It is absolutely wild to me that Discord put up with this at all - but it's not surprising that they would want to change this. It also makes me wonder if Discord could add permanent image hosting to their list of Nitro benefits. I do think they're in prime position to become a service hub for the Very Online but not very technical.
I agree and hadn't really considered the Very Online but not technical as a cohort before. Perhaps in contrast to people who are online but not "online natives".
Discord has become a defacto platform for online native communities, in the same way many of us treated IRC. It's really the same atmosphere, any of you old nerds yearning for the IRC golden years should try and find a discord server to join.
> any of you old nerds yearning for the IRC golden years should try and find a discord server to join.
If we're still on IRC then we mostly would clearly have an objection to using discord for the very many legitimate reasons to object to it, such as the mass data collection, phone number requirements for many users, lack of control / selfhosting capability, or just general requirement to use (very heavy) nonlibre software to access it.
This is a very contentious topic but looking into the relatively recent Freenode vs Librem.chat debacle I think signifies how important privacy is to the common IRC user.
I don't think that's the right conclusion to draw at all from the Freenode debacle. A pretty significant amount of the channels stayed on Freenode after Andrew's takeover, until Andrew kicked them off himself with the mass Libera purge. There were many communities still on a wait-and-see approach -- at least until Andrew was revealed to be semi-insane (Emperor of Korea, digital territory, alt-right conspiracies, etc).
Yes, the open source privacy crowd is a big chunk, but there were just as many social communities. Don't you remember the olden days of sex channels and all their drama? The roleplay, alt history, sci-fi, and just general random niche hobbies that populated the IRC landscape. IRC was, above all, a social space, it just so happens that many of these communities died or migrated to discord over time. Those that remain are those who are most attached to privacy/open source/etc, all the rest are gone.
I don't remember privacy being a significant part of the discussion about the Freenode takeover and the subsequent founding of Libera.chat. My memory is that the hostile takeover was a big problem for some, and the majority of the exodus happened when Andrew went crazy and started hijacking channels and banning people en masse.
As an ex heavy IRC user, I couldn’t possibly disagree more with this. Not even for the same “free! libre!” reasons as the other replier. It is just at its core still a gamer chat platform heavily misappropriated for other purposes, with a UX that will spare no opportunity to make you aware of that.
> Discord is just treated as the sum repository of all for way too many people.
The barrier of entry of asking and answering questions on a Discord is very low. Setting up a forum, that's needs a bit of effort, not to mention hosting, and on-going headache of spam and liability.
I mean, I'm really interested in Audio Description, but there is no forum for discussing the nuts and bolts, issues, research, advocacy etc. Conversely there are AD groups on Twitter, Facebook, Linkd In, Discord and a few more besides.
I guess it could be treated that way, but it is just a chat network to me and many. I don't expect to scroll back to infinity and find old messages.
On IRC of course, you got X amount of history when you logged on, and that was what you worked with. It does feel a lot more ephemeral, more like a real conversation.
For contrast I've gotten a lot of use out of it for connecting with various topic focused communities and I've seen people do neat things with it. The python server manages to offer an awful lot of surprisingly high quality tutoring, all things considered, and a big part of it is through the automation they've built in via bots. Oh! And I found a server focused on electronics when I was looking for help repairing a damaged TV that had knowledge resources the likes of which I rarely see anymore.
In all that I never felt like the experience was hampered by discord's association with gaming. Honestly it felt like a chat client that wanted to be used - if you want to start using IRC as a newb today you first have to pay obeisance and perform the ritual stumbling through. Discord doesn't (or did not as of a few years ago) even need an account to get started, just type a handle and go.
They try, but they still end up clunkier. E.g. you're never going to be able to put pictures in a message in a nice way, because even if your client supports it, other people on IRC don't.
IRC v3 supports feature extension standardization via message tagging, so these features aren't client-specific. Anyone who --wants to see pictures in their feeds will be able to do so by using a client that supports the feature, without a single proprietary client being forced onto everyone. That's a win-win.
Between the random ads for this Discord service or that Discord update that are all focused at gamers... and the voice and video... and the integrations Discord themselves offer... and the store... I can see why one would describe it as GP did.
