Discord lowers free upload limit to 10MB: “Storage management is expensive” - Dexerto
www.dexerto.com
Discord is lowering the upload limit for free users from 25MB to 10MB, citing operational and financial reasons.
  • Jarmer@slrpnk.net
    1463·
    2 months ago

    so many people left reddit and fled to discord. So sad. Discord was ALWAYS going to enshittify itself to death, but okay people.

  • cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    111·
    2 months ago

    I’m surprised they didn’t put a time limit on the storage since they are not a file hosting platform.

      • lemmyingly@lemm.ee
        14·
        2 months ago

        I find it weird that they upload content to their own servers even when you provide them with an external link.

    • Sudomeapizza@lemm.eeEnglish
      3·
      2 months ago

      I know there’s been several news items regarding file changes to links within discord, like Link Expiration, file size increase for free users, and all i found from a quick search was this reddit post talking about how their file wasnt deleted, but the link directs to discord saying “This content is no longer available.”

      I don’t know how long it is, but to wether or not it was removed by discord, or file expired, im not sure

  • Dave.@aussie.zone
    952·
    2 months ago

    Dammit now I have to reduce the block size of my discord-based cold storage filesystem.

    • pup_atlas@pawb.social
      7112·
      2 months ago

      I don’t see this as enshittification. It’s a real thing that’s happening, but raw storage is expensive. They pay for it directly. Unlike artificially limiting features that are “free” to them, this genuinely isn’t, it’s not even really super discounted for them on the backend. They’re likely just paying for a series of S3 buckets.

      • Count042@lemmy.ml
        5615·
        2 months ago

        I’m a sys admin/devops engineer, and yes, storage is far more expensive then people realize.

        This is the very definition of enshittification.

        EDIT: To those downvoting:

        Do you actually know what the definition of enshittification is? Apparently not.

        Enshittification (alternately, crapification and platform decay) is a pattern in which online products and services decline in quality. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize profits for shareholders.

        It doesn’t matter that the cost of storage is a real thing. They gave things of value away for free to grow their user base and to try and capture network effects. Now that they think they have that they are taking away ( or decreasing ) the free stuff of value they gave away.

        The fact that storage has value is literally an important part of enshitification.

        It wouldn’t be enshitification if they gave away free stuff that wasn’t valuable.

        • tyler@programming.dev
          11·
          2 months ago

          It’s not enshittification because it literally doesn’t follow the second part of your own definition. Needing to change your offerings because your internal prices increase is normal business. Enshittification literally is from companies offering stuff to entice users and then they realize they have nothing else to offer to businesses, so they remove features in order to sell them to businesses or to increase ads.

          • pup_atlas@pawb.social
            41·
            2 months ago

            This was my core point. I don’t consider a business raising prices or gating features as a direct result of those features increasing their cost as “enshittification”. Stickers being paid, custom emojis, etc, that doesn’t cost Discord anything to provide, making that paid is enshittification; But if the feature itself costs the business actual money to provide, does everyone just expect them to eat that cost forever, in a lot of cases for absolutely no revenue from the users?

            Calling out businesses for not giving stuff that costs them money away for free just, doesn’t fundamentally make sense to me. Why is it just expected of Discord that they pay to store all your large files? A lot of “freemium” services like GMail recoup some of that money by mining your email for data that it can sell to advertisers, or eating the cost in an attempt to lock you into an ecosystem where you’ll spend money. Storing files on Discord is neither of those things.

            Don’t get me wrong, a lot of services are enshittifying, and making their services worse so you spend more money with them— but adjusting your quotas and pricing to reflect your real world cost of business is not that. To frame it as though you are entitled to free compute and resources from companies that don’t owe you anything comes off as just that, entitled. The cloud isn’t free. If you want to use a service, you should pay for it if you can.

      • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.techEnglish
        1510·
        2 months ago

        Except not, this is what social media is supposed to do, allow people to upload things to share. They’ve done perfectly well for all these years on it, it’s not some new crazy problem. It’s existing functionality they are removing, that’s on them.

        • tyler@programming.dev
          51·
          2 months ago

          Discord isn’t social media. What is with everyone just referring to every tech company product as “social media”!?

          • ayyy@sh.itjust.works
            11·
            2 months ago

            I use discord to keep up with what my friends are doing, look at pictures that they post, etc. We used to use Facebook for the same thing back when it was The Facebook and required a university email address and didn’t have ads. How is that not social media?

