That Mr. Orange is proposing a new Steam news thread, the purpose this thread originally served, is pretty telling. The vast majority of the content of these threads is unrelated to Steam news, it's give aways, discussing humble bundles, .gifs and insular thread-community posting. I just waded through the last 6 pages to find one post with Grid Autosport impressions buried under giveaway posts and reactions to giveaways.
I think this is a little dramatic. Among the original purposes of this thread are:
- Discussing games on Steam (I'll note I did this on this very page, there's Toki Tori 2 a page ago, Grid Autosport the page before)
- Discussing Steam and community features (there's a discussion about family sharing and community profiles on this very page, as well as trading cards)
- Asking for and getting game recommendations (there's someone posting some of their backlog and asking for recommendations on this page)
- Discussing releases, prices, and deals (including, yes, bundles)
One of the issues of contention here is that this is sort of a space both for people to collect and to play games. So I certainly agree that people should post game impressions and reviews here, but I don't think this should preclude them from being able to discuss finding or buying games. I mean, this is a service with 50+ new games a week and a 10+ year existing library.
In terms of giveaways, I mean, obviously there's a balance. This is sort of a big day for giveaways and it's my fault for calling attention to the fact that it's ModBot's birthday. But there are different types of giveaways--some are just people giving away what amount to worthless bundle keys (although people claim those keys, so it's clearly valuable to the people who claim them). That's sort of a product of the fact that there's a billion bundles a week. While others are legitimately people buying stuff to share. In this three page span a giveaway that involved access to 3000+ Steam games ended, and people gave away literally dozens of high quality games, so it's pretty logical that some people are going to be discussing that. I do think people should probably hold off on some of their getting-rid-of-spare-keys giveaways during times where the page seems filled with them.
The thing is, even if people posted exclusively game impressions and discussion, this would still be one of the biggest, fastest moving threads on GAF. When people post "well I left for 2 hours and there are more posts, what did I miss", that contributes to lower signal-to-noise ratios. Either read the posts or don't read the posts, and honestly, you're better off not reading the posts you're not here for. Mostly as a platform thread this is going to be more ephemeral than a thread built around discussing one specific thing. I mean, if 200 people all posted impressions of the game they played today, the impressions you're looking for would
still be buried.
I'm generally more concerned with actual off-topic posts, like extended discussions about TV or movies or GIF spam or whatever. Chat room stuff. That gets in the way and it doesn't really connect to Steam even in a tangential way. Mostly I think if people want to see more game impressions, they should post more game impressions.
It's ModBot's birthday! Celebrate by giving out something other than bundle garbage today!
