Can the sharks in Steamtrades get bans already?

Sorry, I can't seem to find an official announcement or statement from that period at the moment.
I summarized my knowledge of the event in my response just a bit further below.

Note that I'm utilizing "officially abandoned" to mean "an official statement, which indicates a lack of future support and updates".
Just to cut off anyone wanting to nitpick that cg never used the precise word "abandoned" or the like. :P

cg made both sites, but ever since I joined SG back in 2015 there was no meaningful connection between the two sites, nor any moderation for ST. Others have indicated that there wasn't any support for trading matters preceeding that point, either. Further, while the site had basically never received any meaningful updates during the period to begin with, some time back cg made a final update which made ST user-moderated and then indicated he wouldn't be providing any further updates or support for the site aside from basic server maintainence.

As such, the only connection between the sites is cg himself (all the more so, now that all major links and references to ST have been removed from SG), and ST is effectively an abandoned site. There's also been a strong push from both SG support and community to not discuss SteamTrades matters on SG (at least, in any way other than how one would normally discuss any other abandoned, unrelated, and issue-prone site).

Well, not that the site encouraged such discussion even back when ST was active. It was always indicated to be entirely separate from SG, but its ever-more-emphasized "lawless wasteland" vibe has brought it somewhat in line with the perspective the community has towards G2A, in that SG's community both avoids bringing the site up and criticizes the site whenever does happen to be mentioned.

Basically, a gerneral shift among responses favoring a perspective of "Yeah, that's another site, but SG doesn't actually have any relationship to it. You could try Barter, if you want a good alternative." to ones favoring a perspective of "What, you still use ST? Is that really still a thing? That site is so busted. Let's not discuss that nonsense here. Just go use a better site." :P

Those mostly popped up after Barter went down for a time, so- while it has been some time now since that happened- it's still a relatively new issue (and thereby may still have a chance of eventually seeing some administration-side updates, if they can figure out any way of mitigating that trend).

That said, there's actually rather few of them, it's mostly just an issue of them being rather visible in their habits. Once you block the handful of major players, you rarely encounter any exploiters and bot users. In fact, ST'd probably be similarly managable if it also had a block feature, as it also suffers from its major exploiters simply being a lot more active and manipulative in their posting habits than normal users.

Well, it's way easier to compare and search things on Barter, so it seems rather unlikely that it'd be possible for Barter to be worse on the matter than ST overall, nevermind Barter's active moderation which helps mitigate any more overbearing situations. In fact, while some may be utilizing it differently, Barter seems designed more to be a trading resource. ST, on the other hand, seems more suited to be a marketplace advertisement board. Well, it isn't as though anyone has to strictly choose between the two sites, so "better than" arguments don't have to be emphasized too much. Barter is, at the least, certainly worth trying for anyone who hasn't done so.

The sharks are worse on barter.vg than steamtrades. Barter.vg is 90% sharks.
-- cdr

And no, SteamTrades does not have any kind of Support staff.

You'll find all the sharks from Steamtrades on Barter, they're top users. The ones that bump their trades every minute on Steamtrades but never actually trade or sell anything, they just wait for someone to offer them a lot more than what one of their games is worth.. sharks

Some people are in it to make a profit, and you can choose not to deal with those users. You can block people if you don't like their offers, and there are no threads to bump on barter.

I've been using them for the past 7 years and never had any issues.

Gift links transfer Humble support to the recipient, which is why they were favored (even by non-resellers) [Humble also used to be very open with allowing revocations (eg, on grounds of "I activated it to the wrong account"), which meant that non-gift-links also had a mild potential risk to them].

After the whole ongoing "Humble flags gifters as resellers" came about, that emphasis declined. Now everyone I know, myself included, basically just takes a "whatever works for you" approach if they're not resellers. So yeah, by this point, any insistance is probably a sign of a reseller.

Northward specifically is one of the games they try to get low. You won't find it easily because they then turn around and flip it for 20$. There's quite a few other games like that as well. They offer you some 3$ game and say its a good deal because it was bundled but its not. Just because a games been bundled doesn't mean its worthless. Hurtworld was in the 1$ tier of a bundle but it sells for 15+. So again you get offered crao for it while they take advantage of everyone to flip it for 15$