        • pup_atlas@pawb.social
          2·
          2 months ago

          Discord isn’t a social media. With platforms like facebook, you’re still paying for all your storage, just not with money. There’s ads all over the platform, and all your content is data mined to be sold to advertisers. Discord doesn’t data mine (to my knowledge) OR run ads. Would you prefer a higher limit at the cost of having ads all over the interface? The AWS bill has to get paid somehow, nothing is free.

      • Butterpaderp@lemmy.world
        44·
        2 months ago

        Based on all of the changes discord has made over the past few years, its absolutely enshittification

      • zaph@sh.itjust.works
        710·
        2 months ago

        Just like YouTube. They need the ad revenue to keep all those videos saved to their servers. It’s only natural you watch a 30 second ad every 10 seconds. It isn’t enshittification because it’s a real thing that’s happening, and raw storage is expensive. They pay for it directly.

    • willya@lemmyf.ukEnglish
      61·
      2 months ago

      It’s a real issue. It’s amazing they allow it like it is now.

  • Jessica@discuss.tchncs.de
    621·
    2 months ago

    Well that didn’t last very long. It was 8 MB for like six years and then it just went to 25 MB maybe a year ago and now we’re back down to 10 MB.

    I’m surprised they aren’t offsetting the cost by selling all our data to language learning models like everyone else is

    • tetris11@lemmy.ml
      452·
      2 months ago

      I’m surprised they aren’t offsetting the cost by selling all our data to language learning models like everyone else is

      Hah. Hahaha. Hahahahahahaahahahahahaha. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH

      • Jessica@discuss.tchncs.de
        61·
        2 months ago

        Just to be clear, I 100% think they are selling our data. What I meant was I’m surprised they’re concerned about the size of the uploads when they could just be selling the uploaded data.

              • y0kai@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
                1·
                2 months ago

                I simply don’t trust any company that provides a “free” service and is owned by Tencent, who has a 35% stake in Discord.

                • dev_null@lemmy.ml
                  3·
                  2 months ago

                  Neither do I, which is why I would love evidence to confirm my suspicions, so I can show it to others.

                  But I also try not to make claims that are merely suspicious, however likely.

        • Lucy :3@feddit.org
          51·
          2 months ago

          I am using png. Level 0 compression tho and in 4k (3840*2160), sometimes even 4k + 2*1440p (2560*1440), but it’s already too large with just my main 4k monitor.

            • Lucy :3@feddit.org
              64·
              2 months ago

              Because it was never a problem. It’s a little bit faster for encoding and decoding, and no service ever had problems with the file size. Especially not my selfhosted stuff. Every service, except discord. As I now have resorted to using Vencord or just uploading most media to Nextcloud, I don’t have that many issues with it anymore, anyway.

              • NekuSoul@lemmy.nekusoul.de
                6·
                2 months ago

                It’s a little bit faster for encoding and decoding

                On the other hand, the time spent uploading/downloading much smaller files probably more than makes up for that, although even that difference might get pretty small with modern internet connections.

                • Lucy :3@feddit.org
                  1·
                  2 months ago

                  Especially in times where using WiFi is faster than ethernet, because my network ports are only gigabit.

              • ayyy@sh.itjust.works
                3·
                2 months ago

                Because it was never a problem.

                But you literally started this thread because it’s a problem. And then you spent more time defending your bad choice on a Lemmy discussion than you will ever save in your entire life decompressing PNGs.

            • Lucy :3@feddit.org
              33·
              2 months ago

              Yes. But in theory it’s still a performance hit, and as I have enough local storage (and typically use services with high limits), and I’m too lazy to change grims config just for discord, I never changed it and used Vencord instead.

                • Lucy :3@feddit.org
                  2·
                  2 months ago

                  Because even though it saves over 29 MB, it also takes more than 20 times as long. And that’s just on my laptop, 1920x1080 + 2*1680x1050. On my PC it’s even worse.

                  I have thousands of GB of high speed storage, Gigabit internet, but only a Ryzen 5 2600 and a i5-1145G7.

          • tetris11@lemmy.ml
            411·
            2 months ago

            PNG started out as ZIP(BMP) and hasn’t gotten that much better. Use JPEG. The pixels you lose are not worth crying about

            • B0rax@feddit.org
              13·
              2 months ago

              JPEG for graphics like screenshots is not very efficient. For stuff like that, png is simply superior. (But not with compression 0)

              PNG is not good for photos though.

