Account ban for liking a review on steam? (Got a response from support.)

they can mark the review and it locks it so it cant be edited, somebody at steam has to ok it for the ban. had a review locked by a dev where i said they tried to bribe me with keys to change my review and i had backed it up with proof. when it was reported the review got locked and i was unable to edit. steam said the review was OK, so the dev reported it again. it got the Green light agian and jump cut to a few years later and all the devs games have been removed from the steam store. now they go by a new name and just re-upload HD or remastered versions of the same games under a new name

found it https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198094803808/recommended/400250/

Ok, so you voted at some point on something. That something got banned. As a rule, apparently, everyone who votes on something that gets banned gets a TEMP restriction. It will go away, seems like a temporary measure to prevent who knows what, most probably bots.

As was already pointed out any review can be altered after you voted for it. Following Valve's logic they better start selling insurance policies on their crappy store if they want to keep voting for reviews as a feature.

How is posting e.g. arbitrary ASCII art a review? According to your line of thought every graffiti you see in a public restroom is a Steam review. Removing stuff from Steam reviews that has nothing to do with a discussion of a game's merits isn't censorship.

On the other hand the ban we discuss here isn't censorship either but imho an unjustified removal of user account privileges.

Well it's not about recent steam terms. It's rather that there's not enough mods to moderate all the content so they probably address things in the order they see it, and while some community mods might not have permission to issue a ban for a review vs a valve mod, and also their position might affect how they see things.. I wouldn't be surprised if their admin flags are different because they do more things.

I don't know if you remember what the review was but since it says scam or other, the highest probability is that the user pointed towards the download of the patch and who knows where that's hosted and what else they found there and how the link or what can be found at that link changed over time. What if a trojan infected that link or file in the 3 years and now it's found like that, so they are banning it to prevent spreading of viruses. I wouldn't blame them.

Too many variables I don't know to have a closer estimate and even then the only ones that know are the review poster and valve. Could be that he was asking people to add him for this or that and then offering them wallet codes for their inventory or some stuff you know. It does say scam. Seen a review once that said "I've got an extra copy of this, add me to trade!". If the person asks for stuff but gives a duplicate key, maybe they eventually get flagged through reports. Too much we don't know. I think it's the patch thing.

Certainly they blocked you temporarily from voting on reviews because maybe you liked more from that person or they are on your friends list or something of the sort. They see an association between you and that person, hence why they assume you might be helping the scam evolve and they want to stop that. I technically have 4 steam accounts(due to the limit of 1000 cs go items at once in case you are wondering, this has now changed with the storage cases), I only use my current one nowadays but I could basically go on each account and like my reviews or make a group and like stuff twice despite just being one person or pretend I'm a middle man for someone in a trade, see what I mean? Better prevent those things if possible.

Still feels a bit shady to me, a bot account is usually pretty obvious in its behavior, even an automated system should be able to tell the difference between one and a normal user.
If scams are their main concern they should just stop allowing external links in reviews, since it already goes against the whole idea of a concise text review within a binary recommendation system.

I buy games on gog and epic. When epic launched i dared to defend epic (not how they were doing things, or their worse launcher) but because i wanted (and still want) more competition. My intention is never to defend valve or bad practices, im no fanboy.

Sadly some level of automation is inevitable - or if its all man-made everything would slow to a halt.
I was following up on some news and discussions about human review in platforms like facebook, twitter etc, because of low pay and high pressure and so on...
And while the abusive low pay jobs were horrible and still bellow what was needed what one specialist said stuck with me. He was one of the advocates against abusive workloads and anti-social media, but he said it was a tricky problem since, truth be told, the amount of people using online services nowadays and the amount of data generated is just insane- to the point where we past the point of debating 'how many human reviewers are needed at average` to 'how much slow things down'. Simply because, with proper wages, the amount needed (and their speed) could quickly grow unbearable.

Of course steam is no facebook, and obviously valve is guilty of low manpower- Gabe gave hints, and heck the service itself, that it runs almost on a skeleton crew of sorts for its size. This is all bad.

