Toughts on new steam policy?

This will very majorly affect the way trading keys and skins will work. Sites like OPSkins will have to hold users' skins for 7 days before they can be put on the market. Keys bought via OPSkins won't be of any use until that 7 day grace period is over. Many other things will also change. I highly disagree with this decision and hope they will revert it back.

I don't really have much of a stance on it, I don't do CSGO trading anymore. What I do think is SR is going to have a influx of scam reports against random gambling site bots when the site owners just keep everything but that's the risk you take when you use services such as those.

What I like about it is it may encourage trades to stay in the trade window.

They could add a trade captcha. It would ruin sites like OPSkins unfortunately, but it won't really affect normal traders like you and me and basically put a halt to gambling sites. Unfortunately, automated trading is a very big business and many legit sites will also perish. The trading API would be useless as well. However, this one week cooldown is imo not the way to deal with gambling sites. It punishes normal users and legitimate businesses too hard and won't deter the bigger gambling sites as much as Valve would probably hope.

Sadly it has to be a one bad apple to spoil the bunch scenario. I wonder if they will eventually consider having a shorter trade timeframe for longtime friends, maybe 3 days or something like that.

for oldschool captchas such as ones Steam uses sometimes, AI is already more accurate on solving them than humans are, as for trade restrictions, this has a very negative impact on the community and the economy, there must be better ways to deal with gambling sites and scammers

they do that sometimes, but the problem is that Steam accounts are disposable by nature, since they started banning them, gambling sites became much more sneaky in their actions, using random names, no profile picture, only using each account for a short period before abandoning it, due to the huge amount of trades each of them makes, it becomes very difficult to trace the current bots in use, and valve doesn't have the man power necessary to do that.
I'd suggest for starters that in order to trade/own items for a game, you must own that game, that would make it a bit easier to trace the accounts and a bit more costly to make those throwaway accounts, but the problem stays that gambling sites are more than capable of paying for the game for each account due to the amount of profit they make.

if you carefully read the SSA, you'd realize they put them in order to give themselves as much flexibility and power as possible so they can pick whatever decision they want, and not as rules, as it's pretty clear they don't enforce most of the SSA, and they never seemed to be against those trade sites or any other services that use their API (they even gave green lights in some cases), hell they weren't even against gambling until they got in trouble for it, and yes, they are very well capable of tracking bots of those trade sites, but the reason for that is those trade sites operate publicly and don't do any steps to hide their bots.

that is true, eliminating all bots would eliminate most reasons for fraud happening, fake sites will continue to exist, as scamming a couple people will pay out the investment even if the bot gets banned shortly after, there would be less incentive for scams to occur, but by doing that it will hurt the community and economy again, recent csgo changes seems to have more impact on scams than on gambling/fake sites, but more impact on legit trading/cashout sites, however, it is a bit too late to enforce that rule on SSA.

a legit site making profit have always been a positive force in the community, take it from the basic level, a trading site making profit, sponsoring a youtube channel, helping that youtube channel make more content, more incentive for more people to start making videos about the game.
let's say tomorrow Valve starts enforcing a no bots at all rule, it will definitely have a positive impact, trade sites and automated trade bots are eliminated so all trades happening will be between normal traders, farming bots are also banned.
let's take for example marketplace.tf , a popular cashout site, lots of people use it, if it gets eliminated by this rule, it's not just the website and its owners being hurt, marketplace.tf has been the main sponsor for almost every TF2 event throughout the years, including competitive events (prizepools and all), how is that not hurting the community?
what if Valve also takes it to the next level and enforces their view that items has no real monetary value, restricting trading items for real money outside the community market (ala blizzard), that will also have many positive impacts, and will help prevent scams, but then all those people that invested a lot of real money into items would lose interest, the value of items would drop significantly, hurting not just the owners of those items, but hurting Valve themselves the most.

correct, however, profit trading is why most people trade in the first place, having bots definitely has a lot of negatives, but a lot of positives as well, focusing on eliminating the negatives rather than destroy everything would be a better solution, in my opinion.