• 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.

      •  Count042   ( @Count042@lemmy.ml ) 
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        15 days ago

        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.

      • 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.

  • 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

    •  tetris11   ( @tetris11@lemmy.ml ) 
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      14 days ago

      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

            • 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.

            •  Lucy :3   ( @30p87@feddit.org ) 
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              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.

            • 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

            • I use 4k because I like seeing a lot of stuff at the same time in good quality.
              I make screenshots of my whole screen to share all the stuff in the highest detail.
              Using jpeg would result in literally unreadable pictures.

              • Depends on the Quality setting and version of jpeg. Even the original jpeg, on high quality, will result in little to no data loss. IIRC, Jpeg can even do lossless, with the only caveat being that it doesn’t save alpha channels (but screenshots don’t need to have transparency, anyway). Newer versions of jpeg, such as jpeg-2000 (and the much less broadly supported jpeg-XL) have much better compression and provide higher image quality at lower file size.

                “jpegification” or “Deep-frying” only really occurs with the original jpeg at low quality settings.

    • I’m surprised they aren’t offsetting the cost by selling all our data to language learning models like everyone else is

      aren’t they doing it? but at least by looking at how much they like locking out people until they give out their phone number, I suspect they are not collecting it without having further use for it

    • 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

        • https://discord.com/terms#5 is pretty permissive

          Your content is yours, but you give us a license to it when you use Discord. Your content may be protected by certain intellectual property rights. We don’t own those. But by using our services, you grant us a license—which is a form of permission—to do the following with your content, in accordance with applicable legal requirements, in connection with operating, developing, and improving our services:

          Use, copy, store, distribute, and communicate your content in manners consistent with your use of the services. (For example, so we can store and display your content.)
          Publish, publicly perform, or publicly display your content if you’ve chosen to make it visible to others. (For example, so we can display your messages if you post them in certain servers or recommend that content to others.)
          Monitor, modify, translate, and reformat your content. (For example, so we can resize an image you post to fit on a mobile device.)
          Sublicense your content, to allow our services to work as intended. (For example, so we can store your content with our cloud service providers.)
          
    • 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.

      •  Wave   ( @JameUwU@lemmy.ml ) 
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        113 days ago

        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).

          • people jumped ship to Reddit because it was better.

            People jumped ship because Digg turned into complete and utter garbage, and Reddit wasn’t completely awful. It was a weird site though, 100%.

            Digg would’ve been fine had they not forced Digg v4 on users.

          •  Wave   ( @JameUwU@lemmy.ml ) 
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            113 days ago

            You can screen share on signal so that argument makes absolutely no sense. and people down voting me without explaining why are probably too stubborn to switch away from discord.

            • That’s a feature that was implemented what, 1 or 2 years ago when Signal’s been around for a decade?

              You can’t possibly expect people to just jump from one social app to another that has such a relatively small user base and little familiarity. Entire Discord servers would have to jump ship and it would just be a nightmare for most people.

              What Discord prioritizes, Signal treats as an afterthought. Things like group chat, video chat, GIF usage, etc, Signal has never really prioritized.

              Discord’s mobile and PC apps both allow users to select GIFs within the application, whereas only Signal’s mobile app allows users to select GIFs within the application and Signal’s desktop app doesn’t allow for in-app GIF selection. If you’re reading this thinking "who tf cares about stupid stuff like that?", you’re completely missing the point because regular ass users care about stuff like that and they totally will say “fuck that” to an alternative if it doesn’t have features like this. Why doesn’t Signal incorporate in-app GIF selection for its desktop app? I’m sure it will be eventually implemented but dragging their heels like this for popular features and then having the nerve to ask "why aren’t people flocking to us instead of Discord/WhatsApp" is such an out of touch question to ask.

              When open source developers ask for feedback from regular users and their response to said feedback is"ACKSHUALLY it’s your fault, not the application’s fault", as it often is, it’s no surprise that their software never gains traction. It’s like a guy who wears cargo pants to a formal affair and then gets into an argument over attire because in his mind, cargo pants = more pockets = superior, completely oblivious to every other factor.

              Another thing-- Signal requires your phone number, Discord doesn’t. I know right away folks are going to rage about how Discord is the real privacy nightmare, not Signal. I don’t disagree, but the average user is just going to be more wary about being forced to give up their phone number in order to use Signal, even if the software now allows them to hide it.

              •  Wave   ( @JameUwU@lemmy.ml ) 
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                113 days ago

                Phone number point is stupid to bring up because most public discord servers turn on the setting that prevents you from speaking until you’ve verified a phone number, and I’d trust signal with my number over discord any day of the week. I never said general users should jump ship, I said that the reason they DONT is because other platform dont have the advertising budget, nor the user base to make users jump ship. People act like they give a shit about features but as soon as they can only talk to their friends because they all left for one platform, even if its “worse” because of the feature set, they WILL follow or be left out. Its why I originally joined Discord, I didn’t want to leave Skype but thats where everyone was going. I am now taking the other side where I refuse to use discord. I use Signal and Matrix. if people want to talk to me, they talk to me on there or not at all, and ykno what. Ive gotten 20+ people to switch.

                • Discord doesn’t require a phone number to use it and there’s tons of servers that don’t require phone number verification. The vast majority of servers I’m in have no phone number requirement. Signal straight will not work without your phone number, in any capacity. I’m sure you’d trust Signal over Discord with your phone number any day of the week but as I said, that’s an irrelevant point because we’re talking about why people are more attracted to Discord over Signal. Slacks vs ugly cargo pants.

                  I said that the reason they DONT is because other platform dont have the advertising budget, nor the user base to make users jump ship.

                  Have you ever seen an ad for Discord? I haven’t see one before and I only know about it through word of mouth. There’s nothing stopping people from creating Signal groups for various hobbies and including a Signal link in their social media page.

                  Refusing to use Discord might be noble from a privacy/security point of view but from a broader perspective, you’re significantly limiting your social interactions and not because of the people but the app the people are using to communicate with. It’s like not using a phone at all because pretty much any phone is a privacy/security issue.

      • I already use a different app for voice chat, and never used Discord’s voice chat feature.

        Discord is a modern alternative to IRC, Slack, or a more fully featured version of Matrix. I never considered it for the voice chat feature.

        People always bring up voice chat alternatives, which don’t replace Discord at all, because voice chat is a tiny unimportant feature of Discord that I wouldn’t notice if they removed.

      • The process of enshitification is what I was referring to. Discord got super popular by providing users with lots of value for zero cost.

        Now, in order to increase profits, they are reducing the scope of features they offer, and increasing the cost of the features that remain.

        This will continue to slowly get worse, as users are more locked into Discord’s ecosystem and userbase, they will be further pressured to upgrade and pay more money for less stuff.

  • 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!

  • 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.