But the thing is, even if valve multiplied 10 fold the amount of reviewers they still wouldnt be enought to manually review every case.

To give a perspective- what youre saying is that when someone is banned for scamming, a human shouldve looked and evaluated each and everyone who upvoted their scam review.

So 1 scammer caught, at least 100 so accounts to check (potentially thousands, because there are reviews upvoted like that), each directly by a human operator.
Add to that comments and whatnot- theres scammers, flagged post comments, flagged screenshots, reports of scam, cheating, technical issues...
Youre basically saying that because theyre trying to be more cautious (not every company would catch on upvotes- btw amazon recently was criticized because they did nothing about a scheme around reviews/upvotes), they would have to multiply for who know how many of every flag and have every single one be human evaluated?

Scenario 1: They hire everyone needed, proper
outcome: company goes red. Even at minimal wages theres just too many reports, cases, and indirect cases (like upvotes above)
Not to mention a whole bunch of mistaken or ill intended reports.
Maybe valve would be a particular exception because of how much of a monopoly(almost) it has become, but like any service theyre also spending on constant server increases and in valves case who knows how much already indebted into R&D (like steam deck, vr, etc).
It reaches a point where it wouldnt be worth the effort
...and the so asked for share reduction (devs been asking for years, 30% IS too much) wouldnt ever become real

Scenario 2: they hire, underpaid
We have a second facebook case, almost slavery to meet demands and pressure.
Even quality plummets, underpaid and with huge daily targets the 'human review' would be someone taking the quickest glance they could so they could on move on with their 1k+ queue that day
(that btw is how these jobs work even with low ammounts- its one of the worse jobs)

Scenario 3: Time
Thats the only way to feasible have a workforce properly paid without blowing the business:
Time is sacrificed.
So every time anyone made a report, from smallest to the more serious...
...we would have to rebrand 'valve time' to something even worse.
.............

Time is another huuuge problem online: because scammer, hackers and cheaters thrive on it.
Say a company takes an average of a week between proper reports /start of ill activity to proper banning/expurging culprit, doing something to return stolen goods or whatever.
For scammers & cia that means they could plan around new account and scamms for 6 days before pulling everything out- rinse and repeat.

The more time it takes to curb culprits the worse things gets, more scammers come in, it creates a stable enviroment riskfree.

................................

Thats what stuck with me about the whole subject.
Even advocates for better reviews agree that, in the current state we live in and only increasing going foward we HAVE to apply machine learning or similar

The best aproach btw would be a mix- machine learning handling most low level and obvious cases, and filtering what passes on upper to the humans. That way humans would lose less time with non-issues to review things proper without hurry.

"Its just greed... getting away with this shit"
I agree on many levels
But at the end of the day being mad because things are unjust isnt enough
I wish it were but actually solving this puzzle is a tad harder then some ceo wishing so and giving an order.

so you got un banned? congrats - pleased for you have white list

I hate this, seems like it became the standard behaviour for every tech company (if not every company) customer service: being as vague and unhelpful as possible.

I wonder if that have something to do with legal liability- i imagine depending on the case, if its actionable, their responses can be used against then. Wich is understandable -wrong, imoral, sadly legal- but at least they would have a reason to hide

But it seems they spam that as a rule for any and everything, even when theres no sense in doing so...

I commented on a profile of one of my winners who took his sweet time a few days ago just to dip my toe in the water as I'd read about these bans here rather frequently. No ban and account lock yet maybe their algorithm is better trained now.

View attached image.

Question is was this policy already active in 2018 and if so it's nonsense nevertheless because by editing your review to merely correct a typo you'd lose all reactions.

This only works if you change from upvotes to downvotes and vice versa. If you edit a review without changing it, the votes remain. I tend to edit my reviews for grammatical mistakes, so i can confirm it.

Thank you for the input; then there is indeed a system to prevent something like this happening. So you are indeed responsable for upvoting and peraphs "promoting" pushing/scam links in said reviews to be upfront.