              • tetris11@lemmy.ml
                11·
                2 months ago

                why though? The graphics represented in the screen are already squashed and scaled, so you wouldn’t be preserving their quality in any case. If you’re worried about text, JPEG should still be able to handle it under high quality settings

                • B0rax@feddit.org
                  7·
                  2 months ago

                  We can ask the same the other way around: why do you want to use jpg if it results in a bigger size and worse quality than png?

            • lemmyingly@lemm.ee
              12·
              2 months ago

              Or they could just compression for their PNGs. PNG is a lossless format so they’ll only lose a fraction of a second during creation.

            • Lucy :3@feddit.org
              2·
              2 months ago

              I use 4k because I like seeing a lot of stuff at the same time in good quality.
              I make screenshots of my whole screen to share all the stuff in the highest detail.
              Using jpeg would result in literally unreadable pictures.

              • VOwOxel@discuss.tchncs.de
                1·
                2 months ago

                Depends on the Quality setting and version of jpeg. Even the original jpeg, on high quality, will result in little to no data loss. IIRC, Jpeg can even do lossless, with the only caveat being that it doesn’t save alpha channels (but screenshots don’t need to have transparency, anyway). Newer versions of jpeg, such as jpeg-2000 (and the much less broadly supported jpeg-XL) have much better compression and provide higher image quality at lower file size.

                “jpegification” or “Deep-frying” only really occurs with the original jpeg at low quality settings.

    • ReversalHatchery@beehaw.orgEnglish
      3·
      2 months ago

      I’m surprised they aren’t offsetting the cost by selling all our data to language learning models like everyone else is

      aren’t they doing it? but at least by looking at how much they like locking out people until they give out their phone number, I suspect they are not collecting it without having further use for it

    • gencha@lemm.ee
      2·
      2 months ago

      They increased to 25 to encourage media uploads to train their own models with. They now have collected enough metrics to realize, most valuable content is below 10MB. Now they are optimizing. They won’t lose anything valuable to them and the users who are impacted might even buy Nitro now. Win-win for them

        • gencha@lemm.ee
          1·
          2 months ago

          https://discord.com/terms#5 is pretty permissive

          Your content is yours, but you give us a license to it when you use Discord. Your content may be protected by certain intellectual property rights. We don’t own those. But by using our services, you grant us a license—which is a form of permission—to do the following with your content, in accordance with applicable legal requirements, in connection with operating, developing, and improving our services:

          Use, copy, store, distribute, and communicate your content in manners consistent with your use of the services. (For example, so we can store and display your content.)
Publish, publicly perform, or publicly display your content if you’ve chosen to make it visible to others. (For example, so we can display your messages if you post them in certain servers or recommend that content to others.)
Monitor, modify, translate, and reformat your content. (For example, so we can resize an image you post to fit on a mobile device.)
Sublicense your content, to allow our services to work as intended. (For example, so we can store your content with our cloud service providers.)
    • y0kai@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      31·
      2 months ago

      “by selling all our data to language learning models like everyone else is”

      I imagine China is using it for free since Tencent owns a 38% stake.

      • Jessica@discuss.tchncs.de
        2·
        2 months ago

        It might have only even been like six months. It was in the little change log pop up during one of the updates at some point

    • linearchaos@lemmy.worldEnglish
      271·
      2 months ago

      Sure it’s getting cheaper, but is it getting cheaper faster than their need for it?

      I’ve always expected their business model was unsustainable probably only able to manage through venture capital and growth.

      There’s hardly even any competition, their free product is substantial. Even fully funding a server is barely enough to cover a bare metal node.

      This is just the introduction to cost savings. As they wade into market saturation, and still need to provide growth in numbers they’ll need to pinch the free users into paying and pinch the paying users into paying enough to fully fund the service. Of course it won’t stop there…

      Edit: FFS dictation can’t ‘their’ it’s way out of a wet paper bag.

    • Bakkoda@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      16·
      2 months ago

      Yes but are your storage Managers doing anything? Going on long lunches and racking up bar tabs? Expensing escorts?

    • MerchantsOfMisery@lemmy.ml
      21·
      2 months ago

      Until a viable alternative is presented, I doubt Discord will die anytime soon. Part of the problem is people have a hard time accepting that even if you make the best meal in town, you’ve gotta get people to step inside before they’ll try it. To an extent, this does involve winning a popularity contest of sorts if you want Discord to die.

