I reported them for harassment with the following statement:
The purpose of this group is to review bomb any game that has gay representation. Their discussion threads talk about using other platforms to discriminate against LGBTQ+ communities and individuals to circumvent Steam’s TOS policies. This type of behavior promotes discrimination, review brigading, and toxicity. It is surprising Steam is tolerating such open homophobia on this platform.
Curators are just the steam equivalent of movie reviewers.
If you get familiar with a reviewer’s take on things it can help to know if something will be enjoyable based on their preferences to yours. For me, I loved Ebert’s reviews because it wasn’t the score he gave, but how he worded the review. Some reviews were listing the things he disliked, but since I knew he disliked certain things I loved, it let me know that kind of movie getting a low review from him meant it would be dumb fun and not pretentious. Butbif he mentioned something that we both disliked, I knew to skip that movie.
Ebert famously reviewed a few things without giving a score; I believe one of them was Human Centipede about which he said, to paraphrase, “You’ll like this if this is the sort of thing you like.”
There’s a big aspect of genre siloing in gaming. Games tend to be developed very hard into specific genres and tropes, not all of which are things I like. However, game developers don’t necessarily like to be categorized that way, so the way things are marketed can get very muddled. I like games that are the sort of thing that I like, and when creators are actively working against me finding out what kind of game they made, I don’t always know what games are a good match for my tastes.
Then add to that: Often games will get very high ratings because the niche of players they cater to thinks the game is sitting near the apex of that niche–and nobody outside the niche is playing that game. But if that niche is, say, visual novels (which bore me to death), I’m not going to like a game. The high rating is, to me, a false signal.
But this is where curators can help! The fact that it’s a specific person with that specific person’s tastes is good if I happen to share those tastes. It helps me to avoid high-rated games that don’t contain the elements I enjoy in a game; and to find the games that cater to my tastes but aren’t marketed in a way that I recognize.