Does anyone know how to disable the invasion of community content? This right now more than anything is really upsetting me. I don't want to see community/stranger activity in my private library. Adding to this mess is the fact that it just auto plays movies and gifs or what have you. I don't like this intrusion and its also making me dizzy. I don't want Steam forcing my personal library to be facebookified.

I don't like the shelves and tiles business but what I really can't tolerate is the above.

Thanks Khai for the tip on the shelves. What we really need though is to be able to TURN OFF the community crap within our libraries and also delete the "What's New" shelf. If its a game we own, its easy enough finding out what's new about it by oneself if we so choose to do so.

Coot, to disable Community Content, try this:

Click: Steam > Settings
Click on Library in the left hand column.
Click on Disable Community Content.

Not sure if this will do what you want, but worth a try. I also clicked Low Bandwidth Mode, to cut out as much other stuff as possible.

It's also possible to set the tiles to "small". Not perfect, but another step to be less intrusive.
All in all, I can't say that I'm emotionally traumatized. I don't necessarily like this, especially not that more advertisement is creeping into non-shop pages, but then again I knew from the day that understood what Steam would be, that it would eventually lead to this. Just like there is stupid advertisement on YouTube, or even Amazon Prime now. I'd love to lead an ads-free life, but I've accepted that won't be having one.

I used to leave steam on all the time, not anymore... it kills framerate in non-steam games. must be constantly loading in the background

Before this update when I was starting IL2 BOX in VR I would start SteamVR and the "Play" button for IL2 would change to "Play in VR". Now It remains "Play" and when I click on it it the asks if I want to start desktop or VR, defaulting to desktop.

So although I have Oculus and SteamVR running someone thought that defaulting to desktop, in such circumstances was the thing to do thus forcing me to find the little "Play in VR" checkbox while peeking out from my Oculus Rift. Stupid.

Thanks adlabs6 for the tips. I'll check them out. I sent a message to Steam and put a request in the forums to either have the option to revert to the old ui or to at least be able to disable the intrusive community content. I don't want that in my own library space. They should keep it its own page like it used to be. There still is a community tab at the top and that's where this stuff should remain, not barging into my library. Everything else about steam is already full of shared space from the store front to the community and activity tabs. They should not invade our personal libraries with this stuff in my opinion.

Well, they want this in your library space. It's more advertisement against which you can't shield yourself, with the chance to increase revenue by another percent.

It is important to understand that for Valve, Steam is a software sales platform. From their perspective, every minute that you hang out there without actually buying anything is a failure. It was inevitable that we'd eventually get to this point. Vavle has been giving a #%&*$# about what other software developers want, and paid attention to what the customers want only to the extent that they must to keep it a viable marketplace. Other than that, as with every large corporation in a near-monopolistic position, soulless business management types will rise to the top of these organizations eventually and start dominating the decision-making process. And they will do whatever Excel suggests to them that they should try to increase revenue (and their personal bonuses).
Steam makes an annual turnover of several billion dollars. They aren't a cozy little company run by gamer enthusiasts. They will fake and pretend enthusiasm for games and gamer culture only to the extent that they have to. Their benchmark in customer relations is EA. As long as EA is perceived worse by gamers, "everything's fine" for Valve.

**Shrug** This is business. It's all about maximizing revenue and profit as it should be. Ultimately the marketplace will decide if this approach by Valve will work or not. As it is already, game developers have been flocking more and more to the competitors of Steam like Epic.

+1 for Ssnake's last post.

I really hope people will come to a point where they support non-intrusive platforms (cough, GOG, cough) more. I *do* pay for my games via Steam even though I don't use the client, so I guess I'm guilty as well. But I pay much more on GOG and try to minimize my steam purchases.

It's the same in almost any area of software now. My banking company changed their online banking layout from a clear red numbers/negative cash and black/positive cash to an all grey type, larger fonts, tablet/mobile phone "friendly". Less booking lines per page, less overall information, total waste of desktop display resolution, and they added advertisements for their own products. They just don't care, some beancounter somewhere decided that's their new global appearance and has to be "modern" instead of usable.

On one hand we're expected to update our software for security reasons, and on the other hand companies change workflows/appearance in the wake of those updates, as they see fit. Firefox just broke my password management habits and made the same task much harder than before.

I guess if you are serious about the whole problem, the only option is Linux and free software.

That will depend greatly on what you do computing wise. If you are a gamer then good luck finding games (besides cheap low budget independent titles) that run on Linux.

I hadn't logged in to Steam in weeks, as I've been playing nothing but Combat Mission. But did so last night and actually I prefer the new style. Go figure. Nothing about it bothers me, and there's lots more info available. An improvement as far as I am concerned. No accounting for taste I reckon

Linux is a non-starter for me as far as games are concerned. I wish that wasn't so.

I'm getting used to Steam now. I still don't like it however.

The thing is,I was annoyed when the SimHQ forum changed some while ago. I didn't like it. I don't like change. Now I can't even remember what it was like before, I'm so used to the new layout.

I just need things I can shake my fist at once in a while

I would think just British politics alone would keep you quite busy!

Not so much a shaking of the fist Panzer,more like

oh i found out why i dont have advertisement reported a while back, i have family share or whatever its called, when its on when you open steam the ads don`t show. So if it bothers you so much, try setting that up on configurations.

i will suport GOG when it has games i want to buy, where are the publishers ? that is right,they dont want to risk piracy.

I don't know if I'm seeing the same thing everyone else is seeing, but I don't see that much difference. (I fire up Steam on a Friday & shut down on a Sunday, so it took a week for the new look to get here :))

The Play/Install button looks a little larger to me, but that's about it. I can't seem to drag the left game list column out to accommodate long game titles, that would be my only complaint. I don't see any ads in my library view.

They're not "ads", they're "suggestions".
Maybe Czechia isn't yet a test market. The times where a global audience could expect identical treatment - whether that's prices in web shops or customer support - seem to be long over, if they ever existed.

That being said, and notwithstanding my critical remarks about the monetization of everything in a global contest for our attention, I think this was mostly a typical "internet outrage" from people who don't like change. from a functional perspective there's very little to get worked up, there's even the chance to declutter and better organize large game collections by allowing you to create custom "shelves".

Sure, maybe CZ is not fully updated yet, but it is different. Different enough to assume it was what everyone was talking about, but maybe not. I'd be surprised if there was some little halfway change before moving to a bigger one though.

After scrolling down on each game's page, I do see user generated content in the form of GIFs, videos, memes etc which I didn't see before. I don't see them unless I scroll down though so it doesn't bother me. None of them looked like suggestions though, I still only see them in the store page, which is where I would expect to see them.

tip of the day

opt into the Beta program and get the latest Beta installed the you can set it to List only.... I love it...