352
Discord will switch to temporary file links to block malware delivery
(www.bleepingcomputer.com)
this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2023
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Yeah... In sure malware is the reason. It's not that they don't want people using discord for file hosting.
Still, it’s not a file hosting platform. 🤷♂️ it should have been temporary to begin with.
It literally is, it's part of their paid plans.
It literally isn't, what the hell are you smoking?
you think a service you pay for that lets you upload files to them, to share the files with an unlimited amount of other people, is not a file hosting platform? even though it hosts files for you? and you pay for the service?
what do you think it is?
Don't move the goal posts. It's 100% not an advertised feature to use Discord uploads as cloud storage or an off-platform CDN.
The unintended side effect that you've so clearly described is the exact reason they're implementing the protections in question.
So if I sell a paid package that let's you upload files, then I store them and make them available to unlimited other people and put the files on my global cdn to achieve that. But I specifically don't use the magic words in my advertisement. It's not that product it's some magical other nameless thing
Listen, I would be right there with you if this wasn't a paid for feature, but it is. People pay Discord specifically for this. And now discord are neutering that feature because people are actually using it and now discord is mad. Just pay, don't use.
So now people who want to distribute files will end up using mega or whatever and going off app, and for what. So discord saves some money. Fuckin great
What ? Pretty sure their paid plans only allow uploading larger files. It says nothing about the longevity of said files on their servers
It shouldn’t have been. That’s their bad—misuse of file hosting is an obvious result of offering file hosting. Manage your own files. Put them on GitHub or something. And if they’re private they shouldn’t be on any cloud to begin with 🤷♂️
...... But it is, and they offer for people to pay them in order to function as such.
"Kroger shouldnt sell groceries. 🤷♀️ Grow your own celery, if you intended to eat it and not sell it you shouldnt have bought it from a store to begin with."
You're beim disingenuous, discord very clearly wasn't selling file hosting and was simply offering file transfer
They literally were selling that. That was the thing they flaunted as a big reason to pay up, was the permanence of the file storage.
If they werent aware of that, or its effect on their sales, I would be genuinely shocked. That would be like mcdonalds being surprised people wanted fries with their combo meal.
Surely you can quote where the permance of file storage "was the thing they flaunted as a big reason to pay up".
And no, a mere mention of increased upload sizes is not enough.
That comparison is poor. Kroger is a store for groceries. If DropBox started saying files were temporary, I’d think that was ridiculous. Discord should have always required a third party storage solution for longer term storage. They’re a chat app. Like zoom. And zoom provides integration with cloud file services.
Discord is a free chat app that offered a paid service of file storage. Because they arent actually trying to be a chat app.
They are trying to be a community hub. A hub that offers the bare minimum for a community for free, with paid upgrades to community care, communication, interaction, and convenience.
Which included file storage. Which is why so many people chose them for their community hub.
This is just patently false, so you're either completely clueless or are being dishonest to stir up outrage.
No it isnt? The paid subscriptions upgraded your file upload size with advertised emphasis on the permanence of the upload remaining.
That was half the reason why emulator communities started moving to discord. Because they could pay to be able to share rom modification files and know discord would act like a running library.
No one likes change.
That is a completely unrelated argument.
Is something changing?
Do people like it?
Does water falling from the sky cause the ground underneath to become wet?
It sure does, but like your questions, has nothing to do with what's being discussed.
They wouldnt have been as popular if they had been temporary from the beginning.
Shoulda woulda coulda, this is now a thing their community has come to expect and rely on their platform being capable of. And the change of such will break a number of channels.
Eh if they don’t want people using their service that way, that’s their right. People who care about it that much should host a matrix instance.
Reminder that file uploads on discord more than a few mb is a paid feature.
25 is more than "a few" mb
Ignoring the fact that they were clearly talking in orders of magnitude, it was 8MB for a very long time and only recently got increased to 25.
I'd only recently noticed the change, because my multipicture and short video sends were failing less often.
Fine, free gets you 20 floppy disks worth!! Omg, so useful. Four second heavil compressed reaction mp4s might fit fine. Don't go more than ten.
If I'm measuring it in two handfuls of floppy disks in 2023, then its not a lot. That's your hint that I'm measuring it in !980s technology.
There's no daily limit mate, you're free to upload as many files as you want.
Just not at once.
No one here is talking about daily limits or how many files you can upload.
You're the one complaining about only being able to upload 4 mp3s
This is typical enshittification. Make an impossibly good service to gain marketshare. Then make it worse once you've eliminated all competition and dominate the market.
You make it sound like the initial investments were sustainable
If their plan was to intentionally make unsustainable investments and then gut features later on, they should be shuttered now before they waste any more users time and money
Wdym?
Initial investments are usually excessively big to secure your position. The main focus isn't to balance the budget, but to have as many earnings and growth as possible to then get rid of the defficit
You are describing enshitification. You're missing the point.
Company enters market, disrupts it with money from investors, with featuresets that aren't profitable just to drive out the competition, kills the competition who have to pay for their features and pricings with an actual business, then raise prices and reduce features now you're the only one left.
See music streaming, food delivery, taxies, TV and movie streaming, now game subscriptions are gonna do the same thing. Discord is another example .
Did anything about my comment imply I thought this change was illegal? This has nothing to do with their rights
The issue at hand is taking away a feature your users have come to expect from your product after youve secured a level of dependance by outcompeting the competition
I didn’t intend to imply that, my statement can be rephrased as “if users don’t like this change, they should use an alternative, because discord is going to do what makes sense to discord.” File hosting is ubiquitous and cheap, so it isn’t a big deal. I don’t work at discord, but I do work at a company that has file hosting as one of its features, and combating malicious misuse of that feature is expensive and a pain in the ass. If I could get away with not offering file hosting, I’d be tempted to remove it.
Do you think your company could get away with offering a paid service that included file hosting, and then suddenly announcing that the file hosting was now only temporary?
Or would you expect your customers to abandon you over any claims of "just find an alternative"?
E: to clarify, by "your company" I mean where you work. Im not assuming youre at a position of ownership
The services are way too different to compare that feature in isolation, unfortunately. But discord’s business model is not to be a cdn, and I think it’s a good move to occasionally prune a feature that doesn’t provide enough juice for the squeeze. We’ve seen much worse enshittification this year, and I doubt this move has any measurable effect on their active users. Dealing with getting your servers off of blacklists because some douche decided to host malware on your free file hosting isn’t how anyone wants to spend their days, I assure you.
Its not going to effect the causal, non paying active users for sure.
But thats because they arent the paying customers. A lot of people who paid did so for the purpose of upgrading their personal servers, which pretty often included the file storage.
Im not in a ton of servers, but the ones who were community hubs are already discussing leaving discord over this, because the file convenience was the big draw of paying for discord. No idea where they want to move to, but they arent happy about sitting still.
Files are still stored permanently and links inside the client stay permanent as well, only links accessed externally are affected. I don't like Discord either but anyone relying on it as their personal free CDN had it coming for them.