Platform Decay

The Death of the Free Internet: Why SteamDB Joining Nexus Mods Should Terrify You

SteamDB — the internet’s most trusted window into Steam’s hidden data — just joined Nexus Mods, a company with a history of ideological curation and a motto of ‘acquire, amplify, conquer.’ This isn’t a merger; it’s the enclosure of a digital commons. When the tools that keep the internet honest get absorbed by the very forces they were built to expose, every user transitions from community member to monetized product. The free internet always dies with a smile and a press release.

You’re a ‘Bad User’ to Reddit. And They’re Coming for You.

Reddit is systematically degrading old Reddit through a thousand small cuts — login walls, broken incognito, killed APIs — to push out “bad users” who don’t generate ad revenue. But the users they’re shedding are the same ones who built the culture, wrote the deep-dive posts, and moderated the communities that made Reddit worth billions. This is the enshittification playbook in real time.