Clown Emoji farming incentivizing subversive discourse

[Azhukar]

The "Clown Emoji award" should not award any points to the recipient, so as to not encourage people intentionally making controversial statements despite not holding stated position.

[lukaself]

I agree. Although there are already many threads suggesting this, it doesn't seem to influence Valve at all. Maybe they noticed something we didn't, like that it encouraged people to leave jester awards rather than sending rude, antagonistic messages? If they noticed a diminution of the reports for misconduct since the introduction of the Jester, it'd would make sense.

Or they just do not care. Works too.

[Gwarsbane]

Originally posted by Azhukar:

The "Clown Emoji award" should not award any points to the recipient, so as to not encourage people intentionally making controversial statements despite not holding stated position.

Just removing the points is not enough, some will still farm it just to have a higher number of them. If you get rid of that award, they will just try to farm others and nothing will change.

The only thing that will actually cut down on the spam/farming is removing ALL the awards fully. And even then we'll still see it for a while after that, how do I know this? Because we still get people spamming junk posts to get a badge where the require meant to "post on the forums" was removed many many many years ago now.

So we will no doubt still have some people trying to get awards even if they are all fully removed.

[Ionut Catalin Frasineanu]

They should remove that award for good.

[Velesianus]

Have you seen Palworld's board over the past couple of days? Jesus wept.

What's odd is that it can be fixed immediately and easily in a wide variety of ways. For example, ban repeat offenders from creating posts for games that they don't own, remove point gains from jesters or just add a simple thumbs up/down system.

I'm guessing whoever is responsible at Valve for keeping this very clearly failed experiment going is a nepotism hire with a marketing degree and a room temperature IQ.

Or they own stock in Reddit because it's definitely driving traffic away from Steam's discussion boards and towards game specific subreddits at an ever increasing rate.


This is one of Valves few L's over the years but damn is it a massive one.

[Gwarsbane]

Originally posted by Velesianus:

What's odd is that it can be fixed immediately and easily in a wide variety of ways. For example, ban repeat offenders from creating posts for games that they don't own, remove point gains from jesters or just add a simple thumbs up/down system.

Devs can already restrict people who do not own the game to 1 discussion area and they can ban them if they want. Its 100% up to them, Valve doesn't have to step in on that.

Again, removing points will not solve the problem, they will either keep going just to get more jesters, or move on to farm another award.

Moving to a thumbs up/down system is just as bad as the award system. There are a bunch of trolls with large groups out there that will upvote dumb threads/posts and downvote good threads/posts.

Again the only thing that will solve it is remove the award system fully. Repeat offenders then have nothing to go after again and again, spammers and scammers have nothing to gain, trolls have nothing to use against people/ideas they don't like that are actually good for the community.


Also if people stopped complaining about getting a jester in public they wouldn't get piled on by trolls giving them jesters. The trolls that tried to give me a bunch of jesters to make me upset learned very quickly it was pointless with me, because I just don't care about the awards at all.

The only reason I have them showing on my profile is because I was accused of giving out jesters to people, so I leave them public to show that I have not given out a single award for anything. I've got over 75,000 points built up that are just going to collect digital dust so getting more points means nothing to me.

[lsdninja]

If they’re not going to remove it, they should increase the amount of points it gives, it’d be amazing!

Remember folks, it’s not the people farming them that’s the problem, it’s the people who insist on handing them out.

[Gwarsbane]

Originally posted by lsdninja:

If they’re not going to remove it, they should increase the amount of points it gives, it’d be amazing!

Remember folks, it’s not the people farming them that’s the problem, it’s the people who insist on handing them out.

Its both. The farmers wouldn't be farming for awards if the awards were not a thing. People giving awards would not be giving them if they were not a thing.

Giving more points will mean more farmers. It won't stop people from giving awards.

[HulaGirl86]

Originally posted by Lara Croft:

It would be better to remove all awards and we have peace now :wololo:

I say remove the forums all together. Clearly people having fun is the problem and we need to put an end to that.

AND NO, DON'T GIVE THEM A CONTAINMENT AREA TO HAVE FUN IN WITH LOOSER RULES. WE NEED TO GET RID OF ALL THOSE SILLY AND MEAN BULLY JERKS RUINING THE SUPER SERIOUS HALLOWED HALLS OF STEAM FORUM ACADEMIA.

[Aachen]

Originally posted by HulaGirl86:

I say remove the forums all together. Clearly people having fun is the problem and we need to put an end to that.

