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Discord will switch to temporary file links to block malware delivery
(www.bleepingcomputer.com)
this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2023
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Did anything about my comment imply I thought this change was illegal? This has nothing to do with their rights
The issue at hand is taking away a feature your users have come to expect from your product after youve secured a level of dependance by outcompeting the competition
I didn’t intend to imply that, my statement can be rephrased as “if users don’t like this change, they should use an alternative, because discord is going to do what makes sense to discord.” File hosting is ubiquitous and cheap, so it isn’t a big deal. I don’t work at discord, but I do work at a company that has file hosting as one of its features, and combating malicious misuse of that feature is expensive and a pain in the ass. If I could get away with not offering file hosting, I’d be tempted to remove it.
Do you think your company could get away with offering a paid service that included file hosting, and then suddenly announcing that the file hosting was now only temporary?
Or would you expect your customers to abandon you over any claims of "just find an alternative"?
E: to clarify, by "your company" I mean where you work. Im not assuming youre at a position of ownership
The services are way too different to compare that feature in isolation, unfortunately. But discord’s business model is not to be a cdn, and I think it’s a good move to occasionally prune a feature that doesn’t provide enough juice for the squeeze. We’ve seen much worse enshittification this year, and I doubt this move has any measurable effect on their active users. Dealing with getting your servers off of blacklists because some douche decided to host malware on your free file hosting isn’t how anyone wants to spend their days, I assure you.
Its not going to effect the causal, non paying active users for sure.
But thats because they arent the paying customers. A lot of people who paid did so for the purpose of upgrading their personal servers, which pretty often included the file storage.
Im not in a ton of servers, but the ones who were community hubs are already discussing leaving discord over this, because the file convenience was the big draw of paying for discord. No idea where they want to move to, but they arent happy about sitting still.