Without proper moderation, it will always be terrible. I don’t think Valve is going to change that given their hands off approach to this kind of stuff.

There used to be a game called Domina on Steam, the developer used his forum and the game changelog to complain about trans people and spread conspiracy theories about covid vaccines. It took months and several verbal warnings from Valve before they finally shut down the store page and its forums.

That is what it took for Valve to draw a line. They do not care about xX_gamerfart13_Xx screaming that their Dell from 2004 can’t run GTA V.

I’d love to be wrong, but I think Valve is more likely to shut down the forums feature than bother with moderation.

You can't fix it. People are just awful and it's getting worse.

Sometimes I get drunk and go to the discussions, not to post, but to report trolls. Every time a mod reviews a report you get a notification, which is archived in your profile, and I made it my mission to get as many pages of reports as possible. Iirc there are 20 per page, and I have over 8 pages.

Actually punishing those with poor behavior? Perhaps a ban from the forums should extend to their steam account?

Pretty much nothing, it was always bad. Although, it has gotten worse after they added steam points and the ability to put a special emote on someone's comment/post which gives them steam points so now people often purposefully post some cringe just to get clowned upon and collect the points, or plagiarize/make meme posts so actual information becomes rare.

The truth of the matter is that the core demographic for steam forums are either children or gopniks, everyone else rarely even look at Steam let alone post/comment. Very little moderation doesn't help things also.

stop using them? :)

Simple... Bring back the good ol' SPUF.