AND NO, DON'T GIVE THEM A CONTAINMENT AREA TO HAVE FUN IN WITH LOOSER RULES. WE NEED TO GET RID OF ALL THOSE SILLY AND MEAN BULLY JERKS RUINING THE SUPER SERIOUS HALLOWED HALLS OF STEAM FORUM ACADEMIA.

You can always shut off the device and go get some fresh air; it may be time.

[Gwarsbane]

Originally posted by HulaGirl86:

Originally posted by Lara Croft:

It would be better to remove all awards and we have peace now :wololo:

I say remove the forums all together. Clearly people having fun is the problem and we need to put an end to that.

AND NO, DON'T GIVE THEM A CONTAINMENT AREA TO HAVE FUN IN WITH LOOSER RULES. WE NEED TO GET RID OF ALL THOSE SILLY AND MEAN BULLY JERKS RUINING THE SUPER SERIOUS HALLOWED HALLS OF STEAM FORUM ACADEMIA.

Since you don't want to use the forums... stop using them. Stop looking at them.

You are not forced to use them or look at them. Other people use the forums for what they are suppose to be used for, communications. Yes there are a few bad apples and Valves Mods should be more active and get rid of them, if they were more active, with dedicated people who would read and get to know the trouble makers we wouldn't keep getting as much spam as we do.

Those who keep getting warned and banned rightfully should lose their ability to use the forums at all.

Those who scream how the forums should be shut down because they see a few people abusing it or having fun, should maybe have their forum viewing & posting ability removed for a while so they can calm down, go play same games or go outside and touch grass or what ever they need to do to calm themselves down.

[Psymon²]

Originally posted by Azhukar:

The "Clown Emoji award" should not award any points to the recipient, so as to not encourage people intentionally making controversial statements despite not holding stated position.

removing the "awards" entirely is much more preferable suggestion to making the clowning an even more effective insult

[davidb11]

Originally posted by Velesianus:

Have you seen Palworld's board over the past couple of days? Jesus wept.

What's odd is that it can be fixed immediately and easily in a wide variety of ways. For example, ban repeat offenders from creating posts for games that they don't own, remove point gains from jesters or just add a simple thumbs up/down system.

I'm guessing whoever is responsible at Valve for keeping this very clearly failed experiment going is a nepotism hire with a marketing degree and a room temperature IQ.

Or they own stock in Reddit because it's definitely driving traffic away from Steam's discussion boards and towards game specific subreddits at an ever increasing rate.


This is one of Valves few L's over the years but damn is it a massive one.

None of what you are saying makes any sense at all.

[William Shakesman]

As always the funniest thing about this discourse is that it's just people who call posts they don't like "farming for jesters" more than actual jester farming posts.

[76561199559798421]

steam empowers it

[Kitt 🌟 Stargazer]

Just altering the jester itself won't deter this board unfortunately. You're probably going to have to address all the awards as a whole. You're going to get a lot of backlash as well towards people who don't have jobs that require these awards to get any steam points too. That are willing to let the forums burn in order to get a few points to buy a shiny new background, profile picture or pfp boarder off of the shop.

I want to push for more tools for users to filter out content created by others that they would rather not see or engage with, that only effects them. To Hide topics and responses completely from view with simple clicks so they don't show up at all. Mind you, this only effects what you see, not what others. This would be a way to keep awards just the way they are too. I'd argue this would make moderators jobs a little less busy as well. This is a pretty win win compromise though as I have yet to see any real issue with the suggestion so far.

Originally posted by Velesianus:

Have you seen Palworld's board over the past couple of days? Jesus wept.

What's odd is that it can be fixed immediately and easily in a wide variety of ways. For example, ban repeat offenders from creating posts for games that they don't own, remove point gains from jesters or just add a simple thumbs up/down system.

I'm guessing whoever is responsible at Valve for keeping this very clearly failed experiment going is a nepotism hire with a marketing degree and a room temperature IQ.

Or they own stock in Reddit because it's definitely driving traffic away from Steam's discussion boards and towards game specific subreddits at an ever increasing rate.


This is one of Valves few L's over the years but damn is it a massive one.

People on this board will willing pretend that situations like that are made up or fabricated on this board lol. That they can just be ignored... When I go to said forums and find that out of 50 threads on the first page, only like 5-10 of them are legit conversations and the rest are low effort bait topics. Lol...