Discord Lowers Free Upload Limit To 10MB (dexerto.com) 65
Discord has reduced the upload limit for free users from 25MB to 10MB per file, citing financial and operational reasons. "Every day, millions of files are uploaded to Discord and stored securely for your future access. Storage management is expensive, so we regularly review how people use Discord and their storage needs. In fact, our data shows that 99% of users stick to files smaller than 10MB," the company wrote in an updated support page. Dexerto reports: Discord increased its file-sharing limit to 25MB in April last year. Before that, the limit was set at 8MB for free users. While the new 10MB limit isn't terrible by comparison, it can still be frustrating for those who frequently share high-quality photos and videos. The messaging app is recommending those who want higher sharing limits use Nitro. "Unlike other platforms, we store your files for as long as you need them, so it is crucial that we manage our storage sustainably. If you need more upload capacity, Nitro Basic offers a 50MB limit, and Nitro gives you up to 500 MB, so you have options that fit your needs," the company said on its official support page.
For those who aren't aware, a Nitro Basic subscription costs $3 a month. Nitro users, who pay $10 a month, get to stream videos in 4K and use emojis in channels. In comparison, messaging platforms like WhatsApp and Telegram offer a 2 GB file limit.
For those who aren't aware, a Nitro Basic subscription costs $3 a month. Nitro users, who pay $10 a month, get to stream videos in 4K and use emojis in channels. In comparison, messaging platforms like WhatsApp and Telegram offer a 2 GB file limit.
"Storage management is expensive" (Score:2, Interesting)
No, it really isn't. Everybody is just trying to nickle-and-dime everybody else to death.
Re:"Storage management is expensive" (Score:4, Insightful)
Both can be true at the same time. Storage management at scale is expensive, and everybody is just trying to nickel and dime everybody as much as they can.
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Storage is dirt cheap, even cheaper than bandwidth. What we are looking at is enshittification in an attempt to generate more subscriptions. Like ISPs who have ingrained in people the thought that a gigabyte of data transfer is a meaningful cost to them, these managers would like you to believe that your 25MB will ruin the company, but the log files that they keep on your activities down to the individual tap and mouse click won't.
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You're missing two critical data points. First is situation of the storage market. For example:
https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp... [idc.com]
In a nutshell as Big Data Machine Learning (AI) is increasingly adopted, it requires a lot of storage for more complex models that handle things like video, which require tremendous amount of storage. As a result, the costs are in fact going up, while interest rates remain high and there was little investment in new fabs to compensate because of said high interest rates.
It has been
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Big Data Machine Learning (AI) is increasingly adopted, it requires a lot of storage for more complex models that handle things like video
As demand rises, the per-unit cost goes down, not up.
The users that cost company while bringing nothing in.
Keep drinking the Kool-Aid.
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It's kind of counterintuititve, isn't it, but that's why you can download at hundreds of megabits per second today, store terabytes with ease and pay a pittance for it. Demand causes an increase in supply, and despite what you may think, the supply of storage capacity is not stagnating and the price per capacity is still dropping. If everybody had heeded the warning calls of the accountants, we'd still be mailing tapes. Conserve bandwidth, conserve storage, the machine needs it to keep track of you!
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It's actually completely intuitive, as long as you don't hold anti-reality opinions like one you expressed above.
In real life what has happened is that laws of demand and supply apply, leading to more expensive storage when demand rises with novel usage scenario, leading to investment into more manufacturing capacity for the drives, leading to increase of supply, leading to prices going down. It's a natural cycle that has been ongoing in storage since those massive IBM drives being delivered to military in
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Second point is that this is for FREE users. The users that cost company while bringing nothing in.
1. Just like all the FREE Redditors bring nothing to the table for that service. Discord would be nothing if all the free users left for another service.
2. "In fact, our data shows that 99% of users stick to files smaller than 10MB", so this will have a (self-admitted!) negligible effect on storage costs.
The reality is that they're making their free tier just annoying and shitty enough to get more users to switch to a paid tier, whilst preventing users from leaving. So yes: enshittification.
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You're locked into zero interest rate "free money from investments" paradigm, where user numbers brought money in.
