[mdasen]

As someone who worked at a company that hosted content, I can believe it. Malware folks always want to get their content onto legitimate domains where 99.999% of the content is legitimate. The amount of time spent trying to keep your domains clean can be a nightmare. Dealing with abuse can become a major cost.

This doesn't really change Discord away from being a free file hosting platform for anyone that gets the link on Discord. It just prevents someone from uploading a file to Discord and then sending a link to the file along a different medium (email/text/etc).

Hosting files really isn't that expensive given Discord's tiny file size limit and Discord's scale. Cloudflare's R2 charges $0.36/million downloads. The problem is that if you're hosting content on your domains, you have a certain responsibility for the files on those domains. Your domain gets a reputation and at a certain point starts appearing on lists (even if you're a multi-billion dollar company). People trying to spread malware love taking advantage of any place they can store a file on a reputable domain or get a reputable link shortener to redirect to them. I don't blame Discord for wanting to cut them off.