Thanks to the GDC 2019 we are getting a lot of information and face to face feedback directly from Valve such as the Official talk where the new library design and a few mor things were unveiled or this interview that Kotaku has made and the objective of this thread is to compile all the useful information possible, so let's start, shall we?
To make things clear, this is not a copy-past of the full interview, Kotaku made it and they should get the credit and the clicks.
As the article states, Valve has been pretty conservative in terms of communication, one of the concerns media and people have about the company when something happens, but there is an intention of changing things internally to improve this:
Tom Giardino addressed how unintuitive and infrequent were previous statements about Steam changes, blogs are not enough and they know it, how things are going to change? that's unknown but the thing is they know.
Of course things weren't going to stop on their communication with developers but also with the media and the people, putting the recent example of the infamous Rape Day debacle, a product that was dormant until thing blew up everywhere, this time Lombardi and Alden Kroll would speak with Kotaku in order to explain it and how Valve is committed to avoid this kind of debacles in the future.
Kroll also put some light on how Steam operates internally about the newcomers to the platform, automation isn't everything, a human team reviews the entering apps individually (I guess the amount of content makes this process slower than it could be) and not only that but there is also a team specialized on "Edgy content" that meets once a week which would explain why there are regular purges in groups.
The team still learns from mistakes and is always changing in order to improve but there's still plenty of room for that, Lines are always changing to adequate the system to whatever it comes and that makes things even slower.
The way Steam operates has lead into some non-wished behaviors from the community and while some have been addressed lately such as the review bombs some others still need to be fought (toxic behavior) an while the company makes efforts to keep the platform clean, as always, there's room for more improvements. Both Lombardi and Kroll said things about this matter.
And that's it people, here you have a complete summary of what the Valve people said on such interview, now I will put the link to the original interview (which is great) so you can read the interviewer comments, remember than this is just a summary so I totally encourage you to read the whole thing. Thank you so much for your attention and time, hopefully we will get more information in the future.
Valve's Rocky Road To Better Communication About Steam
To make things clear, this is not a copy-past of the full interview, Kotaku made it and they should get the credit and the clicks.

As the article states, Valve has been pretty conservative in terms of communication, one of the concerns media and people have about the company when something happens, but there is an intention of changing things internally to improve this:
“The company still thinks like it’s this tiny little group of folks,”
-Doug Lombardi to Kotaku“We've never outgrown the mentality that we’re only, like, 50 people. And the principle has always been ‘Just ship stuff, people will find it.’ Then we’ll listen to developers and customers and make updates and stuff like that... Now we’re hearing from folks that there’s so much going on, that they’re being fed from the firehouse and all that. ‘Maybe if you guys took some time to curate your messages a little better, we’d understand where you’re going, where your head was at, how to leverage it, etc.’”
Tom Giardino addressed how unintuitive and infrequent were previous statements about Steam changes, blogs are not enough and they know it, how things are going to change? that's unknown but the thing is they know.
“Developers are so busy,”
-Tom Giardino to Kotaku“They might ship a game once every two or three years. A huge amount of Steamworks changes and improvements come in that time. We’d work really hard on an update, ship it, and post a blog about it that maybe 500 people would read.”
Of course things weren't going to stop on their communication with developers but also with the media and the people, putting the recent example of the infamous Rape Day debacle, a product that was dormant until thing blew up everywhere, this time Lombardi and Alden Kroll would speak with Kotaku in order to explain it and how Valve is committed to avoid this kind of debacles in the future.
“There’s this issue that happens that we’re working to correct now where a developer or publisher will sign up for something, they’ll make a [store] page and that’ll go live, and then the code comes through and there’s an evaluation for the code—for the game itself,”
“So there’s this step where the sign goes up—’coming soon,’ so to speak—and then there’s this process of actually looking at the game. We’re working to correct that now so that everything gets reviewed before anything goes up.”
-Doug Lombardi to KotakuRape Day was never actually approved; it only appeared that way because the developers put the page up. In the future, that shouldn't happen anymore."
Kroll also put some light on how Steam operates internally about the newcomers to the platform, automation isn't everything, a human team reviews the entering apps individually (I guess the amount of content makes this process slower than it could be) and not only that but there is also a team specialized on "Edgy content" that meets once a week which would explain why there are regular purges in groups.
“like 90 percent of the games” being submitted to Steam are reviewed multiple times by a human team at Valve. First the review team looks at a game’s store page, and then they play a build of the game itself and check to make sure that it’s functional and contains features listed on the store page. “We go through a checklist of ‘Does it do these things? Does the build match what’s on the store page? Is it what they’re promising?’”
-Alden Kroll to KotakuThere’s also another review team for “edge cases,”. This team meets once a week to look at games that don’t fit pre-established molds and evolve Steam’s policies over time.
The team still learns from mistakes and is always changing in order to improve but there's still plenty of room for that, Lines are always changing to adequate the system to whatever it comes and that makes things even slower.
“These are things that we can’t deal with right away, and we need a group to figure out ‘How does this fit into our decision making, and how can we adapt our decision making to that?’”
-Alden Kroll to Kotaku“We knew from the beginning, we couldn't define ahead of time a bunch of gray lines, because you can’t anticipate what people are gonna make. So then it’s all these weekly conversations around ‘This is in this gray area here. How do we see that? How do we determine what that is?’ So it’s an ongoing, iterative process. We’re constantly refining how that works.”
The way Steam operates has lead into some non-wished behaviors from the community and while some have been addressed lately such as the review bombs some others still need to be fought (toxic behavior) an while the company makes efforts to keep the platform clean, as always, there's room for more improvements. Both Lombardi and Kroll said things about this matter.
“We can go all the way back to the day we launched Steam and say there’s all these things we wished we’d known beforehand that we could have done in advance,”
-Doug Lombardi to Kotaku“Part of it is, you get it to a point, you think you have it, you ship it, and you find out a bunch of stuff once it’s in the wild and millions of people have it. You find not only the lists of things you thought you should have included, but then there’s this whole other list of things that users and developers point out for you that you need to go do. We measure ourselves more on how quickly we can respond to that stuff and update things and keep reacting to stuff as times and technologies change.”
“Of course we would rather save people grief,”
“But it’s hard to anticipate exactly what boundaries you need to put in place because you don’t know what people are gonna try, and you don’t want to constrain too much the ways people can voice themselves or—in the case of new features or moderation or new types of games—you don’t want to constrain the amount of creativity people can put into the system, because we’re surprised all the time by what people bring.”
-Alden Kroll to Kotaku“But if you’re looking at the review system for example, it was hard to anticipate how people were gonna use it. Review bombing is a symptom of having a popular platform that matters. That people care about. If nobody cared about Steam, review bombing wouldn’t be a problem on Steam.”
And that's it people, here you have a complete summary of what the Valve people said on such interview, now I will put the link to the original interview (which is great) so you can read the interviewer comments, remember than this is just a summary so I totally encourage you to read the whole thing. Thank you so much for your attention and time, hopefully we will get more information in the future.
Valve's Rocky Road To Better Communication About Steam