for once.

But is Steam even remotely analogous to Reddit/HN? You'll be able to just ignore the kind of content you don't want to see (the article mentions they'll be building tools to that effect). This is not like Reddit, where your subreddit will be invaded by the wrong kind of people and more like Google, where you'll only find the questionable content if you look for it.

Some subreddits act as a beacon attracting new members and sharing new views. These people or ideas do not always stay in their respective subreddits.

Similarly people attracted to steam for pornography might stay to play a game, adjusting the demographic of the larger community.

I think the parent's point was that this probably won't attract that many new users - most of the people who would buy porn games (especially VR ones) are probably already on Steam.

I do worry a bit that it might trigger some sort of moral panic when e.g. parents hear that one game program Steam is giving 8 year olds free porno or some other exaggerated claim. Jim Sterling made a pretty good case for this in a recent video about the school shooting simulator game, that by allowing that kind of content Steam is exposing itself to becoming the victim of a hysterical panic like has happened many times in the past.

I think Valve is morally in the right with their hands-off approach, but it is politically naive. They need a different brand for this.

Segregating the controversial content away behind an 'edgier' brand with a different client would deflect a lot of criticism, even if it was just a new coat of paint over the Steam client. Valve needs to make the content expectations clear to people who have never used Steam themselves.

I agree, I think they should focus on filtering quality not censoring based on content (as long as mature content is gated off). They should be policing broken games and asset flips.

How would you even start such a brand? Would a user switch just to be highly visible that they're into kink?

Users would join the service if it had a game they wanted. Its games and Steam's games would not have much overlap, if any.

Having it seperate would also allow them to change the default UX. Among other things, the default behaviour of sending notifications to your friends like, "Bob has started playing Call of Duty," is probably not the right behaviour for porn games. If they don't firewall those sorts of games off into a seperate area, Steam at least needs to clearly communicate at every point where the user interacts with the game on Steam (store page, cart, profile, library, etc) whether that interaction is public or private, because historically just about every interaction has been visible to the user's friends.

Fair point, but quite speculative at this point. For this to backfire on Valve, you need several assumptions:

a) a significant portion of the people who consume their porn products is not a current Steam user, b) the new users will not only buy and play games, but also interact with the community (message boards, etc.), c) these new users will on average exhibit more anti-social behavior, d) their behavior is linked to lost game revenue larger than the amount brought in by the porn sales.

Shocking, shocking I say!

I would bet money that the historical overlap between regular consumers of Steam and pornhub look more like a single circle than a venn diagram.

HN has a way higher standard for comments than Reddit. Definitely attributable to the mod team and their tooling. I think the tools still aren’t there yet, though. Tying karma to money or monetization will lead to higher quality. For example, you don’t have crude people who swear at a country club.

Country clubs, and anything that requires a large up-front cost for membership excludes a wide swath of people from participation. A wide range of viewpoints will result in better content over all, even if it lets some low-quality content get in.

My gut says the same, but I have to give props to them willing to muck with a billion-dollar online store.

> Communities cannot police themselves, even with the best of tools. I think Reddit and HN are iconic examples of this.

What exactly do you mean by "communities"? e.g. isolated small towns are usually viewed as having extreme levels of social control, not inadequate ones.