Thanks for the thread, I really hope the conversation doesn't just become another endless 'egs fine/egs bad' spitball contest.
The EGS Discussion Problem has always felt like a symptom of a larger problem on the internet and particularly here on era.
Dismissive, childish shitposting isn't discouraged hard enough here.
Folks are not modifying their behavior from the bad old days of "Neat.jpg" or "fuck this, fuck that, fuck everything" drive-bys, and there isn't a visibly enforced moderation policy to cull that behavior early enough in a thread to make a difference. Everything is extremely reactive and things are allowed to spiral 10 times past that point and suddenly all this bad stuff is The New Normal. [SEE STAFF POST] is a memetic joke, and often reads like a white flag surrending the convo to the same, low-simmering hellhole of circular, low-effort recrimination while the thread drifts further and further from its intended topic. The chaos of metacommentary has to get severed at the head: The shitposting. So many times an EGS thread goes off the rails because a shitpost gets chain-quoted and we're off to the races, the thread goes down a predictable path as people polish their dusty talking points and paste them in obediently, and nothing changes. Nothing gets better. People don't come to some kind of understanding until the thread is locked or another conversation becomes the next battleground.
Everyone here is a person at a phone or at a computer and we all feel things as intensely as any other human being put on this planet. Everyone who likes the EGS catalog, everyone who works on a game that gets put on EGS, as well as everyone who still invests a ton of goodwill in Steam is capable of thinking beyond the stuff you spend your money on and consider, even if only for a moment, that there is no Internet, it's just other people, before resorting to the hostile, toxic shitposting that is anathema to any kind of actual discussion online. Anybody can do this, but it has not felt like even the plurality of people are even trying to do this anymore. The noise is pushing everything else out. It's madness and we know that we can do better but aren't. The only reason I can think of why is we aren't looking at each other anymore. And if that's the case I wonder why any of us are even trying to be a community.
