Valve targets "humorous but unhelpful" Steam reviews by auto-enabling a new "helpfulness" filter that pushes down "jokes, memes, and ascii art"

Valve has seen your jokes and found them wanting. Continuing an uncharacteristically talkative week for the company, the house of Steam has rolled out a new, auto-enabled user review filter that takes aim at "humorous but unhelpful" posts like "jokes, memes, ascii art" and one-word reviews. 

In a new Steam blog post, Valve says "we are ready for public testing of a new system that changes the way Steam sorts user reviews on store pages with the goal of prioritizing reviews that can best help players make a purchase decision about the game. This new helpfulness system is now enabled by default, and can easily be toggled within the user review settings for each game." 

Valve isn't bothered by reviews serving as jokes, and agrees that it's "often a lot of fun for existing customers of a game," but says such posts aren't terribly helpful for "making informed purchasing decisions." There's a fair argument to be made that games capable of eliciting such irreverent, lighthearted reviews are probably doing something right, but lord knows plenty of bad games get similar meme reviews too. 

To that end, "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. That doesn't mean players won't ever see these humorous, but unhelpful posts, but it hopefully means that they’ll see them less frequently when trying to learn about a game."

Pull up a Steam store page right now and you'll find the "helpfulness" filter ticked on under the "Display" settings of user reviews. You can, of course, turn it off if you want. Let the ascii art fly. It's worth noting that recent reviews seem to be unaffected by this filter, judging from the posts I'm seeing on the Cult of the Lamb store page right now. "Hail Lamb," says one user. "Shep," intones another. "Fun," observes one cultist of few words. 

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