Friendly reminder this is the average “stop banning mods” commenter.
Can’t even view r*ddit links anymore because they hate VPNs…
Content of the Reddit post follows:
See the original post here. https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1lcyjl6/nexus_mods_was_acquired_by_chosen_a_company/
People on Restera did some digging: https://www.resetera.com/threads/nexus-mods-site-has-been-sold.1219452/post-141554013
Site of the company itself: https://wearechosen.io/
Here is a monetization “cheat sheet” that the CEO posted on LinkedIn which is linked on Chosen’s main page if you scroll down: https://i.imgur.com/ztjS4K7.jpeg
In the CEO’s LinkedIn profile it says this:
Working closely with teams at NexusMods and beyond to build meaningful, sustainable experiences
If I had to guess the acquisition details are under some sort of NDA right now
That cheat sheet is weirdly coherent. Human, almost. Weird.
Welp, abandon ship.
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)
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.
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?
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 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
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.
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)
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.
Ooof. We need a new place now.
Oh no, this is never good. How long before they implement a required pay system?
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.
It’s was a lateral move from one person inside Nexus to another moderator. It wasn’t sold to some faceless corporation
Edit: fuck me I was was wrong:
https://www.reddit.com/r/skyrimmods/comments/1lcyzxz/nexus_mods_was_acquired_by_chosen_a_company/
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.
Would it be possible to build a fediverse modding platform? What would that look like?
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.
