That was my first thought too. I’m assuming dev responses ignore all comment settings. At least I hope that’s the case.
As far as reviews themselves go, It just makes me wish for better moderation. So many Steam reviews are awful and deserve pruning that I don’t even bother reading them half the time and go straight to the discussion pages.
i really really loathe the /s or “meme” reviews. People that either don’t gaf or don’t know their bullshit “ironic” upvotes causes steam to actually recommend me some of those shitty games…
should be grounds for review privilege suspension imo, i freakin hate that! when the algorithm couldn’t remotely tell shit apart,
i had so much shovelware on my steam front+rec pages for a while it was hopeless for me trying to browse the store while signed in… (seems to have gotten a fair bit better since then tho, but still 
*grumple grumple)
Much like @Gnuffi I like both and I also like to delve into the negative reviews for anything first. Look for any glaring issues that seems to repeat or what other things people found the game to lack or that they had a personal problem with. I can then weight that against my own expectations of the game and see if it’s something I care for or even might think is a good thing.
The greatest benefit of this compared to games media is that these are nameless people who have no ego or paycheck on the line and they don’t even pretend to be unbiased. They wear their biases openly and clearly making it much easier to judge and I can easily tell if these people have actually played the game they’re talking about, can’t say that for Destructoid.
I strongly disagree with that notion, exactly how strongly depends a little on what precisely you wish was pruned out.
Again in agreement with @gnuffi that the joke and meme reviews are pointless waste of space. But valve in one of their actually clever moments added the option for the community to mark reviews as “funny” and give you the ability to filter those out. Far and away better a system than some appointed judges supposed to sit around and tell what is a useful review and what isn’t. Such a system would render the whole idea of the public input pointless as now only the approved messages get through.
Might work reasonably for a little while. But I know for a fact that sooner rather than later people who fancy themselves gatekeepers of taste and morals will worm their way into that judiciary and now it’ll will be only their opinions that are reflected in the reviews because anything they disagree with will be pruned. Then we might just as well read kotaku.
I can think of no merit whatsoever of the following reviews taking directly from Steam. They just confound the weighting system.
This game is art
Great Game!
Oh sh**, I’m sorry.
Sorry for what?
nice
Oh Daniel, Daniel, Daniel… what have you done?
game scery bexcuz it make noise
i like the visual on this game fit with genre of this game
Great game for everyone
Add in the “12/10 would poop myself again” type and the reviews that aim for for a “found this review funny” and that’s exactly what I’d prune. You could almost automate the process! Just wondering why you strongly disagree with keeping reviews that ruin the weighting.
That’s why there IS the “funny review” mark to set. As I said I do not find these reviews to be anything but a waste of space. But they have already largely been dealt with. They’re also easy to just scroll past on your own so they’re largely harmless. Far less harmless, in my opinion, than a system to prune reviews would be in the long run.
As for what they do to the aggregate grading on top of the store, I don’t know exactly what sort of weights there are in the system. It’s entirely possible that any review marked funny is weighted less or not considered at all. Even if not I still don’t think they’re worth worrying very much about.
The steam reviews are the only reviews I ever “read” nowadays. If I’m remotely interested in a game I scroll through the reviews to get a decent idea of the major issues and whatnot.
And if someone posts a longer review (or rant) you usually see comments that often have interesting conversations so it really sucks that it won’t be used like that anymore.
I no longer trust any actual game reviewer out there, I just don’t give a damn what one particular person thinks about a game.
Thanks for spreading this news. I think it’s important for people to know.
When developers respond to reviews, it opens up a conversation about the game and greatly increases the value of those reviews.
The review section is my first go-to for a buyers’ guide. Next, I look at YouTube.
Also, I checked my past reviews, and it seems the “allow comments” box is checked for all of them.
Good to know, glad the default is on for ‘legacy’ reviews.
Though those funny reviews are also often marked helpful, which means they are equally rated compared to those reviews that are actually, you know, helpful!
Take one of the reviews I quoted above…
7 helpful votes? That has to skew the overall positive rating of a game and I’d much rather there be a decent system of getting those sorts of “reviews” removed. Although saying that I wouldn’t because by and large I ignore Steam reviews in favour of Eurogamer/Rock Paper Shotgun/Destructoid and Totalbiscuit/Worthabuy/ACG so it’s a devil’s advocate kind of opinion. I suppose I regard it as Steam graffiti.
Upvoted 
Haha, now it’s at 8/8 are we brigading steam reviews now?
Oh Truly, Truly, Truly… what have you done?
I like leaving reviews on games that leave me an impression, whether it be good or bad. I usually try not to break it down to strictly positives, negatives, and a score, but that has happened as well. I like to leave behind a message that speaks about my experiences playing the game. I have seen a silly comment on a up or down review that get upvoted a ton because it’s a 3 word sarcastic comment. That really doesn’t do it for me if I want to look at a review that actually is informative. I try to read/glance at a bunch of reviews before I buy a game, since I want to know about some mechanics that may cause issues or particular aspects that I do not want to engage myself with. I also look for negatives to start, as others have already mentioned. The comments are nice, it allows people to let me know if what I have written is informative or not.
I do wish that Steam allows more than just thumbs up or thumbs down for reflections on a game. I think people would have a much more dynamic response.
Say if there’s a 10 point system, there’s a big difference between 6 and 10, but both would likely be qualified as positive. That’s why I really have to read a lot of reviews instead of looking at the general positive percentage before deciding on a game.
You would probably run into the problem of the “IGN score inflation” rather quickly though, people don’t really use the whole space a 1-10 score system gives. Far too many people are too likely to think that 6 is a bad score and we’ll only see 9s and 10s for “recommended” reviews and straight 0s for “not recommended” and so I think the binary system is probably just as good. It also cuts out people arguing about what specific score they think a game should be worth.
Well, maybe I just wanted a neutral choice added to yes and no.
What would a neutral choice really accomplish anyway?
I mean we keep calling them reviews but they were really not meant to be, they have never been intended to be anything but recommendations. You either think a game is worth recommending to someone or you think it’s worth recommending against and of course it’s nice if you have some sort of reason or arguments for your position.
So what would a neutral review/recommendation even be?
The response of the consumer looking at the recommendation is binary in nature, either they buy the game or they do not. Well sure they could add it to their wish list and buy it on a sale later but I’m not sure that’s what a “neutral” recommendation suggests.
Good point, I concede. It would, in fact, not be informative or useful. I think people who give halfway marks tend to have more thoughtful commentary, 'tis all the reason behind my thoughts.
They certainly do, you are correct. When looking for reviews of products, movies pretty much anything other than video games reading the 3-7s is where the good info is. Why that doesn’t seem to work very well with video games I do not know.
I would have been highly annoyed if they made this update and forced everyone to “Comments: Off”, like they did with Profile Privacy settings. That would have meant hours of flipping through all of my 177 Steam reviews to check a box. Thankfully, this isn’t the case… any reviews before the change still have comments enabled by default.
Honestly, I’m indifferent. Discussion is half the fun. Nothing beats being able to go to a negative review over technical issues, explain the problem he’s having and a solution/workaround, and seeing it flip to positive a week later because they ended up having a great time after the game worked. That said, there’s a sizable amount of reviews written by people who don’t want a discussion, don’t want to defend their statements-- they just delete any kind of discussion-opening comments. This just automates the process. Other people may be sick of dropping a review and having it flooded by angry whiners that don’t even have any interest in the game but jumped on a hate-bandwagon, or on the flipside, defend the game to the death. Again, dealing with these frustrating comments is now automated.
I’ll never use the feature, but options are always nice.