Discord “accidentally” watched a YouTube video with more than 500 million views, apparently breaking part of YouTube itself in the process.
On April Fool’s Day 2024, Discord will be available in the app. It’s a loot box. New additions announced: A completely free feature that users can try out during the day, it basically gives you some clown-themed cosmetic items. The idea is to mock people who spend time opening loot boxes in the first place.
However, while adding a new feature, Discord seems to have accidentally watched the loot box announcement video, resulting in a large number of views on YouTube.
I would like to mention that they probably did this by mistake. Even one of Discord’s senior developers was confused as to how this happens . pic.twitter.com/0uRLQRRzSq
— Marvin Witt (@NurM4rvin) April 2, 2024
It was first pointed out by software developer and Discord Dataminer Marvin Witt, who noted how Discord’s loot box video received over 100 million views.
“Discord created a YouTube viewbot that works in 2024 by looping a loot box notification trailer with an in-app toast in the background.”
By default, when you open Discord after a loot box has been added, you will now receive an in-app notification about the new feature, and the notification will include an announcement video. And it seems that every new user opens the Discord app and sees a message, which increases their YouTube video views.
But Witt also pointed out that it was likely accidentally exploited by a Discord developer, posting a screenshot of the employee asking, “How does this video get so many views?”
The views on the Discord video keep piling up.
Still, it seems the YouTube platform itself is flawed. If you visit Discord’s YouTube channel and sort the videos by most popular, you’ll see that this video is the least viewed video on the channel, despite having over 500 million views at the time of writing.
When I started writing this article, it actually had 340 million views, and it surpassed 500 million views in just one hour.
At this rate, Discord’s videos will beat some of the most viewed videos on the platform in just 24 hours.
