8 months ago
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An April Fool’s Day video posted to YouTube by the chat platform Discord wracked up well over a billion page views in less than a single day. The video is only 17 seconds long and jokingly advertises “Loot boxes”—the frequently recurring video game trope—as coming to the chat and streaming app. While you’d think there would be limited interest in that sort of thing, its page views exploded, swiftly growing beyond the margins of popular creators like Mr. Beast.
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Since then, viewers online have speculated that Discord may have accidentally created a “viewbotting” mechanism that could automate multiple views of the video. IGN cites one web developer, Marvin Witt, who speculated that the platform had created a “working YouTube view bot” by playing their Loot box video on repeat in the background of the in-app “toast” notification. A toast notification is the popup icon that appears on your mobile homepage when an app on your phone is in use.
Discord has close to 1.5 million subscribers on its YouTube channel and tends to post videos related to new features every few months. In comparison, a video about its fall update from October has just 5 million views.
On the prank video itself, viewers joked about Discord’s bizarre video glowup: “Discord accidentally making a YT view bot is the funniest April Fool’s day joke this year,” one user posted.
Another said: “Discord loot boxes are so good that almost an 8th of the worlds entire population has come to witness them!”
Gizmodo reached out to YouTube and Discord for comment and will update this story if they respond.
It should be noted that Discord’s video is nowhere close to being the most viewed video on YouTube. No, that honor goes to “Baby Shark Video,” a children’s song posted to the platform in 2016 that currently has over 14 billion page views. The video won entry into the Guinness Book of World Records in 2022 for being the first YouTube video to crest 10 billion page views.
Of course, what’s most impressive about the Discord video is just how quickly it was able to rack up such a high view count. This was a billion page views in a day. A DAY. That’s pretty good. Too bad it sure seems like Discord cheated.
