Discord is lowering the upload limit for free users from 25MB to 10MB, citing operational and financial reasons.
Discord isn’t exactly known for generous file-sharing limits, still, the messaging app offered a 25MB limit to free users. The company has now updated its support page to reflect the upload limit for free users has been lowered to 10MB.
ETA: I stick by my premise and my conclusion (storage management isn’t expensive, and it’s probably a Nitro thing), but my math may be wrong and my usage is apparently not normative. The costs are probably not so negligible, but I would still assume they aren’t as low as they want us to think.
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Discord has 200,000,000 MAU. If every single one of them uploaded a file every month (of pretty much any size) and Discord tossed it into an AWS S3 IA bucket, it would cost them $500 to store that data. Their total S3 bill for storage would be five hundred US dollars. Storage is dirt cheap. AWS doesn’t even charge per gigabyte on that storage type, it’s so cheap; they charge for downloads.
So, ok. Let’s talk downloads. If each of those files were 25GB and downloaded twice (probably an underestimate, but not everyone is uploading files, so I’m going to make the completely unfounded assumption that it’ll all shake out), it would cost them a couple hundred thousand dollars. Which, ok, that’s much more significant than $500. But Discord made $575 million last year—so the S3 download costs would be 0.03% of their total revenue. They probably spend 2-3 times more on coffee.
Storage management is emphatically not expensive.
My guess? They just saw that the higher upload limit was eating into their Nitro subscriptions.
Back in 2016 I managed to get all of my gaming friends on discord simply by saying “It’s like Skype but it doesn’t suck”
We simply needed something that worked and let us do voip calls without having to jump through the hoops of setting up ventrilo, mumble or teamspeak. Skype was so aggressively bad that any alternative was like finding a waterpark in the middle of the desert.
I was a member of a number of groups in a larger gaming community most of which migrated from Reddit/Mumble to Discord. It destroyed the quality and accessibility of written content and lore and I wish it had never happened. Then again, we can’t go back to reddit at this point either.
Guess I’ll be posting my screenshots in 640x480 from now on!
Yeahh no shit! Been using it for a short while now, glad Im able to find a couple groups to chat with, such an underrated service/protocol or whatever. I hope it and element keep getting better maybe I can get more friends to use it! Been tryna ditch Instagram cus half for the reason I use it nowadays is simply to keep in touch with friends and family as I don’t use any other messaging service ATM.
It’s kinda like lemmy here, but a little more pain because not only do you have to pick your provider, but you also need to be very mindful of how your key pair is managed. Like… don’t just uninstall a client without going through the effort of trusting and verifying a new one first, or you may lose the ability to decrypt a lot of history and also break trust with relationships you have.
Security first is a major concern in the system, so it doesn’t leave a lot to the imagination unfortunately.
That said, once you convince yourself to set it up, and convince anyone else to do the same, it works pretty nicely. It’s like an inner venn diagram of discord, telegram and IRC.
Yeah, makes no sense that they store some pdf I was dragging over to someone one time. Super inefficient. They should allocate an amount of storage per user that then rolls and deletes the oldest files when the cap gets exceeded to make room for the new files.
I kinda wish we could go back to the world of people hosting their own servers and having subsets of their homedirs on ftp urls. Of course none of that is really approachable to a lot of a people :-(.
I’d be down if Discord offered optional/default compression for images/videos. Yeah maybe my photos are 10 MB each, but with a slight quality loss they can get under 1 MB. Telegram does it well.
Mine changed back to 8MB from 25MB a few weeks ago and it really does cut the amount of stuff you can send without having to run them through compression or just host externally.
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the enshitification will go faster now i bet
It’s really not, though.
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ETA: I stick by my premise and my conclusion (storage management isn’t expensive, and it’s probably a Nitro thing), but my math may be wrong and my usage is apparently not normative. The costs are probably not so negligible, but I would still assume they aren’t as low as they want us to think.
/////
Discord has 200,000,000 MAU. If every single one of them uploaded a file every month (of pretty much any size) and Discord tossed it into an AWS S3 IA bucket, it would cost them $500 to store that data. Their total S3 bill for storage would be five hundred US dollars. Storage is dirt cheap. AWS doesn’t even charge per gigabyte on that storage type, it’s so cheap; they charge for downloads.
