It happens in games that have chat as well, mostly shooter games like CS2 and TF2. Consider yourself lucky if you haven't encountered people like that, they're not hard to miss unfortunately in those games.

The Steam community stuff existed well before Lemmy, or even Reddit as far as I can remember. As toxic as it can be, it can also be helpful. The forums are broken down per game, I’ve found answers to getting games working on ultrawide monitors and stuff before, and fixes for other random game-specific issues.

There’s also the steam workshop, as well as the marketplace, I guess you’ve never seen the +rep stuff commented on people’s profiles?

I get what you’re saying, I think every time I’ve landed on a steam community post it’s been from a search page in my browser, never going there directly on Steam lol. You not using it is a completely valid thing, but it exists and it shouldn’t be filled with hate speech and neo nazi bullshit.

Side note, I used to volunteer as a sysadmin, maintaining a Hell Let Loose server for a clan, and wound up running double duty as an in-game admin for them also. The amount of times I’d have to look up somebody’s steam profile because they dropped some suss shit in text chat, only to find full on WW2 nazi shit in their usernames, profile pictures, about section, or groups they were members of was astronomical. It was an everyday occurrence. I get that a “realistic” (used to be, rip) WW2 shooter is going to self-select those people to a certain degree, but after seeing how many people were willing to just put that pathetic bullshit on display in their public profile I wasn’t surprised by this headline at all.

I reported every profile like that I came across, and I almost never got a “user does not exist” page indicating they had been banned when I followed up. The profile was usually just turned to private, and rarely left public but sanitized.

Questions, and mostly