Steam's new system of 'Helpfulness for user reviews' is here to fix Steam’s 'Helpful system for user comments

Valve, in its never-ending quest to make user reviews more useful than just a way to vent rage or silliness, has added a feature to Steam. It hopes that this will make reviews more helpful to people who want to learn more about the games that they are considering buying.

Steam users used to be able to vote on whether a review was helpful or not. Steam then sorted them according to the rating, giving higher priority for those who gave high ratings. As usual, the problem is the Boaty McBoatface Syndrome: When you allow people to vote on things on the internet, you will end up with shenanigans.

Valve explained the new helpfulness system called the Helpfulness System. "We've seen many players use reviews to share jokes, memes and ASCII art that may not be the most useful for a potential buyer," Valve wrote. "This content is often fun and enjoyable for existing customers, but it does not always help new players make informed decisions."

The Helpfulness System will give less priority to user reviews that have been identified as unhelpful. This includes "one-word reviews," reviews consisting of ASCII artwork, or reviews that contain primarily playful memes or in-jokes. These reviews will still be available to view, but they will now be sorted after reviews that are considered to be informative. The new system won't affect the generation of review ratings, just the order in which reviews are displayed on store pages.

The obvious question, as the Insane Clan Posse once said, is: How does it work? It's a bit unclear as usual: Valve explained that helpfulness categorization is a "mixture of techniques" including user reports, Steam moderation team closely examining a lot reviews, and machine learning algorithms, which help scale human judgment calls. This was made necessary because "well over 140,000,000 user reviews" had been posted on Steam. It's interesting to note that marking a review helpful or unhelpful is still "taken in consideration," although the extent of this is unknown.

Valve's reasoning for re-sorting reviews is also interesting, as it does not simply delete the unhelpful ones. Valve wrote: "We've found that players are eager to share their opinions about the game but lack the words to do so. Or they're not interested in writing a lot." Valve wrote: "Their indication that they would recommend the games is still valuable information, even if it's not possible to articulate why." Sincerely, I respect that.

If you'd rather keep things the way they were, you can uncheck the box that says "use the new helpfulness system". This will allow you to keep your reviews in the same order as before.

The ASCII art, jokes and memes will all be back in their rightful place.