      I think often times folks are torn between enjoying a space/app as is, and making compromises to attract a larger group. IMO Linux has the same issue and that’s part of why die hard fanboys get so aggressively defensive when this is brought up.

      It’s the software equivalent of being the bitter "nice guy" that simultaneously wants to attract a girlfriend (users) but is kind of an asshole to women. You might think you don’t stink but please wear deodorant.

      • PolandIsAStateOfMind@lemmy.ml
        5·
        2 months ago

        Yeah i also don’t think it’s dying hence the plea. But thing is, i don’t want alternative. I want this shit to die so i never want to see “join our discord” spammed absolutely everywhere when i want to get some info on anything.

        • MerchantsOfMisery@lemmy.ml
          8·
          2 months ago

          Signal isn’t an alternative to Discord. I use both and they’re used very differently. Group movie watching for example is pretty easy on Discord.

          Digg had users and people jumped ship to Reddit because it was better.

          • NostraDavid@programming.dev
            1·
            2 months ago

            people jumped ship to Reddit because it was better.

            People jumped ship because Digg turned into complete and utter garbage, and Reddit wasn’t completely awful. It was a weird site though, 100%.

            Digg would’ve been fine had they not forced Digg v4 on users.

            • MerchantsOfMisery@lemmy.ml
              1·
              2 months ago

              That’s a feature that was implemented what, 1 or 2 years ago when Signal’s been around for a decade?

              You can’t possibly expect people to just jump from one social app to another that has such a relatively small user base and little familiarity. Entire Discord servers would have to jump ship and it would just be a nightmare for most people.

              What Discord prioritizes, Signal treats as an afterthought. Things like group chat, video chat, GIF usage, etc, Signal has never really prioritized.

              Discord’s mobile and PC apps both allow users to select GIFs within the application, whereas only Signal’s mobile app allows users to select GIFs within the application and Signal’s desktop app doesn’t allow for in-app GIF selection. If you’re reading this thinking "who tf cares about stupid stuff like that?", you’re completely missing the point because regular ass users care about stuff like that and they totally will say “fuck that” to an alternative if it doesn’t have features like this. Why doesn’t Signal incorporate in-app GIF selection for its desktop app? I’m sure it will be eventually implemented but dragging their heels like this for popular features and then having the nerve to ask "why aren’t people flocking to us instead of Discord/WhatsApp" is such an out of touch question to ask.

              When open source developers ask for feedback from regular users and their response to said feedback is"ACKSHUALLY it’s your fault, not the application’s fault", as it often is, it’s no surprise that their software never gains traction. It’s like a guy who wears cargo pants to a formal affair and then gets into an argument over attire because in his mind, cargo pants = more pockets = superior, completely oblivious to every other factor.

              Another thing-- Signal requires your phone number, Discord doesn’t. I know right away folks are going to rage about how Discord is the real privacy nightmare, not Signal. I don’t disagree, but the average user is just going to be more wary about being forced to give up their phone number in order to use Signal, even if the software now allows them to hide it.

                • MerchantsOfMisery@lemmy.ml
                  1·
                  2 months ago

                  Discord doesn’t require a phone number to use it and there’s tons of servers that don’t require phone number verification. The vast majority of servers I’m in have no phone number requirement. Signal straight will not work without your phone number, in any capacity. I’m sure you’d trust Signal over Discord with your phone number any day of the week but as I said, that’s an irrelevant point because we’re talking about why people are more attracted to Discord over Signal. Slacks vs ugly cargo pants.

                  I said that the reason they DONT is because other platform dont have the advertising budget, nor the user base to make users jump ship.

                  Have you ever seen an ad for Discord? I haven’t see one before and I only know about it through word of mouth. There’s nothing stopping people from creating Signal groups for various hobbies and including a Signal link in their social media page.

                  Refusing to use Discord might be noble from a privacy/security point of view but from a broader perspective, you’re significantly limiting your social interactions and not because of the people but the app the people are using to communicate with. It’s like not using a phone at all because pretty much any phone is a privacy/security issue.

          • PolandIsAStateOfMind@lemmy.ml
            1·
            2 months ago

            No. I mean if you spend your entire life jumping between 30 rooms full of people then perhaps, but for just normal voice communication for meeting, gaming or RPG it was entirely sufficient.

