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This April Fools' Day, Discord pranked its users by adding loot boxes to the app.
April Fools' Day came and went, but then the little video announcement that Discord posted on YouTube suddenly set a world record for the most views in one day with over 1.4 billion views. What happened?
So on Monday, Discord posted a 17-second-long announcement advertising its latest feature: loot boxes. By opening very much Overwatch-looking loot boxes, players have been able to collect up to nine items that don't really do anything by themselves (however, unlocking all nine does add a temporary clown avatar decoration).
To advertise its little April Fool's prank, Discord posted a video on YouTube, and, importantly embedded that video into a pop-up notification (aka toast) in the app.
What happened next was the video skyrocketing to 1.4 billion views in 24 hours, beating the record just recently set by the trailer for Grand Theft Auto VI.
Obviously, 1.4 billion people didn't collectively decide to watch the video on YouTube. Moreover, likely just a minuscule percentage of those actually saw the video. So how come?
When Discord embedded the video into its pop-up, it was playing on loop for every user who had Discord open, even if they never bothered to hover their cursor over the notification to show it. So effectively the 17-second video was just playing non-stop for all Discord users who had the app open, quickly racking up millions upon millions of views.
Yesterday, Discord acknowledged that it had accidentally created a functional view bot with a cheeky tweet.
It's unclear whether YouTube will do something about all the fake views the video managed to accumulate. If not, congratulations to Discord on setting an impressive record.
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