How big ?

[River]

How large is the steam community/forums compared to other sites/forums ?

Is it larger than reddit? Even though I don't like reddit much.

[breadman]

well that was a suggestive title and now i'm disappointed in the context

[Ogami]

Way smaller. While Steam has a large userbase of around 50mil active users and over a billion registered accounts overall, only a very small portion of that userbase visits the forums.
Its enough that this place is active and threads move at a decent pace but its a far cry for super popular subreddits, not even speaking of something like Reddit overall.

Many users just use Steam as the store to buy and download their games and dont interact much with it apart from that.

[✨Saint✨]

Games have their own communities and forums, take in consideration that a lot of clients do not even use the forums.
Reddit is specifically used for interactions between users, not something to be compared with imo.

[River]

Originally posted by Ogami:

Way smaller. While Steam has a large userbase of around 50mil active users and over a billion registered accounts overall, only a very small portion of that userbase visits the forums.
Its enough that this place is active and threads move at a decent pace but its a far cry for super popular subreddits, not even speaking of something like Reddit overall.

Many users just use Steam as the store to buy and download their games and dont interact much with it apart from that.

Ok that is what I thought. Thanks.

[Johnny Stokino]

Originally posted by breadman:

well that was a suggestive title and now i'm disappointed in the context

lol I came here for the same reason

[Reggaejunkiedrew]

Forums in generally are pretty low key nowadays and have been largely replaced by Reddit, Discord and Twitter for most people unfortunately.

Steam forums in particular are shockingly quiet compared to the size of the user base though. Unfortunately the amount of people who actually come here for discussion is pretty low, people mostly come to forums when they have something to whine about. The result is forums (a lot of games ones especially) tend to be really negative and it drives away people looking for actual discussion.

[Johnny Stokino]

If people avoid the discussions it's their loss. There are some really knowledgeable and helpful people here. I can name names but I don't wanna put anyone on tne spot.

There are Neverending people asking the same questions and thankfully Neverending people willig to answer too. At least in general discussions.

The game specific ones vary based on the popularity of the game but the ones for recent games are always buzzing!

[NakiBest]

Maybe if the forum software was not so outdated there would be more users willing to participate.

In other online forums, I can easily get the postings/threads width to take all, or almost all of my PC display width. Here most of it is a big black area on the left, and a huge one also on the right. Zooming in does not help.

Not very usable, IMHO.

(I am not using anything special, old plain 27" Full HD display, 2 of them.
So I am not on 4K or even 1440p...)

And if we compare similar services that are not online forums, such as Slack and Discord, those also allow for easy usage of the whole display width - just maximize the client window.

[River]

Plus email notifications for replies!

Got that covered though now.