The many ways to undermine a previously healthy online community

Two examples.

Here is a mistake made on Tumblr that is undermining the income for artists:

please go to “General Settings” then to “Dashboard Preferences” and turn off “Best Stuff First”. This is killing artist exposure! Please, please, PLEASE, turn it off if you really do love the artists you follow! You’d be helping us so much!

Please reblog this so that more people may know!

Artists and writers are losing a lot of exposure over this new feature. Someone recently posted a photo of their notes over the last month and there was a HUGE difference from before the “Best Stuff First” feature and after.

The things many people create on this site is getting buried. Some is commissions but a LOT of content is done for free. Changing your settings does help them, but it also helps YOU still find the things/ blogs you enjoy. If you want to actively help, hit the reblog button if you enjoy something.

This one on Skyrim is much less obvious, though perhaps more common. It is about the issue of sexual mods. My first thought was that this was a harmless fantasy. My second thought was that if this actually drove away the women who liked this game, then this would be the start of a process that would eventually undermine the game itself. So the makers of Skyrim have an incentive to watch this carefully.

The follower mods remain the worst of the worst. If you’re new to Skyrim modding, you’d be forgiven for wondering why this is the case. After some digging in the early days of my foray into the Skyrim modding scene (digging I still regret), I found out why. LoversLab has an “animation framework” known as (NSFW site) SexLab, and as you might have guessed, it allows the user to have fully-animated sex with anyone in Skyrim.

So those followers? Yep. Glorified blow-up dolls. Suddenly, the implications of those sexed-up teenage followers are pretty clear.

It gets even more gruesome when paired with the download rates. These mods are being pushed to the Top Files of the Month list because they’re being downloaded in droves. Thousands of followers, designed as unwitting sex partners, are being uploaded and downloaded voraciously. People are out there downloading these digital blow-up dolls as quickly as people make them.

It’s gotten to the pint that mod authors who produce other content are rapidly becoming frustrated and are pulling away from the community. Those who haven’t jumped ship are either very devoted to the game, or are fine with the growing misogyny of Skyrim’s mod content. I’ve modded Skyrim for years now, and this is undoubtedly the worst the Nexus has ever looked. It remains to be seen if anything can be done to stop the onslaught of misogynistic mod content.