This is several years behind us now. We're in age of non-zero interest rates, and money has to come from actual revenues. And most users on discord are negative revenue. Not a new problem for discord either, they are still struggling to figure out how to monetize users. Nitro for example started as a game store. It's now a donation platform to discord for some emotes.
Re: "Storage management is expensive" (Score:2)
I think the point is that, without free users, there wouldnâ(TM)t be any nitro users either. The free tier must exist in order for anyone to care about the paid tier.
In other words, the free users donâ(TM)t bring in revenue, but they absolutely provide value.
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Yes, that is the pitch to the investors.
Problem: investors are gone. You're pitching to people who aren't there. And bean counters don't care about your old hypotheses aimed at something that isn't real any more.
Re: "Storage management is expensive" (Score:2)
Worth noting that 99% of users != 99% of uploads.
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That is true, but there would have to be users that somehow cause enormous storage costs with that 25MB upload limit. For what use cases would limiting that to 10MB make any significant difference?
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Investor that used to invest in "volume" of users have largely went away about two years ago.
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Second point is that this is for FREE users. The users that cost company while bringing nothing in.
Bringing nothing in except the content that Discord sells. The cost of that labor to Discord was 25MB of storage. Of course, the value varies greatly depending on the user, but I think Dischord was already getting the better end of that stick.
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It's funny to me that there are many people who are basically regurgitating the same sales pitch about free users. Literally NPCs running same code meme in action.
There's just one problem. This sales pitch is aimed at investors. And investors are gone. You can scream this sales pitch in a choir until you're all hoarse, and it will change nothing. Because investors are gone. And staying gone, at least as long as current interest rates and downward correction in the wake of cancellation of corona lockdowns pe
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Bingo. This is a scale problem (and a money problem). When you're making a tiny amount per user, you can't afford to accumulate a lot of storage.
$575m in revenue in 2023. And 560m registered users (presumably even inactive users would require some storage). Some revenue is advertising and partner arrangements. Some of it is Nitro subscriptions.
But really how much of the $1 per user per month revenue should a company spend on storage. A cent? A quarter? All of it? The answer is as little as possible and stil
Re: "Storage management is expensive" (Score:2)
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Can't they just limit the time? (Score:3)
Most of the time you just want to exchange something in the context of a dialogue. Once the dialog has passed, the upload is forgotten. If you want long term storage, other services are more suitable.
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If I remember, correctly, they break the links but keep the content. I.e. the link on their CDN to files changes over time, so when you share something on discord CDN here on slashdot for example, it will work for a couple of days and then break.
But that saves traffic, not storage.
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First, anyone know if they have a total usage quota per (free) user account? Like, can I upload a million 10mb files for free? While I understand many of the reasons for upload size limits, long term data management is only loosely related - a quota would make more sense for long term storage per user. Anyway...
IMHO, that temporary storage idea sounds like a good solution, and I might even be surprised if they don't add that at some point. IE:
* keep the free forever uploads, but limit free users in upload s
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Stuff like quotas would be pretty considerable amount of work. Since discord is built around servers (which can be paid or free) with users (that can be paid or free), they'd have to apply something per-user-per-server, but then they'd also have to add some sort of file management system with controls for each server so users could remove old files once they hit the quota. The end result would be pretty convoluted and confusing
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You were able to describe the project requirements in one sentence. I wouldn't consider that convoluted nor confusing, let alone a considerable amount of work, though I guess that depends on what you consider to be "considerable".
I've implemented similar systems before, and I've designed and wrote them from scratch to add onto existing systems. Seriously, it's not that difficult. I'd estimate worse case to be a one man job for a couple months, and that's allowing for the inevitable conflicts and quirks to b
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I'd guess their architecture is more decentralized and split which would make this a lot more difficult.
Currently, a user uploads a file, it checks if it's within the size limits (on upload), then it's stored associated with the server/channel. There's no real management of files or history. It's very easy to distribute the storage that way and changes on one channel don't affect other channels
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I'd guess their architecture is more decentralized and split which would make this a lot more difficult.
Why are you making baseless excuses for them? Do you work for Discord or something?
It's no more difficult with distributed data stores, or barely more difficult.