> The python server manages to offer an awful lot of surprisingly high quality tutoring, all things considered, and a big part of it is through the automation they've built in via bots
Fair enough. The UX is really not an issue for me. I am a terminal diehard but I still don't miss IRCs interface.
I am mostly talking about the communities themselves, there are not many truly large everyone-in-a-room chat networks with diverse and modern topics. Yeah IRC is still there, but I am in it for the people, and the people are on discord at the moment. They'll probably move when Discord fucks up, but that doesn't change the conversations I have today.
A fair concern if you're building the community. But if you just want to get involved, nothing is forever, all my IRC haunts are dead too. So get involved, enjoy yourself, make friends, take the memories with you when it inevitably dies.
Here is the option though… we ignore the titans above us, the ones that desperately need us. See some of them fall; and hopefully they shrink small enough were we aren’t craning our necks so much.
Or, we continue to pretend that everything is fine and keep praying and sacrificing (printing money) and pretend that will just keep working.
ZIRP was a mistake. Better to rip the bandaid off now.
But… for what it’s worth, I think it will lead to war. Actual war, not this proxy stuff. We’re too far in and owe China too much. There needs to be some debt reset because “paying it off” isn’t a thing.
I’ve done it, and found myself back in the middle of wars vim vs emacs and arch vs all and slack vs all, I agree it was the same on IRC, but as someone who has lived through it while in middle schoo, I have no desire to go through it again ^^
Could do, I don't find the communities I want to join have IRC though.
I am not saying Discord is better, or you should move. More like, if you gave up IRC decades ago, but want to try some new communities, discord chats are close enough to be fun.
I really wish they would add useful features to Nitro. I want to pay for Discord Nitro, but the features they keep adding to it actually actively annoy me and I don't want them. Server boosting seemed interesting but it ends up being extremely ephemeral.
I signed up for the trial and hop into a direct call. The other participant shared his screen, and the video looks like hot garbage. High fidelity options buried behind notices that the other user needs Nitro.
If I pay for the service, my UX should improve. It did not. No thanks.
They seem to want to money beyond Nitro right now despite it being very pricy (100€/year right now for non classic one). They just added very basic paid animated frames sold for 10€ each and with a crappy discount for Nitro users.
I'd happily pay for such an image hosting. Our gallery site Hall of Framed (https://framedsc.com/HallOfFramed/) with the best virtual photography shots from our Discord community is hosted this way (json file with the urls in a github repo, updated by a bot, the site is hosted on github pages). We directly pull the shots from discord, but we now have to refactor the site so the images are hosted elsewhere.
This poses a problem as the amount of shots is quite large... We have a channel where users post their shots, and the bot basically harvests the links of the shots which have a high amount of votes. So currently no re-hosting of images occurs.
I can image tho why Discord does this. Our gallery is likely not visited a lot, but I can imagine high profile files pulled from discord channels like pirated software/malware etc. are a big problem. The route to the server / channel where the files are coming from isn't known, only to discord
Disagree. The very technical have a "the cobbler's children go barefoot" effect where they're unwilling to pay for anything. The non-technical are much more likely to pay $5/month for a program they use.
Under normal conditions, I'd agree, but the Very Online (But Non Technical) specifically have a chip on their shoulder about not wanting to pay for online services, even at a fair value.
- "Copy link" on images is now producing an image link that has "ex", "is" and "hm" URL parameters
- The parameters can be removed (or altered) without affecting the link's validity (at least, for now)
- "ex" means expiry, "is" means issue time. Both are expressed as hexadecimal numbers encoding a UNIX timestamp. "is" is the time when the link is generated. "ex" is exactly 86400 seconds (24 hours) after the issue time.
- "hm" likely means HMAC. It looks like a SHA-256 hash, and is likely an HMAC-SHA-256 of the link, ex and is parameters. It's not currently being validated, but it would not surprise me if Discord is internally tracking failures on hashes and expiry parameters.
People are using Discord as a file hosting service a la Imgur? Yikes. Hard to blame Discord for cracking down on that, considering it's not a service they intentionally offer.
