Discord lowers free upload limit to 10MB: “Storage management is expensive”

moe90@feddit.nl to Technology@lemmy.ml – 335 points –
Discord lowers free upload limit to 10MB: “Storage management is expensive” - Dexerto
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Well that didn't last very long. It was 8 MB for like six years and then it just went to 25 MB maybe a year ago and now we're back down to 10 MB.

I'm surprised they aren't offsetting the cost by selling all our data to language learning models like everyone else is

I’m surprised they aren’t offsetting the cost by selling all our data to language learning models like everyone else is

Hah. Hahaha. Hahahahahahaahahahahahaha. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH

Just to be clear, I 100% think they are selling our data. What I meant was I'm surprised they're concerned about the size of the uploads when they could just be selling the uploaded data.

For the record, they still claim that they do not sell user information nor data.

Giving it to China for free isn't selling. Its just called "investor relations"

Any proof, or just tinfoil?

I simply don't trust any company that provides a "free" service and is owned by Tencent, who has a 35% stake in Discord.

Neither do I, which is why I would love evidence to confirm my suspicions, so I can show it to others.

But I also try not to make claims that are merely suspicious, however likely.

Good point. Harder to parse would be my guess

And standard screenshots of my desktop are ~30mb, I was lucky to upload it lol

What format are you saving them in? BMP? Try png.

I am using png. Level 0 compression tho and in 4k (3840*2160), sometimes even 4k + 2*1440p (2560*1440), but it's already too large with just my main 4k monitor.

Why 0 compression?

Because it was never a problem. It's a little bit faster for encoding and decoding, and no service ever had problems with the file size. Especially not my selfhosted stuff. Every service, except discord. As I now have resorted to using Vencord or just uploading most media to Nextcloud, I don't have that many issues with it anymore, anyway.

It’s a little bit faster for encoding and decoding

On the other hand, the time spent uploading/downloading much smaller files probably more than makes up for that, although even that difference might get pretty small with modern internet connections.

Especially in times where using WiFi is faster than ethernet, because my network ports are only gigabit.

Because it was never a problem.

But you literally started this thread because it’s a problem. And then you spent more time defending your bad choice on a Lemmy discussion than you will ever save in your entire life decompressing PNGs.

You know PNG is lossless compression right?

Yes. But in theory it's still a performance hit, and as I have enough local storage (and typically use services with high limits), and I'm too lazy to change grims config just for discord, I never changed it and used Vencord instead.

Why do you think it's a performance hit?

Because even though it saves over 29 MB, it also takes more than 20 times as long. And that's just on my laptop, 1920x1080 + 2*1680x1050. On my PC it's even worse.

I have thousands of GB of high speed storage, Gigabit internet, but only a Ryzen 5 2600 and a i5-1145G7.

PNG started out as ZIP(BMP) and hasn't gotten that much better. Use JPEG. The pixels you lose are not worth crying about

Or they could just compression for their PNGs. PNG is a lossless format so they'll only lose a fraction of a second during creation.

JPEG for graphics like screenshots is not very efficient. For stuff like that, png is simply superior. (But not with compression 0)

PNG is not good for photos though.

why though? The graphics represented in the screen are already squashed and scaled, so you wouldn't be preserving their quality in any case. If you're worried about text, JPEG should still be able to handle it under high quality settings

We can ask the same the other way around: why do you want to use jpg if it results in a bigger size and worse quality than png?

But that's patently untrue: take this 10 MB example TIFF file as an example.

  • PNG Compression, max compress (=quality 9):

    convert file_example_TIFF_10MB.tiff -quality 9 test.png
    
  • JPG Encoding, 99% quality (=quality 99):

    convert file_example_TIFF_10MB.tiff -quality 99 test.jpg
    

Final file size comparison:

9.7M Sep  5 13:21 file_example_TIFF_10MB.tiff
1.7M Sep  5 13:22 test.jpg
2.5M Sep  5 13:22 test.png

PNG is significantly larger, and difference in quality between them is negligible

Dude. Did you even read what I wrote? PNG is bad for photos. Your example is a photo. Go ahead and try the same with a screenshot with text and menus showing.

png - jpg

156K Sep  5 23:06 Screenshot_20240905_230459.jpg
137K Sep  5 23:05 Screenshot_20240905_230459.png

jpg with 80% compression, via krita.

As B0rax said, for screenshots, png is better - it can represent line graphics and text more efficiently.

Thanks for this. Still, I would be curious to see this for a 4K level image. Also I wonder if your screenshot tool did a bitmap copy of the screen or intrinsically converted it to PNG first before pasting it into your paint editor.

I use 4k because I like seeing a lot of stuff at the same time in good quality.
I make screenshots of my whole screen to share all the stuff in the highest detail.
Using jpeg would result in literally unreadable pictures.

Depends on the Quality setting and version of jpeg. Even the original jpeg, on high quality, will result in little to no data loss. IIRC, Jpeg can even do lossless, with the only caveat being that it doesn't save alpha channels (but screenshots don't need to have transparency, anyway). Newer versions of jpeg, such as jpeg-2000 (and the much less broadly supported jpeg-XL) have much better compression and provide higher image quality at lower file size.

"jpegification" or "Deep-frying" only really occurs with the original jpeg at low quality settings.

I'm surprised they aren't offsetting the cost by selling all our data to language learning models like everyone else is

aren't they doing it? but at least by looking at how much they like locking out people until they give out their phone number, I suspect they are not collecting it without having further use for it

"by selling all our data to language learning models like everyone else is"

I imagine China is using it for free since Tencent owns a 38% stake.

They increased to 25 to encourage media uploads to train their own models with. They now have collected enough metrics to realize, most valuable content is below 10MB. Now they are optimizing. They won't lose anything valuable to them and the users who are impacted might even buy Nitro now. Win-win for them

It would be legally stupid for them to abuse that.

https://discord.com/terms#5 is pretty permissive

Your content is yours, but you give us a license to it when you use Discord. Your content may be protected by certain intellectual property rights. We don’t own those. But by using our services, you grant us a license—which is a form of permission—to do the following with your content, in accordance with applicable legal requirements, in connection with operating, developing, and improving our services:

Use, copy, store, distribute, and communicate your content in manners consistent with your use of the services. (For example, so we can store and display your content.)
Publish, publicly perform, or publicly display your content if you’ve chosen to make it visible to others. (For example, so we can display your messages if you post them in certain servers or recommend that content to others.)
Monitor, modify, translate, and reformat your content. (For example, so we can resize an image you post to fit on a mobile device.)
Sublicense your content, to allow our services to work as intended. (For example, so we can store your content with our cloud service providers.)

Wait, I ~never was notified that it got to 25mb, I thought it was 8

It might have only even been like six months. It was in the little change log pop up during one of the updates at some point