Let's say they really dropped the ball and there's just nothing helpful in place. Just a bunch of files associated with posts, and those posts are associated with people, but no direct link from file to person anywhere. And the files are stored as URL's pointing to their disparate locations.
Easy: Build an crawler/indexer. It can be set to very low p
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I've read a few posts of how they've set up their architecture and the challenges with the amount of data dealing with. I'm not making baseless excuses for them, just observations and theories based on what I've read.
Your idea mighty work. They might be able to hack together a solution in a couple days that would let them limit files. It probably wouldn't work well though, would have sync issues, new paradigms for their system, and be more confusing. It wouldn't really fit with any of the models they've
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But you are making excuses for them. They knew this problem was coming - they already went through changing upload file size limits multiple times. At a minimum, they should identify what they would need in order to work on a solution (Ex. a metadata database to keep track of all files, sizes, owners, etc..), and get that tracked now (if it isn't already). They can take whatever time is needed to implement whatever long term solution they deem fit, but tweaking file size limits doesn't even touch on the act
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Kicking the can down the road is what tech companies do best!
I can upload all I want to Instagram (Score:1)
Why bother with some shady social media platform when you can show all your pictures for free to the world on Instagram?
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Why would you share random pictures on a dating app?
This is why (Score:4, Insightful)
IRC was suffficient. Discord is the shittiest UX I have ever seen and I don’t understand why people use it.
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Discord is the shittiest UX I have ever seen and I donâ(TM)t understand why people use it.
Have you tried slack? It's about equally shitty.
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Slack is equally 8k times worse than Discord. At least Discord notifications work consistently.
Too bad Discord invites don't
How did IRC users work around no persistence? (Score:3)
When IRC was popular, how did IRC users handle the limit of one connection per user and lack of persistence? Without persistence, I don't understand how to ever see the answer to the question that you asked just before you discovered that you had to leave home, or how to continue a conversation across devices, without each user having to rent their own VPS on which to run a bouncer.
When IRC was popular, how did IRC users handle sending and receiving files when the parties were behind networks that blocked i
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Ah yeah I love the image sharing and voice chat capabilities of IRC
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Really, this is why IRC was sufficient? Tell me, how do you share an image with an entire chat room?
I know the answer because I use both: You upload it on a third-party website and then paste the link. And you know what? If your image is too big for discord, you do exactly that! IRC is better because your only option is to do the discord workaround, ok dude. There's lots of reasons discord sucks shit, but you can't champion IRC as better on this issue.
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99% less than 10MB tells you nothing (Score:2)
Is the 1% significant? Can they cut their storage needs by how much? By 1%? By 2%? By half? Is the 1% the 99%?
Haha Discord. (Score:2)
My loss I guess.
A time limit would be better (Score:2)
A better way to reduce your storage bills would simply be to say, for free users, any image uploaded is going to be ephemeral - they will be deleted after 14 days. Want longer, subscribe.
I Read This In Darth Vaders Voice (Score:2)
If 99% of users are using less than 10 MB... (Score:2)
... then it seems unlikely that tuning around the remaining 1% is going to make a meaningful difference to their operational costs
I can support this (Score:2)
Over the past 2 years I've been slowly shifting to discord becoming my primary form of social media. It has especially replaced facebook groups, which are far to subject to the whims of the infamous facebook algorithm.
I've genuinely wondered how they are monetizing me (since I pay nothing I am aware I am the product) since they have no ads. In some ways I'd rather pay for it and at least pretend I'm not also being monetized, and at $3 a month it's not bad for what is possibly my favorite currently free serv
Modern Problems Require Old Solutions (Score:2)
I don't even use their image upload half the time. I run my own imghost, host my own files. I got spare computers.
Bug, not a feautre (Score:2)
Is there a fee I can pay to prevent other users from using emojis? And animated GIFs, and "stickers"?
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That's a good question. I'm not a discord expert but I thought I would check. In general the answer seems to be No.
I looked through some of the servers I'm in to get an idea of usage. In most cases there are only the static emotes reactions much like Facebooks, just with more variety. Most servers have several chat channels. I see a very moderate amount of animated stuff in the more freewheeling general chat channels and minimal usage in more focused channels. Every community is different and some are very