Xuande's recent activity
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Comment on Steam Spring Sale suggestions in ~games
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Comment on A vast swathe of varied topics, and the conversations built around them, were just lost from Tildes – what to do when users leave with their posts in ~tildes
Xuande Link ParentFirst time poster and long time lurker here who only has an account thanks to invite codes that were openly posted here. I've went through deleting myself from communities numerous times, going...First time poster and long time lurker here who only has an account thanks to invite codes that were openly posted here. I've went through deleting myself from communities numerous times, going through the effort to remove my contributions/posts even if it meant manually deleting thousands of posts.
For me, its because I sometimes get the urge to break out of my shell of conditions (diagnosed social and generalized anxiety, bipolar, PTSD, among others.) That's hard for me to do, but so is living an isolated life - my time is 97% spent at home with no particular obligations and nobody to safely socialize with except my spouse. I've had strong experiences, good and bad (mostly the latter), happen when I decide to get active socially over the internet.
Several of those times involved me feeling personally attacked over an issue that I feel strongly about. If I left my posts intact, I would get a very strong urge to check back from time to time, a curiosity that I couldn't overcome short of nuking it entirely. And since that's bad for my own well being, I get rid of all of it.
So there's been a number of times where I've made the decision to abruptly remove myself from a community that might have no clue why I'm leaving, and I know that sucks for them, but I also haven't figured out a better way to handle the circumstances. I don't know the details of the poster the OP is referring to, but thought it might be helpful to lay out why I abandon sites myself.
I find that how usable a Steam forum is directly relates to how large of a community the related product has. Assuming that the community is large enough to exist, small enough to not attract much mainstream attention, and isn't too insular (Discord centered, etc)...there's a lot of times where I've found and/or gave useful information, tech support/bug fixes, and so on. Its even led to learning a lot about the developers at times, or helping steer their Early Access plans in meaningful ways.
As someone who frequents smaller scale indie projects and avoids most AAA/AA level games, this happens more often than you might think, and I'd hate to see yet another useful resource disappear from search engines for getting games/software working properly.
Of course, it would be nice if the more densely populated and toxic forums were functional without having to add in pages worth of ignored users, but that would require better moderation, and that can come with its own set of problems - assuming Steam isn't interested in greatly expanding their paid moderation team.