Yes, For a little while even it became a meme to compress all of shrek down to less then 8MiB using AV1 as that was the largest file you could host on discord without premium. It's not 'great' but considering many websites load more javascript then this entire 1.5 hour movie, It's impressive in it's own right.
It’s a fun experiment. Reminds me of years ago watching some movies on the screens of small iPods.
Also I will give it that it’s a surprising amount of movement for being just 6fps, that file.
Fun experiment, but not really watchable with this much loss of detail :p
(The movies we watched on small iPod screens were surprisingly watchable, thanks to having good audio and image quality in spite of being somewhere around 320x160 px resolution.)
heck yeah, I watched an entire season of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex on an iPod 5.5G Video :) Those were 320x240, maybe you meant a smaller iPod though haha
Ours were probably 320x240 too. It was many years ago so I didn’t remember exactly :p
Although, for a widescreen movie it might use less than 240 of the available vertical size. For example if the aspect of the original video is 16:9, then a 320 px wide resized version of the video will be about 180 px tall.
So yeah, my guess is that the screen was 240 tall and that some of the videos we watched on it may have been as little as 180 px tall :D
Ohhh yeah true! I bet it was cropped... well, I've got a new drive (SD card) and battery in that iPod so unfortunately I don't have the videos on it anymore, or I'd check... haha
you can upload any file below 25mb for free unless it's malware, it's a direct link that works everywhere, and it's quick because you always have discord open. if it's something not too important why wouldn't you?
It's basically a free S3-type storage, easy to use with little to no limits or controls (even a deleted upload used to stay valid for weeks). I'm surprised this went on that long even if size limit stop piracy it could still easily used on a large scale for suspicious pictures hosting.
Being able to upload unlimited 50MB (with nitro) files with infinite retention is kinda wild in and of itself. There’s a reason every email provider has storage quotas.
No more unreasonable than always being connected to the internet - its not like there is a generalized benefit to deactivating it when its not in use.
I mean, you probably don't go and unplug your modem when you get done with a browsing session right? Or turn off your phone when you aren't actively engaged in a phone call?/writing a text message?
yes for many young online people but probably not most hacker news users. and if it's worked for 8 years i don't think it's unreasonable to think it'll work for a few more
How many major social media sites try to prevent this behavior? Facebook links expire[1]; but Reddit, Tumblr, and Twitter all generate seemingly permanent image links.
Also semi-related fun fact, I think most sites lack authorization checks when accessing images via direct urls. A logged out user can follow direct image links from private accounts/servers/subs on all these sites, including Discord. Not like that means much of anything security wise (if you have the url you likely had access to the image)
> A logged out user can follow direct image links from private accounts/servers/subs on all these sites, including Discord. Not like that means much of anything security wise (if you have the url you likely had access to the image)
This is a concept I think about often. Tons of services use unguessable URLs for access control. A long time ago, I would've called it "security by obscurity" but it's become so normalized that I've come to mostly agree that it's sufficient because users who give out the URL can generally perceive it as equivalent to giving out any other secret (such as a password). But on the other hand, using other HTTP headers instead of the URL (authorization headers, cookie headers, etc.) do have a rather major benefit: not typically being stored in logs as cleartext, which cannot generally be said for URLs. So if you run a service that uses URLs as secrets, and you don't keep those URLs in your logs, then it's pretty decent security, I think. Although if your logs fall into the hands of a bad actor, then the actual data probably did as well, so it's kind of moot.
As of a few months ago, Reddit no longer allows linking directly linking to their hosted images. You are directed to a pseudo-page that links back to original thread it was posted in.
This sucks because it's now not possible to use the browser's built-in image viewer which has better UX.
I am expecting them to eventually put ads on the page as well.
Majority was hidden for non-logged in users (nowadays seems they provide a blurred curtain), some were deleted with either copyright or content rules violations as reasoning
Telegram Web loads images over websocket and shows them as blobs. This way it prevents users from copying url and not knowing that it will stop working after 24h.
