Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Discord as a filehost will no longer be possible by the end of the year

this.alicorn.gay

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 111 posts

Re: Discord as a filehost will no longer be possible by the end of the year

#11

Post by tmpX7dMeXU »

ehnto wrote: post #8
aeturnum wrote: post #4

It is absolutely wild to me that Discord put up with this at all - but it's not surprising that they would want to change this. It also makes me wonder if Discord could add permanent image hosting to their list of Nitro benefits. I do think they're in prime position to become a service hub for the Very Online but not very technical.

I agree and hadn't really considered the Very Online but not technical as a cohort before. Perhaps in contrast to people who are online but not "online natives". Discord has become a defacto platform for online native communities, in the same way many of us treated IRC. It's really the same atmosphere, any of you old nerds yearning for the IRC golden years should try and find a discord server to join.

As an ex heavy IRC user, I couldn’t possibly disagree more with this. Not even for the same “free! libre!” reasons as the other replier. It is just at its core still a gamer chat platform heavily misappropriated for other purposes, with a UX that will spare no opportunity to make you aware of that.

Re: Discord as a filehost will no longer be possible by the end of the year

#12

Post by Algent »

aeturnum wrote: post #4

It is absolutely wild to me that Discord put up with this at all - but it's not surprising that they would want to change this. It also makes me wonder if Discord could add permanent image hosting to their list of Nitro benefits. I do think they're in prime position to become a service hub for the Very Online but not very technical.

They seem to want to money beyond Nitro right now despite it being very pricy (100€/year right now for non classic one). They just added very basic paid animated frames sold for 10€ each and with a crappy discount for Nitro users.

Re: Discord as a filehost will no longer be possible by the end of the year

#13

Post by UnlockedSecrets »

spondylosaurus wrote: post #3

People are using Discord as a file hosting service a la Imgur? Yikes. Hard to blame Discord for cracking down on that, considering it's not a service they intentionally offer.

Yes, For a little while even it became a meme to compress all of shrek down to less then 8MiB using AV1 as that was the largest file you could host on discord without premium. It's not 'great' but considering many websites load more javascript then this entire 1.5 hour movie, It's impressive in it's own right.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AV1/comments/hb039t/8mib_shrek_is_b...

Re: Discord as a filehost will no longer be possible by the end of the year

#15

Post by herpdyderp »

aeturnum wrote: post #4

It is absolutely wild to me that Discord put up with this at all - but it's not surprising that they would want to change this. It also makes me wonder if Discord could add permanent image hosting to their list of Nitro benefits. I do think they're in prime position to become a service hub for the Very Online but not very technical.

I really wish they would add useful features to Nitro. I want to pay for Discord Nitro, but the features they keep adding to it actually actively annoy me and I don't want them. Server boosting seemed interesting but it ends up being extremely ephemeral.

Re: Discord as a filehost will no longer be possible by the end of the year

#16

Post by throwanem »

ehnto wrote: post #8
aeturnum wrote: post #4

It is absolutely wild to me that Discord put up with this at all - but it's not surprising that they would want to change this. It also makes me wonder if Discord could add permanent image hosting to their list of Nitro benefits. I do think they're in prime position to become a service hub for the Very Online but not very technical.

I agree and hadn't really considered the Very Online but not technical as a cohort before. Perhaps in contrast to people who are online but not "online natives". Discord has become a defacto platform for online native communities, in the same way many of us treated IRC. It's really the same atmosphere, any of you old nerds yearning for the IRC golden years should try and find a discord server to join.

Just in time for the rugpull that became inevitable the day money stopped being free? No thank you.

Re: Discord as a filehost will no longer be possible by the end of the year

#17

Post by spondylosaurus »

unleaded wrote: post #5
spondylosaurus wrote: post #3

People are using Discord as a file hosting service a la Imgur? Yikes. Hard to blame Discord for cracking down on that, considering it's not a service they intentionally offer.

you can upload any file below 25mb for free unless it's malware, it's a direct link that works everywhere, and it's quick because you always have discord open. if it's something not too important why wouldn't you?

> it's a direct link that works everywhere

TBH I'd always assumed Discord links only worked in Discord. Which sounds like is how things will work, going forward.

Re: Discord as a filehost will no longer be possible by the end of the year

#18

Post by spondylosaurus »

aeturnum wrote: post #4

It is absolutely wild to me that Discord put up with this at all - but it's not surprising that they would want to change this. It also makes me wonder if Discord could add permanent image hosting to their list of Nitro benefits. I do think they're in prime position to become a service hub for the Very Online but not very technical.

Unfortunately the very-online-but-not-very-technical are a hard demographic to monetize, maybe more so than the very-online-and-very-technical.

Re: Discord as a filehost will no longer be possible by the end of the year

#19

Post by aquova »

> if you haven’t noticed, copying a link for a file now appends special parameters to the end. these are a request signature, which indicates a specific request for that file. this request will expires after a few hours, so files will no longer be permanently available through a specific url.

I went and looked at some Discord image URLs, and sure enough there are now "ex", "is" and "hm" fields. While I'm sure removing image hosting would save them a lot of money and trouble, I'm not really seeing anything that necessarily supports their claim though.

Re: Discord as a filehost will no longer be possible by the end of the year

#20

Post by nneonneo »

Spoom wrote: post #14

Hmm. So you could regenerate the link every few hours? Probably enough to discourage casual use though.

There are many, many places where it would be impractical to regenerate and repost links frequently. Plus, regenerating a link would require a Discord API call, and they could easily rate-limit that or add anti-bot features, which would put a cap on how scalable an auto-refresher could be.

At some point it’d probably just be easier to create a service that generates the links on demand and caches them for their TTL. However, generating the links will probably require access to the Discord server where they’re posted.

Post reply on HN