In April 2023, I reported on Discord fixing one of its biggest problems: increasing the free upload limit for file sizes in serves. It had been a pathetic 8MB for years for non-paying users but was increased to 25MB. Great news, right?
It truly was a sign that the extremely popular text and video chat social media site had finally been paying attention to the vast majority of users and their needs. Unfortunately, it paid attention again just recently and not in a good way.
The official Discord support page detailing how Nitro Basic and Nitro — the site’s two paid subscription tiers — work also contains a brand-new clause explaining that Discord has lowered the upload limit from its juicy new 25MB back down to 10MB. According to the support page, “storage management is expensive,” and “in order to maintain our service without compromising on quality of storage, we decided to reduce the free file size upload limit.”
Apparently, Discord analyzed how much storage non-paying users actually use and found that “99% of users” tend to upload files smaller than 10MB. As such, it decided to reduce the storage limit to that amount. Of course, we have to take Discord at its word here, as it did not publish the results of this study, but the reason for this change sounds reasonable at first glance.
Storage is quite expensive and even more so for a site as widely used as Discord. There’s also the fact that once you upload a file to it, it stays on the server permanently unless you or someone else with the right permissions deletes it. Discord reviewing its operating costs and its average user’s site usage, then came to a logical conclusion as to what is sustainable for the site is nothing particularly noteworthy.
Then why did Discord do it?
Then again, if the vast majority of users aren’t using more than 10MB of storage, why is so cost-efficient to reduce the upload limit? Is that reported 1% of users so high that in just over a year, Discord is already calling it quits?
There’s also the fact that if Discord was able to review this user data now, it already had to have studied said data beforehand, which begs the question of why didn’t it foresee that the costs would be ‘too high’ for it to afford?
Finally, when discussing this issue, it’s vital to mention Discord's worth. Since Discord is still a private company, it’s not required by US law to report its finances.
However, there are estimates of its net worth, with its highest value at $14.5 billion in 2021 and the most current estimate of $8 billion now. Regardless, this company is worth quite a bit of money, which makes the “storage management is expensive” statement a bit odd.
How does it affect you?
Most likely, a vast majority of users won’t be impacted by this storage limit rollback because while file sizes have increased dramatically over the years, it’s still rare to come by a file that comes close to 25MB. On the other hand, for the same reason, it hardly seems worth changing this policy back to 10MB if the amount of users uploading large files is truly that small.
It seems like Discord is stirring unnecessary, well, discord by taking away such a universally popular upgrade. Burying it on the support page without properly informing users of such an important change (as its official X account never reported this) is also not a great idea.
It’s to the point that I’ve seen Discord users even theorize that it would soon cut the upload limit for Nitro from 500MB to 250MB. While there’s, of course, no evidence that this would happen, it points to the level of distrust that this decision is already cultivating among those who have been using the site for years.
Piling on other recent negative press, it’s generated, like the updated Terms of Service adding a forced arbitration clause, laying off 17% of its workforce, and changes to its AI policy, it had to walk back, and it’s more than understandable why this would be a thought process.
Discord seriously needs to rethink its PR strategy regarding decision-making policies. It’s an incredibly popular site used by millions of people, and it would be devastating for the gaming community to lose such a vital asset if enough people started mistrusting it enough to affect userbase numbers. And it’s not impossible, either.
After all, Skype, at one point, was synonymous with text, voice, and video chat.
