Discord’s enshitification continues.
so many people left reddit and fled to discord. So sad. Discord was ALWAYS going to enshittify itself to death, but okay people.
As a forum-like community like Reddit it was always shit to begin with.
Still light years ahead of FB groups tho
That’s not the biggest accomplishment.
Man, you should have seen forums at hobby sites, etc in the times before Reddit/Digg…
At least those forums store information in threads. Discord is just an endless stream of blabber.
Agreed. Or worse: for documentation!
Was looking into some FOSS tools, the ones that say discord I automatically skip, imo it’s not future proof.
Storage (and transfer and processing) has only ever gotten cheaper, but okay.
Yes but are your storage Managers doing anything? Going on long lunches and racking up bar tabs? Expensing escorts?
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.
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
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
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
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.
For the record, they still claim that they do not sell user information nor data.
Giving it to China for free isn’t selling. Its just called “investor relations”
Look up the Discord Summaries BETA.
They already have “AI” monitoring all chats.
It would be “stupid” of them to not abuse that. (Unmorally stupid that is)
And standard screenshots of my desktop are ~30mb, I was lucky to upload it lol
What format are you saving them in? BMP? Try png.
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.
You know PNG is lossless compression right?
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.
Why do you think it’s a performance hit?
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.
PNG started out as ZIP(BMP) and hasn’t gotten that much better. Use JPEG. The pixels you lose are not worth crying about
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.
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
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?
Why 0 compression?
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.
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.
Wait, I ~never was notified that it got to 25mb, I thought it was 8
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
“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.
I am fortunate enough to know how to set up VMs and use Linux, so I run my own IRC server with a web interface (TheLounge). I can set the upload limit to what I want and settled for 100MB. This way my friends and I are not at the mercy of some proprietary software.
I do pay for a dedicated server that I also use to host my games’ servers and also a mumble server, but it’s so worth it, just to have control over our stuff.
They want to start charging for the malware they host.
The enshitification is progressing nicely!
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.
Based on all of the changes discord has made over the past few years, its absolutely enshittification
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Discord isn’t social media. What is with everyone just referring to every tech company product as “social media”!?
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?
I’m surprised they didn’t put a time limit on the storage since they are not a file hosting platform.
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
Honestly, I’ve always been surprised they allow any direct file transfers, instead of having to use external links.
I find it weird that they upload content to their own servers even when you provide them with an external link.
They want the data
They should’ve never increased the size to 25MB. Now everyone is mad they can’t upload files larger than 10MB, instead of being happy that Discord allows free file sharing up to 10MB.
That’s why you need to keep free product features and small and useless as possible; people will happily take improvements but complain to hell and back if you accidentally overcommit.
Meanwhile most Lemmy servers have an upload limit of what, a megabyte?
Most Lemmy servers don’t relentlessly track and sell everything you do though. Discord makes way more money off your data than it costs them to host.
Discord makes way more money off your data than it costs them to host
Lol. Your data is worth maybe $5, maybe $10 if you discuss financial platforms often, there’s no way that’ll cover the costs of hosting media for years. Just watching or hosting a video stream every month will probably run you over the money your data is worth. Individual data is practically worthless, and aggregate data doesn’t sell for a lot when you divide the total worth by the amount of users covered.
Discord is alive because of their premium subscription, their data sales are just a little bonus on top. Their own statistics claim 200 million active users per months with 600 million in revenue per year. Those $3 per user start to run real thin when you’re essentially running a free S3 server with 8MB blobs.
Your data is worth about $5-$10 a month, at least for Facebook. A month.
And they don’t sell to Facebook, nor does it sell any ads to advertisers willing to pay that rate, so that’s a rather useless statistic.
The point was not the amount of money they are making, the point is that regardless you are being sold for profit. Any platform that is ad-driven should be avoided if you want any form of privacy.
Revolt, people
Revolt I love, but there’s no federation or anything, and I won’t be able to get anyone to switch unless they could join many servers from mine
Yeah, a federated alternative would be neat. Revolt has a lot of issues but kudos for the customizable UI.
Nah, xmpp is better.
How is it comparable to the layout?
The clients are a bit under developed by progressing quickly, and are all open source.
To be clear, XMPP is the name of the protocol, not the app. If an XMPP app with a Discord-like UI is what you’re after, then Converse.js is probably your best bet. Here’s what it looks like.
That doesn’t have the server + Channel layout
Gajim can, but you have to create it yourself.
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.
Dammit now I have to reduce the block size of my discord-based cold storage filesystem.
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!
Please discord die already
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.
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.
There are viable alteratives, but they aren’t making money and can’t advertise. Signal is a prime example, its an amazing platform with feature parity + more to Discord. Regardless of how well a platform is polished, you need users. People will use the shittiest platform ever if it has users (Twitter and Reddit come to mind).
