This is… annoying. I get the intent for malware, but honestly it’s a BS reason. The content will just be uploaded elsewhere. But what this will do is drastically lower their storage cost under the guise of… not even user safety, more “slightly inconveniencing malware writers.”
Yes, it’ll be uploaded elsewhere. That’s the whole point.
Discord doesn’t want to host any of this data, they don’t want to be connected to criminal activity. It makes sense.
Also, while it might slightly lower their storage costs (if the hackers move elsewhere), if you send a file to someone, it’ll still stay on Discord’s servers. Only difference is the link to said file - it’ll only be valid for a day, and then you’ll have to use a new one (in a way that’s probably transparent to the user)
The goal here is to make it difficult to link to things uploaded to discord from outside of discord. The malware reason is BS. If they wanted to curb malware it would be as easy as making it a nitro feature. What that doesn’t fix is all the people piggybacking on discord as a free CDN.
Discord isn’t even wrong for doing this. I just resent their dishonesty.
Honestly, I’m okay with this at least until they fix the fact that all shared files are accessible without authentication. Granted, you still had to get the link before downloading an uploaded file, but the fact that there was no authentication required to download a file uploaded to Discord was pretty surprising.
It’s probably also way cheaper to do it that way. As far as I could tell when I checked in on it some time ago, most of the content goes through a Cloudflare proxy straight to a GCP S3-compatible bucket.
Add comment