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Discord as a filehost will no longer be possible by the end of the year
- sb057 3y ago>while they are not currently necessary to view the file, they will be by the end of the year, assuming nothing changes. What makes the author think something is changing?
- ZeWaka 3y agoThese were added extremely recently with no announcement.
- sjkna 3y agoOkay, I know what the tokens do. But how does this guy know they'll start working by the end of the year?
- amatecha 3y ago"she/her it/its" right on the page -- not a guy.
- geraldwhen 3y agoGuy is gender neutral, like person. It is a noun, not a pronoun. “Dude” is also gender neutral, to save you a post at a later date.
- stevenpetryk 3y agoOh come on. Guy is sometimes gender neutral, but is overwhelmingly often not.
- hunter2_ 3y agoI don't mean to derail this tangent, but I noticed your profile. End of year is when this changes?
- l33t7332273 3y agoI would say “guys” is gender neutral but “guy” generally isn’t.
- hunter2_ 3y agoYou'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.
- geraldwhen 3y ago“My guy!” - joking adoration “Get this guy an award/beer/microphone!” - similar “THIS GUY, am I right?” - used to mock/express disbelief “Bro” is also gender neutral, just adding in to this mix. “Bro don’t play me like that.” “What’s up bro?”
- mvdtnz 3y agoWhere I'm from, "guy" is gender neutral. Please stop trying to force American cultural norms on me - I'm not interested.
- DoctorOW 3y agoIt's amazing how often I ask guy if they're into dudes and get a "No" without even a follow up as to what gender the dude is.
- xigoi 3y agoIn this situation, it's obvious from context that the word is meant to be used as gendered. Don't be deliberately obtuse.
- geraldwhen 3y ago“Into dudes” provides context which genders the noun. It’s really not that hard. “Dude, you wouldn’t believe what happened to me this weekend” gender ambiguous. Context is everything.
- amatecha 3y agoNo, guy is not gender neutral. https://www.dictionary.com/browse/guy https://www.dictionary.com/browse/guy https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/guy https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/guy https://www.thefreedictionary.com/guy https://www.thefreedictionary.com/guy https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/11816/is-guy-gender-neutral https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/11816/is-guy-gen... Note that wiktionary points out the fact that the female complement to "guy" is "gal". https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/guy https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/guy
- TheHappyOddish 3y agoThat's nice. The cultural norms where you're from aren't necessarily reflective of the use of language elsewhere though.
- geraldwhen 3y agoI 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”.
- burnished 3y agoInteresting, 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?
- spondylosaurus 3y agoPeople 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.
- unleaded 3y agoyou 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?
- Algent 3y agoIt'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.
- RockRobotRock 3y agoBeing 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.
- sScTE9qEMCxEk34 3y agoThere's also a reason that they and every other provider give/gave free "unlimited" storage. And a reason they're all cracking down.
- RockRobotRock 3y agoHaving a p2p file transfer built in would be amazing. Would save them some money
- spondylosaurus 3y ago
- aeturnum 3y agoIt 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.
- ehnto 3y agoI 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.
- treyd 3y ago> 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.
- personjerry 3y agowhy would being on IRC be synonymous with any of that? maybe people on IRC just want to hang out and chat with people?
- Spoom 3y agoHmm. So you could regenerate the link every few hours? Probably enough to discourage casual use though.
- nneonneo 3y agoThere 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.
- aquova 3y ago> 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.
- koolba 3y agoExcept it’s the same memes over and over again so if there’s even the simplest deduplication their storage costs would be orders of magnitude less. How many new images are actually uploaded daily? It has to be tiny compared to the same reaction gifs used over and over again.
- _a9 3y agoAside 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.
- kr0bat 3y agoHow 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) https://stackoverflow.com/questions/30477877/facebook-image-url-gets-expired https://stackoverflow.com/questions/30477877/facebook-image-...
- codetrotter 3y ago> Tumblr […] generate seemingly permanent image links They did, and people hosted a bunch of things there, and then they changed the ToS to not allow NSFW stuff. What happened to all of the NSFW images people hosted on Tumblr? I assume they were all deleted with the ToS change.
- pndy 3y agoMajority 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
- hunter2_ 3y ago> 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.
- nneonneo 3y agoFor completeness: - "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.
- yawnxyz 3y agoThis 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.
- vel0city 3y agoYou 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?
- RockRobotRock 3y agoWe used to call this hotlinking and it was and still is a dick move
- sbarre 3y agoI remember some popular sites would detect and swap out hotlinked images for, let's say, less-than-savoury images instead.
- oblio 3y agoNot quite the same, still funny: https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html
- starkparker 3y agoWell, 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.
- oblio 3y agoAh, you're wrong, I should have linked an image. My bad!
- doomroot 3y agoOne has to think the ungodly amount of images being shared from midjourney has something to do with this?
- whatyesaid 3y agoMidjourey'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.
- Vexs 3y agomidjourney and discord have a number of internal agreements- they're not on there for free anymore...
- dangus 3y agoThere’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.
- hurutparittya 3y agoPlease 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.
- spongebobstoes 3y agothis way, http logs or browser history that include urls can't be used to view someone's stuff years later. that's a privacy benefit
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- pteraspidomorph 3y agoI'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.