Friendly reminder this is the average “stop banning mods” commenter.
80lv (3D industry news media) reports some digging on the company bought Nexus Mod. https://80.lv/articles/exclusive-nexus-mods-was-apparently-bought-by-a-shady-corporate-entity
Not exaxtly noteworthy info there though, it’s just some no name, 6 month old, likely VC-funded company with zero transparency.
To add to the conversation, one of the two new owners has replied to some questions: https://www.nexusmods.com/news/15301?comment_id=155643499
Welp. Almost all of the conversations I’ve read about this change have devolved into “hopefully the new owners don’t enforce their political views.”
They always say shit like “if you don’t like a mod, don’t use it,” but they can’t wrap their heads around the idea that if they can’t tolerate the (ex-)site owner exercising his own moral beliefs, they can find a different platform.
Fun.
Pretty much all platforms do this. It’s not a bad thing to want a big and established uncensored platform
Nobody should be obliged to host bigotry. That’s not “censorship” in a way that matters.
Oh yea of course they’re not, and I would say bigotry was not my aim with my comment. The company can do whatever the fuck they want and it’s probably better this way.
I do get that some people might want extreme free speech where nothing gets censored. It allows for other non conventional ideas to spread. For better, and for worse. Yea nowadays it’s often for worse but hey, there’s still a chance. All of this is really subjective.
I just don’t believe that a mod that changes Voice 1 and Voice 2 to Women voice and Men voice is bigotry. Removing pride flags in a game is… well it says a lot of the person, but it doesn’t harm anyone directly and it’s something you have to actively add to your game if you want it. There could be criticism of pride which can be valid as well but that’s beyond my point.
Having this kind of content hidden and with trigger warnings is still more or less doable depending on the content, and can allow for more expression than classical rules, and not only bad expression.
Shitty mods like Crack Life for half-life are super offensive but funny as hell if you take it with a grain of salt. Knowing that could be banned sucks.
But if their argument is that you can simply ignore mods you disagree with, then those individuals should stop brigading against and whining about, say, a mod that enables queer relationships. As their own arguments imply, they can simply ignore those mods.
They should really pick a side instead of cherrypicking what’s convenient for them.
I would personally be for that
The offensive mods should be hidden by default or similar, with a trigger warning on the mod asking to move on if you don’t agree instead of crying in comments. Same for LGBT… stuff, but we can show by default because it’s not offensive, but have a way to hide it so that those that hate social progress won’t cry as well
And there you go. A platform for everyone. You won’t agree with everyone, but you can make the experience tailored to what you want or don’t want to see
Ooof. We need a new place now.
A new website will suffer the same fate eventually. The best solution I’ve seen is CKAN for kerbal space program mods. Each mod just hosts its own releases for free on github or wherever they like, and the whole mod index is just another github repo.
https://github.com/KSP-CKAN/CKAN?tab=readme-ov-file#whats-the-ckan
The problem with that it’s not “wherever they like”, it is github 99% of the time. It is easier to fix when github enshitifies completely, but it will still require fixing
If it works with any git platform, you have several alternatives + self hosting.
The chokepoint is the index, but if the mod repo is up and you have the url by some other way, it should work
It does but it does so far as someone updates indices. It’s easier with git, but someone still needs to do all of it.
In the case of KSP, mod authors themselves submit Pull Requests to update the index when they release a new mod or a new version of it.
God damnit we just can’t have nice things.
Guy worked on the site for 24 years. Think he deserves some nice things himself (like reclaiming his life)
Yeah he could have reached out to the community to find someone to run it who would act ethically.
You make it sound like the site has been destroyed and enshitefied. Do we have any proof of such so far? Or can we put our trust in the guy who made it to hand it off to someone he trusts to do good by it? Everyone is freaking out about a possibility, which isn’t without cause since we’ve seen what can happen with other companies, but so far there is no need to pull out pitchforks.
Corporations and companies parasitically destroy everything human in the name of money. If it’s not a non-profit dedicated to the purpose of providing access to mods, it’s just a question of time. Best to just get a new thing started.
Oh I agree. I’m just bitching that it was all done secretly.
The fact that it’s secret implies to me the community won’t be happy. Idk.
Yeah, the doing it in secret can definitely be worrying and flame rumors, I agree. I’m being optimistic that the new owner is someone close to them and they’re still working out details before announcing who they are
He does deserve that, but I wish the single biggest modding hub on the internet and a load bearing pillar of an entire gaming culture wasn’t sold off to an unnamed party with no transparency and only vague reassurances that “nothing will change”.
What with the late stage capitalist society we’re living in, I’ve been conditioned to think that good things being sold off rarely amounts to good things.
Let’s hope this is one of the few exceptions.
Narrator: It wasn’t.
At the very least the entity that bought it will not rely on donations and revenue from upgraded download speeds, so it will definitely enshittify further to some degree.
The problem is not capitalism, it’s really us expecting shit to be free and rewarding good development and maintenance effort with thoughts and prayers.
Dude I’ve been premium for years. First sign of betrayal that will change though
Capitalism created this expectation. That’s how corpos operate. Capture the market then bleed it.
