Disaster Discord “accidentally” viewbots YouTube video to 500+ million views - Discord “accidentally” viewbotted a YouTube video to 500+ million views and counting, and in the process, seemingly also broke part of YouTube itself. (The video is at 628M+ views)

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On April Fool’s Day 2024, Discord announced a new addition to its app, loot boxes. A completely free feature for users to test out on the day, it essentially gives out a handful of cosmetic items, all themed around a clown. The idea being to ridicule those who spend time opening loot boxes in the first place.

However, in adding the new feature, Discord seems to have accidentally viewbotted their announcement video of the loot boxes, driving a staggering amount of views on YouTube.
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First pointed out by Marvin Witt, a software developer and Discord Dataminer, he spotlighted how Discord’s announcement video of the loot boxes was sitting at 100+ million views.

“Discord managed to create a working YouTube viewbot in 2024 by playing their lootbox announcement trailer on loop in the background of the in-app toast.”

Essentially, if you opened up Discord after the loot boxes were added, you now get an in-app notification about the new feature, and in the notification is the announcement video. And it seems with every new user opening up their Discord app and seeing the notification, it’s adding views to the YouTube video.

However, Witt also pointed out it is most likely an accidental exploit by Discord’s devs, posting a screenshot of on such employee saying, “How the f*** is this video getting so many views?”

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Views are continuing to pile up for the Discord video.

Even so, it seems to be glitching the YouTube platform itself. If you were to visit Discord’s YouTube channel and sort their videos by most popular, it has been put as the lowest viewed video on the channel, despite sitting at over 500 million views at the time of writing.

In fact, as we began writing this piece, the view count sat at 340 million views, and in just over an hour went way above 500 million.

Discord’s video is about to beat out some of the highest-viewed videos on the platform in just 24 hours at this rate.
 
Now that's a funny april fools joke.
Seriously how do you accidentally let a video run in the background? Just goes to show the average intelligence of a Discord developer lmfao. No wonder it was running extra slow yesterday.
 
Explains why most WEF and Communist channels can get millions of views despite being cringe as fuck.
Maybe youtube might be more dead than google is letting on.
As a "cahntent creatooor" myself I 100% belive that youtube fucks with numbers I occasionally do a video that gets 4 times the normal numbers for no sensible reason
 
I wonder how long this exploit existed.
Since forever. Twitter also worked this way since forever and everyone except normies knew about it until Elon took over and basically told everyone. Why shouldn't YouTube work the same way?

In the future, when there's some huge Musk-like YouTube takeover, no doubt you'll find how a bunch of people used the platform to air their laundry however they pleased. But nobody will do anything about it, naturally.
 
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Why is this a surprise exactly?

So an embed of a video added to the video's viewcount even though by all rights Youtube shouldn't count those.
 
Any wiki ran by fextralife does something similar to this, to boost their twitch views. They embed their twitch stream on every single page, so if someone is browsing for some random item in some Dark Souls game, they will contribute to the twitch views and then other people get it recommended because the algorithm has pushed the stream to the front page.
 
YouTube knows about this. Pretty sure it's an open secret.

You can raise your advertisement prices this way, if you have fake engagement on your site.

Think of it as G2A "lootboxes". You expect to get a topseller when you're advertized a "mostly positive, 10000 reviews, 1000000" downloads game, but get "Slopsouls" instead.

Advertizers expect their ads to land on a PewDiePie gaming stream, but instead end on a Elsa Spiderman Abortion video.
 
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