In a constant effort to make user reviews useful, rather than just a conduit for anger and silliness, Valve has added a new feature to Steam that it hopes will make reviews more useful for people who actually want to know more about the games they are thinking of buying ...

Under the old system, Steam users could vote on whether a review was helpful or not, and Steam would sort the reviews accordingly, giving priority to those rated highest in terms of helpfulness. The problem, as always, is the Boaty McBoatface syndrome: letting people on the Internet vote on things is a bad joke.

“We've seen many players use reviews to share jokes, memes, ASCII art, and other content that may not be the most helpful to potential buyers,” Valve wrote, and literally Helpfulness System, describing the new Helpfulness System. “While such content is usually fine and enjoyable for the game's existing customers, it doesn't always help new players make informed purchase decisions.”

The Helpfulness System will lower the priority of user reviews that are deemed unhelpful, such as “one-word reviews, reviews composed of ASCII art, and reviews centered around playful memes and jokes.” These reviews will continue to be viewable, but will be placed behind reviews that are actually deemed useful. The new system will not affect the generation of review scores, only the order in which user reviews appear on the store page.

The obvious question here is how it will work, as Insane Clown Posse once tweeted: Valve says that usefulness classification will be based on “user reports, Steam's moderation team scrutinizing many reviews, and a human judgment combination of different methods, including machine learning algorithms to adjust the scale.” Interestingly, the mark of helpfulness is still “taken into account,” although to what extent is a mystery.

Also interesting is Valve's rationale for re-sorting user reviews rather than deleting reviews deemed unhelpful; Valve states that “many players want to express their opinions about a game, but don't have the words to describe their experience with the game, or , We found that many players wanted to express their opinions about the game, but did not have the words to describe their experience with the game or were not interested in writing much about it,” they wrote. Their expressed willingness to recommend a game, even if they can't articulate why, remains valuable data.” Frankly, this is truly respectful.

If you prefer the old way, you can bypass the new system altogether and sort your reviews as before: on the Steam store page, in the Customer Reviews section, select the “View” drop-down menu, and in the “Use new usefulness system” box Uncheck the box.

This will put your notes, jokes, and ASCII art back where they belong.