      • dev_null@lemmy.ml
        21·
        2 months ago

        I already use a different app for voice chat, and never used Discord’s voice chat feature.

        Discord is a modern alternative to IRC, Slack, or a more fully featured version of Matrix. I never considered it for the voice chat feature.

        People always bring up voice chat alternatives, which don’t replace Discord at all, because voice chat is a tiny unimportant feature of Discord that I wouldn’t notice if they removed.

    • lud@lemm.ee
      21·
      2 months ago

      If you know of any malware hosted by them you should report it too them.

  • MerchantsOfMisery@lemmy.ml
    31·
    2 months ago

    If Discord was open source, I actually would not mind paying a fee for it. Fixed or reccurring, ideally the former. But that’s never happening. And forget buying that Nitro thing.

  • graphene@lemm.ee
    19·
    2 months ago

    They decreased it?? People always complain about max file sizes being too small.

    Also, how is telegram able to offer 2 GB per file and 4 GB on premium? In comparison, that seems astronomical!

    • nossaquesapao@lemmy.eco.br
      101·
      2 months ago

      I believe telegram manages that with severe upload and download speed limits, but Telegram has always been a bit shady, hasn’t it? Who knows how they financially support all that.

      • Joe Cool@lemmy.ml
        4·
        2 months ago

        About 500MBit/s on Telegram Desktop. They currently have 10 million paying subscribers out of ~950 million users.

      • graphene@lemm.ee
        2·
        2 months ago

        Telegrams billionaire founder claims that he is bankrolling the thing with his personal wealth. I’m pretty sure he also claimed at one point that the average user cost them $6 per year, or something along those lines.

    • rbesfe@lemmy.ca
      83·
      2 months ago

      A smaller size limit on what amounts to free file hosting isn’t exactly enshittification. Servers and hard drives aren’t free.

      • Lettuce eat lettuce@lemmy.ml
        5·
        2 months ago

        The process of enshitification is what I was referring to. Discord got super popular by providing users with lots of value for zero cost.

        Now, in order to increase profits, they are reducing the scope of features they offer, and increasing the cost of the features that remain.

        This will continue to slowly get worse, as users are more locked into Discord’s ecosystem and userbase, they will be further pressured to upgrade and pay more money for less stuff.

      • UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.mlEnglish
        12·
        2 months ago

        Servers and hard drives aren’t free.

        Uhoh, the widdle baby poopy pants corporation can’t handle doing their job. Maybe they can just get the fuck out of the way and let the real adults host our own shit?

  • Resol van Lemmy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    18·
    2 months ago

    I gotta admit, I have no problem with introducing a completely new feature and locking it to paying members. But taking away an already existing feature from non-members, or limiting it in some way, is simply outrageous. They could’ve kept the upload limit at 25MB, and increased it for Nitro users to something like an entire gigabyte. This would’ve encouraged people to get Nitro. But lowering the upload limit for free users would just encourage them to leave and find an alternative (and the problem is that there aren’t any viable ones because they aren’t used as much).

    • werefreeatlast@lemmy.world
      5·
      2 months ago

      So email came before Google. Email was good. You went to your computer and downloaded your inbox. You could either delete the email from the server and have it in your computer only or keep it in both places. With android and Google, the strategy was to give you an address that you couldn’t take with you anywhere, and to let you see and accumulate emails from any device such that your data could be used for AI and you couldn’t easily retain it and still use it globally. You can come up with your own email server, just not a gmail.com address. They own you until you just start elsewhere.

    • MerchantsOfMisery@lemmy.ml
      3·
      2 months ago

      Exactly. And they didn’t even give the 25 MB limit to every user. Some users were always stuck at 8 MB, and others 25 MB. I’m the latter and I was blown away at the decision to cut the file size limit down to 1/3rd of what I was used to.

      https://8mb.video/

      ^ This website will compress videos down to 8 MB but the video quality ends up being awful, plus I’m not so sure how I feel about the privacy/security issues of uploading personal videos to some rando website so they can be compressed.

      • Resol van Lemmy@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        2 months ago

        I REALLY hate this “rolling out” of new features. Seriously, I hate it. I remember Instagram doing it when pressing the screen during Reels playback, on some accounts it pauses, on others it simply mutes the video.

        Good riddance, Instagram.

  • ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca
    141·
    2 months ago

    Maybe they should just delete their data every month. Holding 1 20mb file or 2 10mb files aren’t much different