Discord “accidentally” viewbots YouTube video to over 1.4 Billion views

Discord “accidentally” viewbotted a YouTube video to 1.4 billion views and counting, and in the process, seemingly also broke part of YouTube itself. 

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.

I should mention they presumably did this accidentally, even one of the high up developers at Discord was confused as to how this was happening pic.twitter.com/0uRLQRRzSq

— Marvin Witt (@NurM4rvin) April 2, 2024

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?” 

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 1.4 billion views at the time of writing.

Discord’s video is about to beat out some of the highest-viewed videos on the platform in just 24 hours at this rate.