With today's Steam update, Valve has made changes to how Steam User Reviews are displayed. The goal of today's changes are to push more helpful user reviews to the top of the review section and suppress those damned overused meme reviews to the bottom.
Valve says that the primary goal of Steam User Reviews is to "help potential players make informed decisions about the games they are considering purchasing by understanding the attributes of the game that other players like or don't like." Valve used to have Steam sort reviews by how many "helpful" votes were given to each review by others. Of course, everyone sucks and just marked joke reviews, memes, and ASCII art reviews as helpful which, surprisingly, aren't very helpful at all.
User reviews that are identified as being unhelpful for potential customers, such as one-word reviews, reviews comprised of ASCII art, or reviews that are primarily playful memes and in-jokes, will be sorted behind other reviews on the game’s store page. That doesn't mean players won't ever see these humorous, but unhelpful posts, but it hopefully means that they’ll see them less frequently when trying to learn about a game.
There are no changes to how review scores are calculated with this update. The only change is to how user scores are sorted with this new option enabled.
