Click here to pre-order the latest issue of NAG Magazine
Discord Trolled Itself When Its April Fools' Video Raked In Over 1.4 Billion YouTube Views

Discord Trolled Itself When Its April Fools’ Video Raked In Over 1.4 Billion YouTube Views

·

If you somehow missed it, which doesn’t seem at all possible if the numbers are to be trusted, on April Fool’s, Discord released a short video about adding loot boxes to its social media platforms – and that is where our story should end, but if you’ve read the title of this news you already know it doesn’t.

In just 24 hours, that troll video ranked in a whopping 1.4… Billion views. Just to put that in perspective for you guys, the much-anticipated Grand Theft Auto 6 trailer only managed to get 61 million views in 12 hours, and even now, months after its release, it is only sitting on a mere 183 million views in total.

Now the apparent next quest is undoubtedly “How”. How did a seemingly innocuous prank go so vital? This is where the real meat and potatoes of this story lie.

So apparently, this video clip played in the background of Discord’s toast notification. For those unaware, this is the pop-up that shows you what’s happening on your PC, what friends just started playing on Steam, a Whatsapp web message, an email – you get the idea.

Having the video play like this effectively created a view bot that simulated, quite literally, hundreds of millions of views.

Now, according to Discord, this whole debacle was, in fact, an accident, and the developers were just as baffled as everyone else by the viral nature of the clip. And while Discord hasn’t released a full-on statement, they did post this X on X:

As of writing, it’s unknown what YouTube will do about all this. They could remove the view count from the video or even ban Discord for view botting, but nothing like that has happened yet.

So, for now, just know that the biggest Fool on April Fool’s was Discord.

Tags