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?
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.
So…old mods or mods for uninteresting and obscure games would eventually die because of zero seeders.
I know there’s no easy answer for this question but this would happen. Just try looking on the p2P scene for an unpopular or extremely niche tv show. There’s usually zero or sometimes in a rare occasion less than 3 seeders
Since mods are almost exclusively unable to be copyrighted nowadays, there is a very good chance the Internet Archive would be more than happy to host the mod data - as they have with many community projects.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Care to explain in what way?
I’ve been a casual user of the side for a few years now and except the short waiting times for downloads and endorsement reminders there has been nothing to really frustrate me.
The constant pushes for their premium model, while understandable, sucked as a user. Same with the increasing push to do EVERYTHING through their mod managers which actually had a tendency to conflict with the community made installers for a lot of older games.
They also had weird stances as to what triggered a mod as NSFW. Nobody (sane) would complain about the straight up sex mods but it had the same youtube problem where mature/“mature” content would get age gated. Same with their very hit or miss rules on “politics”. The reality being that it was just a way to blanket ban content for the moderators but it led to hilarity when Skyrim (the game that site basically was built on) has white supremacists in-game but you can’t even acknowledge that because it would make the chuds angry out of game.
For what it was? I liked it. But it has been on the decline for… probably about half the time it has existed.
I’ll also add on that there is a tin foil (but not THAT much) conspiracy that a lot of the pushback against Bethesda’s premium mods came from the Nexus mods staff/team since it was a direct competition to them and they realized no modder would risk that smoke from… asking to get paid for their hard work.
I haven’t used it in the last several years, but from about 2014-2018 any time I tried to download, it required registration, and any time I tried to register, it just didn’t work. It was some problem with the javascript in their site. Probably related to captcha or something. Yes, I tried multiple computers, multiple browsers, even tried registering on a library’s computer.
Looks like their site is less shit now, but it’s still awful.
I’ll probably keep using it and see what happens. To be honest I’ll just go where the content is, and if the new people fuck it up it’ll likely go elsewhere.
I got a “lifetime membership” on discount right before they did away with that option entirely. I’ll stick around for a bit, too, mostly.out of convenience, but I ain’t contributing, and I’m leaving uBlock on at all times.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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I remember getting my Morrowind mods off there. Peanut Gallery edition for me!
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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!
Good luck hosting the terabytes of data that mods have.
Let me introduce you to torrenting and community distribution of data.
It could be implemented this way so that no one individual would need to fully shoulder the burden of hosting everything.
Federation would allow you to only host mods not hosted at other servers, with some level of redundancy.
Also, it could use a modding app with BitTorrent-like functionality, so that downloaders could share their copies as well.
So…old mods or mods for uninteresting and obscure games would eventually die because of zero seeders.
I know there’s no easy answer for this question but this would happen. Just try looking on the p2P scene for an unpopular or extremely niche tv show. There’s usually zero or sometimes in a rare occasion less than 3 seeders
I wonder if this could be solved on protocol level, i.e. automatically preserve objects with least redundancy, as known to the server.
Like if federated servers hold 50 copies of a file, it’s likely not worthy of saving, but if there is only 1 or 2, it must be stored.
Since mods are almost exclusively unable to be copyrighted nowadays, there is a very good chance the Internet Archive would be more than happy to host the mod data - as they have with many community projects.
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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Friendly reminder this is the average “stop banning mods” commenter.
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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”.
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.
That is such a depressing way to look at things
Unfortunately, it’s just the way it is.
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.
removed by mod
Capitalism created this expectation. That’s how corpos operate. Capture the market then bleed it.
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?
Dude I’ve been premium for years. First sign of betrayal that will change though
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.
And I literately just started using them for Daggerfall. Really frustrating.
Fuck em nexus has sucked for a while anyway, they started enshittification years ago.
Care to explain in what way? I’ve been a casual user of the side for a few years now and except the short waiting times for downloads and endorsement reminders there has been nothing to really frustrate me.
The constant pushes for their premium model, while understandable, sucked as a user. Same with the increasing push to do EVERYTHING through their mod managers which actually had a tendency to conflict with the community made installers for a lot of older games.
They also had weird stances as to what triggered a mod as NSFW. Nobody (sane) would complain about the straight up sex mods but it had the same youtube problem where mature/“mature” content would get age gated. Same with their very hit or miss rules on “politics”. The reality being that it was just a way to blanket ban content for the moderators but it led to hilarity when Skyrim (the game that site basically was built on) has white supremacists in-game but you can’t even acknowledge that because it would make the chuds angry out of game.
For what it was? I liked it. But it has been on the decline for… probably about half the time it has existed.
I’ll also add on that there is a tin foil (but not THAT much) conspiracy that a lot of the pushback against Bethesda’s premium mods came from the Nexus mods staff/team since it was a direct competition to them and they realized no modder would risk that smoke from… asking to get paid for their hard work.
The folks who responded explained it better than I could have so I will deffer to them.
I haven’t used it in the last several years, but from about 2014-2018 any time I tried to download, it required registration, and any time I tried to register, it just didn’t work. It was some problem with the javascript in their site. Probably related to captcha or something. Yes, I tried multiple computers, multiple browsers, even tried registering on a library’s computer.
Looks like their site is less shit now, but it’s still awful.
I’ll probably keep using it and see what happens. To be honest I’ll just go where the content is, and if the new people fuck it up it’ll likely go elsewhere.
I got a “lifetime membership” on discount right before they did away with that option entirely. I’ll stick around for a bit, too, mostly.out of convenience, but I ain’t contributing, and I’m leaving uBlock on at all times.
This is shit but… if people weren’t already concerned over the massive monopoly that Nexus had then they weren’t paying attention.
Oh no, this is never good. How long before they implement a required pay system?
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.
They claimed they won’t, but we’ll have to see their actions https://www.nexusmods.com/news/15301?comment_id=155643499
Sounds like people need to start taking their mods off of there quick.
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.
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.
They had a good run. It was fun while it lasted.
Oh this is sad news.
Let the enshitification begin.
sigh.
GOG’s move into mod support seems pretty prescient now.
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
I’m sure all they’re concerned about is censoring and it has nothing to do with anything else.
Spicy point of view that I don’t agree with, but you’re straw manning here.
I’m concerned about it but not for bad reasons. What stats do we have on the different reasons?
Sorting people with “I’m sure they’re all bigots” is a great way to avoid any debate, but very manipulative
removed by mod
Wow massive bigotry right there. I should be banned for this, really.
You didn’t find anything better, really? Laughable
Yes. Perpetuating sexist and transphobic gender roles is massive bigotry. You are a bigot.
What are you on? Because I want some
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
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.
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.