Lack of privacy options, users outcry for change
Around 2019, Steam started allowing adult games to be listed for sale on their service, these could go as far a full-blown hentai games with the most explicit scenes you could find on the web. Of course with this, privacy options needed to also be implemented for user profiles to prevent abused from trolls (Steam being known for having some of the worst trolls on the web, even worse, they are smart enough to know how to get users to overuse the report function & get their threads locked) & other complications with the visibility of those games & other features from them (achievements, community cards, etc.). Privacy options were introduced over time, but those options are still lacking & life issues can become a normal issue because Steam refuses to add those options.
Over time, this became a regular complaint on the Steam forums, many people going as far as to having to create secondary accounts to hide the fact that they had those games in their library or setting their profiles to full private, which only resulted in their inability to conducts trades (i.e. community items) or negate them from promotions & giveaways based on games they owned in their libraries. Later down the line, users wanted the ability to hide games & the activity from them on games outside of the adult genre (especially seeing as platforms such as PSN already offered these options, at least on the console systems themselves, if not when their profiles were looked up in web browsers).
I can't exactly say how long this outcry for change has been going on, but I started searching the Steam forums for threads on this & found a extreme amount of threads already created on the forums. At this time I didn't know which thread to voice my support for this function request & most of the threads were heavily derailed by those opposed to the function (mainly trolls), so I decided to create my own thread, knowing full well it would also get derailed, but having experience with them, I knew how to deal with them through use of a relevant post index in the opening post (reporting typically never went anywhere, trolls would use this against users to get their threads locked and/or deleted).
On 12/16/2019, the thread located at https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/10/2865910147606189246 was created (which has already been locked & restricted from being accessed), which trolls were quick in their attempts to derail, which I had to quickly start using a reply index (something that trolls were quick to use in arguments of degradation of my personality by twisting the purpose of it). It was later down the line that I started keeping track of a percentage of relevance on the thread, noting that the thread would usually only stay an average of slightly over 30% relevant on replies, only rarely getting over 40% & trolls were quick to drop that relevance percentage when they realized the discussion was starting to get back on track. I continued this trend of keeping the opening post updated on relevant posts (so people that had a legitimate interest in the thread could skip over the posts that had nothing constructive to add to it) until it was ultimately locked & restricted from access on 6/20/2020. Because I started keeping backups of this thread within the first month of its creation due to keep track of abusive individuals that were making it clear they weren't going to allow this function to get supported. On 6/23/2020, I made a decision that it didn't look like the thread was going to get reinstated & that it was time to start working on this review so that thread could be republished through unofficial methods due to it's restricted status.
The next portion of this review is going to detail what was stated in that restricted thread, as indicated through the backups that were being kept & regularly updated. After the republication of the restricted thread, I will start listing other threads that have the same outcry for change that appears to currently be getting ignored by vALVE representatives.