> if you haven’t noticed, copying a link for a file now appends special parameters to the end. these are a request signature, which indicates a specific request for that file. this request will expires after a few hours, so files will no longer be permanently available through a specific url.
I went and looked at some Discord image URLs, and sure enough there are now "ex", "is" and "hm" fields. While I'm sure removing image hosting would save them a lot of money and trouble, I'm not really seeing anything that necessarily supports their claim though.
The reaction gifs specifically (from the gif picker) are hosted by Tenor. But surely they're deduplicating the other images already. I've never seen any evidence either way.
Making temporary URLs would still help whether they're deduplicating or not. And almost certainly they're spending most of the storage on videos that have only been uploaded once. It takes a lot of 100KB images to equal a 50MB video.
Aside from the people that abuse the service to host files (using free accounts or using accounts with sniped nitro) there are a lot of bots that do image/gif generation that upload directly as attachments. You could see people using multiple commands, while generating multiple gifs, until they get one they want to save. Theres also servers like Midjourney. I imagine a lot of what Discord stores is dead files that will never be accessed after the first time.
Another note is that a lot of the meme gifs that are used come from the Tenor and Giphy integration which are only temporarily hosted on Discord's media proxy unless a user downloads it and reuploads it.
I'm interested in knowing what will happen to the million instances of discord image URLs copied and pasted somewhere else on discord. Discord just displays these as images (as they do every image URL), which might result in a great many broken images from the perspective of a lot of users.
You're on the right track with guy being more more gendered than guys, but I wouldn't go so far as to say guys is completely neutral. Take "Guys and Dolls" for example. A very dated example, but that specifically-gendered usage does still exist to a reasonable extent, like saying "it's guys' night" and so forth.
Basically, guys is neutral in those cases where it's used to describe a group that isn't entirely male but otherwise it's male (somewhat circular reasoning, but I can't think of a better way to describe it); guy doesn't usually get that same logic applied.
I haven’t heard the word gal used in person in a long time. “Guy” I hear frequently.
“Gal” seems derisive. I would assume someone was being berated or otherwise dismissed if being called “gal”. As in, “oh I suppose there are women here that I will address differently”, hence “gal”.
Interesting, I wouldn't place gal as derisive, just a word that has fallen out of common use. I used to work as a server and we'd talk about stuff like this.
Wonder if there is a regional aspect to it, or perhaps it being an older and less used word has lead to more individual variance in connotations?
Well, JWZ is the prime example considering that jwz.org would replace hotlinked images with a photo of testicles. So, every image on every blog post to jwz.org when viewed on, say, Google Reader.
This is pretty much what Airtable went through last year, and phased out general file hosting.
It'd be nice if either Discord or Airtable let you give an S3 or R2 bucket URL and you can just pay for hosting yourself, without the file expirations. Doing that makes it a headache for everyone.
I like how Notion handles linked images- they keep the original URL around but also duplicates the file into their own S3; if you serve a website using Notion as a CMS, you can still access the original link — so I've been uploading to my bucket and serving my own hosted files to our Notion docs and Notion-powered sites.
Too bad Discord or Airtable never went down those routes.
You really think giving Discord an S3 link and getting IAM permissions straight is a more reasonable ask for the average Discord user who just wants to share a cat meme with their friends?
Midjourey's ungodly amount of images would still be kept on the Discord servers. Just not directly fetchable though. The way to slow that would be some pricing on commercial bots doing things like file uploads.
They got a community showcase but that's a few stuff only.
There’s also a privacy aspect here. Upload to discord and the image URL can easily be copied around and shared outside of the server and the intended audience.
This is at least a crude way to stop that and I think it’s a good thing.
Please explain to me how going "right click -> save as" on the image instead of going "right click -> copy" on the link going to improve privacy in any meaningful way.
There are many, many places where it would be impractical to regenerate and repost links frequently. Plus, regenerating a link would require a Discord API call, and they could easily rate-limit that or add anti-bot features, which would put a cap on how scalable an auto-refresher could be.
At some point it’d probably just be easier to create a service that generates the links on demand and caches them for their TTL. However, generating the links will probably require access to the Discord server where they’re posted.
