344
Discord will switch to temporary file links to block malware delivery
(www.bleepingcomputer.com)
this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2023
344 points (99.4% liked)
Technology
59300 readers
4609 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.