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Source - IGN

Update, April 2: Discord seemed to address the accidental viewbotting with a fitting, if succinct, response on its X/Twitter account: "oops."

Clearly taking its own mistake in stride, the account replied to a number of accounts, including one asking if the platform would do anything to correct it. "STOP PRESSURING ME I JUST BROKE A WORLD RECORD I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT WE'RE DOING NEXT," one of Discord's replies said. Hey, we've all been there.

Original Story: Discord’s April Fool's video blew up on YouTube, securing hundreds of millions of views in just a handful of hours, but it seems there’s a lot more going on here than meets the eye.

The video, called ‘Discord Loot Boxes are here’, is a straightforward April Fool’s joke about adding loot boxes to the online communication platform. That, you would have thought, would be that. But something odd happened: the video saw hundreds of millions of views in the blink of an eye, so many, in fact, that it blew past the record set by the all-conquering GTA 6 trailer.

How can this be? It seems Discord accidentally ‘viewbotted’ its own April Fool’s video. Software developer Marvin Witt took to X / Twitter to say that Discord managed to create a working YouTube view bot by playing the loot box announcement trailer on loop in the background of the in-app toast notification about the video itself. Witt suggested this was accidental on Discord’s part because a member of staff expressed confusion at what had happened. IGN has asked Discord for comment.

At the time of this article’s publication, Discord’s loot box video had an incredible 628 million views in just 17 hours. For context, ‘GTA VI Trailer 1’ set a new views record for the 24-hour debut of a non-music video on YouTube with over 93 million views.

As it stands, Discord is tearing up that world record, but of course it was achieved through nefarious means. Will YouTube make an adjustment to the video's view count in response? Meanwhile, the internet is having its fun. “Discord accidentally making a YT view bot is the funniest April Fool’s day joke this year,” said one user in the YouTube comments.

 

[Dazraell]

That's one way to fuck up lol

 

[ahtlas7]

So they just pulled away the mask to show how popular videos are made. Oops.

 

[Midn1ght]

"Accidentally"

 

[Cyberpunkd]

"Accidentally"

Coding is hard, let me code a viewbot by mistake.

Seems that dev is not part of “let’s do stupid shit for lulz” club at work.

 

[Darkkahn]

Hey
I accidentally 1 billion of views
what should I do... is this dangerous ?

 

[Kerotan]

"Accidentally"

Exactly.

Would be funny if it was actually accidental and linked to some random small time YouTuber. Imagine he made like a 100k in advert revenue.

 

[xrnzaaas]

This was so fucking obnoxious, not only it was a popup with autoplay turned on, but they didn't even get the dates straight and I got it on April 2nd.

 

[ozz ex machina]

Who exactly enjoys these giant corps acting like teenagers on social media? I fucking hate how people lap this shit up.

 

[DrFigs]

I don't get the joke, Discord is heavily monetized w/ Nitro, boosting servers, and discord subscriptions. and now they're going to roll out ads (really). but lootboxes yeah can you imagine how crazy that would be?

 

[Unknown?]

So they just pulled away the mask to show how popular videos are made. Oops.

Yeah. On YouTube, as well as most social media, I feel like half of the users are just bots.

 

[-Minsc-]

Who exactly enjoys these giant corps acting like teenagers on social media? I fucking hate how people lap this shit up.

Growing up is tough man