The problem is not capitalism […] it’s really us expecting shit to be free
No, “we” are not the problem. “We” donated and participated (by making mods) and “we” are responsible for giving the site what value it had. If it had no value, then it couldn’t have been sold.
Quit trying to blame the users for fuck’s sake.
The problem is capitalism, plain and simple.
How would this specific problem be better under another system?
In a system where money is not a thing it would just be a creative passion project and run endlessly until it was no longer needed.
Great. Yes. Under some kind of egalitarian free-energy tech utopia such as you’re describing, websites like Nexus mods would be even better. Sadly there are no such systems already operating for us to move to, and we do not yet have the technology to try creating a new one.
So any other political systems that are more real-world?
Removed by mod
And I literately just started using them for Daggerfall. Really frustrating.
GOG’s move into mod support seems pretty prescient now.
They’ll probably implement a daily/hourly download limit like MEGA does. So, for example, you can download 1000000000 small mods of some kbs, but the limit is 5 GB, so the mod bundle for big games is virtually limited to premium users.
They’ll probably try to change the lifetime subscription(the biggest sin in capitalism, how do you make infinite money without doing nothing if people can buy subscription once?), making it useless compared to the premium premium subscription.
Paid mods I think are unlikely, why bother to make a change so unpopular? Milk this shit for a decade and press this button only when shit hits the fan.
Is a enshification process not so painful so the vast majority will not bother to look for alternatives.
In other words: We’re doomed.
People make mods to be played surely, why bother using a platform if no one can play your mod from it.
? Same reason people use shit platforms? I can’t barely watch Twitch with 3 ads in a row every 30min and they still are the biggest streaming platform even when is shitty to the users and streamers. It’s a community based platform unless the community move to other place they still be big because people is there.
I was going to ask if twitch was still relevant but then realised I genuinely don’t give a shit.
Paid mods I think are unlikely, why bother to make a change so unpopular? Milk this shit for a decade and press this button only when shit hits the fan.
Unfortunately, I think this will be likely because Nexus has almost entirely cornered the market on mods. It is the place people get their mods from if not the Steam Workshop.
People would have to actually abandon the convenience and go back to scrolling a bunch of games specific forums for their mods. I don’t see that happening unfortunately and I’m pretty sure the executives at the new company know this. It’s a common marketing tactic to exploit the sunk cost fallacy.
Nah there’s some games that still only have stuff on moddb, thunderstore is the main place for v rising and a few other popular titles, and for Minecraft there’s curseforge and modrinth, and GOG is adding mods now too. The community is more fragmented than you’d think
No mention of who it is even being sold to, so bizarre.
A big corpo comes in and offer you a life changing amount of money. Very few people can say no to that, myself included.
That’s a big red flag. Good news would say something like “we’re happy to announce a team of community ownership”.
Oh this is sad news.
Let the enshitification begin.
sigh.
Oh no, this is never good. How long before they implement a required pay system?
They claimed they won’t, but we’ll have to see their actions https://www.nexusmods.com/news/15301?comment_id=155643499
Instant death of nexus if that happens
If they make it $1 a month and it doesn’t charge you for .months you don’t download anything I’d be fine.
Unfortunately there are still bills to pay even if you don’t visit the site for months. Keeping the lights on is not free. So that is a very unlikely subscription model you’re describing.
They have bills to pay even if I’m not a customer.
Would it be possible to build a fediverse modding platform? What would that look like?
I guess you still have the issue of someone needing to pay for the huge number of downloads, most of which are going to come from users who make no other contributions to the site. Maybe you could combine a fedi site with torrents or something?
Yeah this is a perfect use case for torrents, could go a step further and keep track of a downloader’s ratio to stop people leaching.
The Internet Archive. No need to reinvent the wheel. Have a discussion with them - set up a new project. Boom - everyone’s mods hosted in perpetuity by a free digital library.
Can things be fedirated and monetized so long as the monetization is put into maintenance & upkeep?
Nothing stopping you trying!
What would you federate? Would you federate posts of each mod with a link back to the home instance. Would you federate the entire modfile.
I’m not sure activity pub is the right fit here. We would lose so many mods and it would make it much harder to find mods.
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I’ve seen too many services go through enshittification, which is why I’ve always made backups of the mods I installed.
That said, that obviously scales poorly if you download a lot of mods or really massive mods.
Well, there’s still ModDB? (I don’t use ModDB so I dunno if it’s controversial or not)
Idk if it’s controversial, but I’ve always hated the layout of that site. It seemingly has not changed in decades, either, looking at it now.
Sounds like people need to start taking their mods off of there quick.
Might be too late. They changed the policy a few years ago when they introduced mod packs. They didn’t want entire packs to fail if one person pulled their mod, so total deletion was disabled.
Folks can still hide their mods and make new individual downloads impossible, but it’s still there in the background.
(All this is from memory. I hope I’m wrong)
I think there’s a process for removing mods. The page disappears but if it was in a pack thay version will remain up until the pack author removes it.
It was not a welcomed change, people lost it.
I wouldn’t advocate removing mods. Definitely put them on another site though.
If they start any nefarious monetization practices, absolutely pull mods. Until then though, I agree. No reason to pull ones that are already there, but definitely be prudent and start casting a wider net.
