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Comment by aquova | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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Except 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.

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.

They're not even temporarily on Discord. They're straight from Tenor.

They only display as an embed because Discord has a crawler that visits all links you send in chat.

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.

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