So, ok. Let’s talk downloads. If each of those files were 25GB and downloaded twice (probably an underestimate, but not everyone is uploading files, so I’m going to make the completely unfounded assumption that it’ll all shake out), it would cost them a couple hundred thousand dollars. Which, ok, that’s much more significant than $500. But Discord made $575 million last year—so the S3 download costs would be 0.03% of their total revenue. They probably spend 2-3 times more on coffee.
Storage management is emphatically not expensive.
My guess? They just saw that the higher upload limit was eating into their Nitro subscriptions.
You think they spend 400000 on coffee? You lost me there.
After looking at their number of employees and some math, I could actually see that as plausible.
It… Is?
on mobile it’s just a huge pile of stinky shit anyway
*everywhere
Just use signal or any e2e instant messanger instead of it.
Could anyone explain the attraction of discord? To me it’s UX is atrocious.
Back in 2016 I managed to get all of my gaming friends on discord simply by saying “It’s like Skype but it doesn’t suck”
We simply needed something that worked and let us do voip calls without having to jump through the hoops of setting up ventrilo, mumble or teamspeak. Skype was so aggressively bad that any alternative was like finding a waterpark in the middle of the desert.
are you fucking kidding me?? TEN MB IN 20 FUCKING 24.
Discord is such fuckin TRASH
I was a member of a number of groups in a larger gaming community most of which migrated from Reddit/Mumble to Discord. It destroyed the quality and accessibility of written content and lore and I wish it had never happened. Then again, we can’t go back to reddit at this point either.
Guess I’ll be posting my screenshots in 640x480 from now on!
Being part of multiple servers becomes such a painful experience with that interface…even with the “folders” and the search palette.
I guess locking basic features behind a paywall didn’t work for them after all, eh?
Matrix works pretty good.
Yeahh no shit! Been using it for a short while now, glad Im able to find a couple groups to chat with, such an underrated service/protocol or whatever. I hope it and element keep getting better maybe I can get more friends to use it! Been tryna ditch Instagram cus half for the reason I use it nowadays is simply to keep in touch with friends and family as I don’t use any other messaging service ATM.
Is there a Matrix for dummies guide? It seems difficult to get started with, finding the right client etc.
It’s kinda like lemmy here, but a little more pain because not only do you have to pick your provider, but you also need to be very mindful of how your key pair is managed. Like… don’t just uninstall a client without going through the effort of trusting and verifying a new one first, or you may lose the ability to decrypt a lot of history and also break trust with relationships you have.
Security first is a major concern in the system, so it doesn’t leave a lot to the imagination unfortunately.
That said, once you convince yourself to set it up, and convince anyone else to do the same, it works pretty nicely. It’s like an inner venn diagram of discord, telegram and IRC.
I also haven’t used it in a few years. Chat systems in general don’t cooperate with the way my brain works.
I mean, its great that they offer that, but all my files dont need to be permemnant. I would love the ability to review and delete old files
Yeah, makes no sense that they store some pdf I was dragging over to someone one time. Super inefficient. They should allocate an amount of storage per user that then rolls and deletes the oldest files when the cap gets exceeded to make room for the new files.
I’m sure there are dozens of you caring about screen share!
Well, it is better than 8, but still sad.
25 MB wasn’t even enough to send a single full res screenshot of my desktop.
Its 2024 and we still lack the basic functionality of file sharing between peers without a corp dictator restricting and snooping.
Not that the functionality does not exist (p2p, literally) but if my grandma cant receive the family pictures its not basic.
EDIT: it is possible i am remembering this from when it was 8MB.
Empty desktop is just a few kb but it was not that hard to open enough stuff to exceed 10MB
Til that i have been sending screenshots of only half my screen for not reason
I kinda wish we could go back to the world of people hosting their own servers and having subsets of their homedirs on ftp urls. Of course none of that is really approachable to a lot of a people :-(.
Reimplement the old WASTE client from the Nullsoft dude, this time with proper encryption and security and let’s call it a day.
I’d be down if Discord offered optional/default compression for images/videos. Yeah maybe my photos are 10 MB each, but with a slight quality loss they can get under 1 MB. Telegram does it well.
Discord offers automatic compression for images uploaded from mobile, but not from desktop IIRC. It’s weird.
Mine changed back to 8MB from 25MB a few weeks ago and it really does cut the amount of stuff you can send without having to run them through compression or just host externally.
It’s a big lie. Why not offer the option to delete automatically after 24h if 15mb extra is so much storage?
Or is it about bandwidth? Why no automatic compression on desktop? Oh wait, that feature existed in the past was scrapped. They think you’re fools.