To hell with everyone who inappropriately applies tags on Steam games

[kane_magus]

*briefly wonders why the hell "My Friend Peppa Pig" is showing up in my Steam Discovery Queue*

Oh, right, it's because dumbfuck assholes mistakenly believe it's "lulzy" or whatever to mark games like this with a bunch of inappropriate and irrelevant tags. https://t.co/9WOcFwYPi3

— Kane Magus (@KaneMagus) October 23, 2021

Here is a list of some of the tags applied to this game, as of right now:
Crime
Illuminati
Villain Protagonist
Bullet Hell
Perma Death
Wargame
Memes
Massively Multiplayer
RPG

— Kane Magus (@KaneMagus) October 23, 2021

What the hell even *is* the "Illuminati" tag, and what's the point of it? I'm asking sincerely, because I'm not sure I've ever seen a game show up in my queue with the "Illuminati" tag where I felt like it was appropriately applied.

*Maybe* The Secret World, but that's about it.

— Kane Magus (@KaneMagus) October 23, 2021

And with very, very few exceptions, I've long since learned that just about any and all games that are (appropriately) tagged with "Memes" are games that I can safely ignore without giving it a second thought.

— Kane Magus (@KaneMagus) October 23, 2021

I honestly think that one of the worst things about the Internet is that it makes far too many people wrongly think that they're funny when they're obviously not funny at all, and it also gives them far too easy access to platforms on which to spew their shitty brand of "comedy."

— Kane Magus (@KaneMagus) October 23, 2021

Comments

[owsf2000]

Inaccurate/False tags get under my skin as well honestly. The first time I see it, it might be funny, but after that the humor's dead.

If Steam insists on keeping user specified tags for games, I wish they'd be responsible in doing it by doing basically 2 things.

1. Create a separate set of tags that are dev/pub specified. Those can't be changed or added to by users.

2. Allow Steam users to turn off user tags for themselves. This means the user will get fed suggestions and the like purely from the dev/pub tags. User won't even see the tags given by the other users - and while it wouldn't be enforceable really, they won't be allowed to add tags themselves. (not enforceable since a user would just turn on user tags, add a tag, then turn it off again.)

If Steam did those two things, I'd be happy.

Alternatively, allow devs/pubs to remove user tags from their games that they feel are inappropriate/wrong/misleading. If a tag gets removed, it can't be added back by another user unless the dev approves. (Essentially the dev/pub would be adding a ban on the tag, that they can then remove in the case of an error.)

Honestly I'd be happy with that as well, although it would be less perfect as it would depend on devs giving a fuck about their own games. The first option would be harder to add I think, but would provide less work for the game devs/pubs - putting the responsibility for it in the hands of gamers.

[kane_magus]

Probably the stupidest thing about all of this (well, aside from the fact that dumbshit fuckwits are able to be """""funny""""" and add inappropriate tags in the first place, of course) is the fact that when you flag the bad tags as inappropriate, those tags will continue to show up on the main store page for the game in question and will show the tooltip "You applied this tag" when you mouse over them. This is the case even after the flagged tags may have been properly removed altogether if you look at the expanded view of tags. It's like, no, you stupid motherfuckers, I did not "apply" those tags, I flagged them to be removed because they were wrongly applied by others.

The only way that I've found to make the flagged tags no longer show up as "You applied this tag" on the main store page for a game is to go into the expanded tag view, then explicitly apply the tags that you'd previously flagged as wrong, and then immediately remove that application of them. Only after that do those tags no longer show up on the store page as applied by you. Of course, you can't actually do that if you want the tags to remain flagged as inappropriate if they are still there, because doing the above removes the flag as well. It is utterly boneheaded, and obviously a bug that Steam needs to fix (one which I reported to them years ago, but as has been shown to be the case numerous times by this point, Steam customer/technical support is... subpar, even at the best of times, and this certainly isn't a "best of times" case).