That might not have been a good decision on valve's part. A moderation staff yes, people with money & egos on the line moderating is a no.

I don't think that is a problem. The comment section is so the users can communicate with the devs, right?
So if a dev removes your comment then he or she has read it, BANG, purpose of your comment is fulfilled.

If they have to delete comments the game is obviously not good enough to make it through anyway. And if the comments are about assets being stolen, etc. You can use the report feature for that. It sucks but I doubt it will make that big of an impact.

Removing legitimate criticism seems like a pretty bad idea but if all the criticism people are posting is "No", "crap", "lame", "I hate pixel art", personal attacks and other useless comments then I think devs should have the ability to clean that up if they want to.

Though maybe it would be enough if people could upvote or downvote comments so that unhelpful ones automatically get buried (positive or negative).

A flag for spam button would seem nice. Allowing the developer to delete comments that he/she does not like shouldn't be allowed.

Ive only deleted people advertising ♥♥♥♥, their own games, and just being trolls.

What is the actual risk of removing negative comments by the way? If someone is intending to vote FOR a game are they really going to be dissuaded by a scathing critique in the comments section?

Do we really want the comments to be an unregulated YouTube-like toilet? Surely the point of comments is a constructive back and forth discussion between players and devs... If a developer wants to ignore criticism it will probably just cost them votes, but that's their problem, isn't it?

Maybe the solution is to have a reviews section separate from comments that cannot be moderated by devs.

Post Edit

This was brought up yesterday, it's a very manipulative and one-sided view of their game which is what they're aiming for so only positive comments exist. This urgently needs to be changed.

http://steamcommunity.com/workshop/discussion/864944465818031942/?appid=765

@GLaDOS: That's not a very helpful comment, but yeah... asking "Could you elaborate?" would be a wiser response to that than deletion, that's for sure.

All the same, given the tone of most comments I've seen on game pages I'm not convinced taking away the ability to moderate comments would be a good idea.

Let's say someone made a game about cats and a user leaves a comment saying only:

"I hate cats."

My response to that would be: "What are you even doing here then?" [delete]

It's a useless negative comment that in no way offers any real criticism or feedback and only takes up space at the top of the page. In my opinion it should be possible to filter out that kind of BS... otherwise the comments section is going to be completely useless for any meaningful discussion.