The sadness of dead mods
I was just reading the posts on Nexus for a rather well known mod.
I thought it was so well put that I'd quote it here as a reminder...
08 April 2020, 7:16PM
> Modders for all games on Nexus Mods should get together and agree on some sort of public domain format.
Pshah! You'll be lynched for saying that in earshot of the wrong people. This site is utterly overrun by control-freaks, and irrational ones at that. They'll say things like "I put reposting and reuse restrictions on my mods because I've had other people fail to credit me, or even claim my work as their own." Then you point out that people who do that will pay no attention at all to their restrictions, because they're already careless or dishonest jerks who steal credit. You might further observe that the restrictions just get in the way of honest users, and are probably dooming the mod in question to low use, and even possibly ruining other people's mods later, since if they use something from the restricted work, with permission, no third party can ever re-use THAT mod in turn without getting permission from the original modder, who eventually disappears. This "permissions failure cascade" is why entire chains of dozens of Morrowind and Oblivion mods are basically dead (absent casting about on a particular shady Reddit board ...).
But then the over-controlling modder will just respond with something nonsensical like "Well, you would feel differently if you'd had other people fail to credit you and even claim your work as their own." It's like they just cannot understand a word you've said, and have no response they can make but a "repeat myself endlessly until anyone who doesn't think just like me gives up and goes away" pattern. It's not based in reason, but in emotion.
I don't think there's a fix for this other than re-implementing (reverse engineering), in a more open manner, every kind of mod that people regularly use but which has restrictive permissions. Skyrim modding may have too short a future lifespan for that to be all that practical, so perhaps look forward to doing as much open modding as possible, and staying away from restrictive mods, when TES VI finally comes out. Might be worth setting up an open-modding site, too. The real problem is that Nexus makes all these restriction options available, and even has a bunch of them turned on by default, when few of them are sensible for anyone to ever use. They just use them because they can; Nexus tricks them into thinking it's normative and useful, when it is the opposite. We're all making what are legally derivative works of Bethesda/Zenimax intellectual property, yet a bunch of us are trying to treat these mods as wholly-owned personal works. It's just silly, and in the long run it badly breaks down. Most mod sites are dead; few of them last more than a few years. Any mod with "do not upload elsewhere" restrictions tends to be left out of future sites due to that restriction, and thus all mods that depend on it go dead in turn. It's "community suicidal" in the long run. Crapping in your own food supply.
Pshah! You'll be lynched for saying that in earshot of the wrong people. This site is utterly overrun by control-freaks, and irrational ones at that. They'll say things like "I put reposting and reuse restrictions on my mods because I've had other people fail to credit me, or even claim my work as their own." Then you point out that people who do that will pay no attention at all to their restrictions, because they're already careless or dishonest jerks who steal credit. You might further observe that the restrictions just get in the way of honest users, and are probably dooming the mod in question to low use, and even possibly ruining other people's mods later, since if they use something from the restricted work, with permission, no third party can ever re-use THAT mod in turn without getting permission from the original modder, who eventually disappears. This "permissions failure cascade" is why entire chains of dozens of Morrowind and Oblivion mods are basically dead (absent casting about on a particular shady Reddit board ...).
But then the over-controlling modder will just respond with something nonsensical like "Well, you would feel differently if you'd had other people fail to credit you and even claim your work as their own." It's like they just cannot understand a word you've said, and have no response they can make but a "repeat myself endlessly until anyone who doesn't think just like me gives up and goes away" pattern. It's not based in reason, but in emotion.
I don't think there's a fix for this other than re-implementing (reverse engineering), in a more open manner, every kind of mod that people regularly use but which has restrictive permissions. Skyrim modding may have too short a future lifespan for that to be all that practical, so perhaps look forward to doing as much open modding as possible, and staying away from restrictive mods, when TES VI finally comes out. Might be worth setting up an open-modding site, too. The real problem is that Nexus makes all these restriction options available, and even has a bunch of them turned on by default, when few of them are sensible for anyone to ever use. They just use them because they can; Nexus tricks them into thinking it's normative and useful, when it is the opposite. We're all making what are legally derivative works of Bethesda/Zenimax intellectual property, yet a bunch of us are trying to treat these mods as wholly-owned personal works. It's just silly, and in the long run it badly breaks down. Most mod sites are dead; few of them last more than a few years. Any mod with "do not upload elsewhere" restrictions tends to be left out of future sites due to that restriction, and thus all mods that depend on it go dead in turn. It's "community suicidal" in the long run. Crapping in your own food supply.
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