Weekly Scroll: Accidental Viewbotting

Oops! says Discord. Plus, Chinese influence ops and 400 Mawozo

Welcome to the weekend, internet gremlins. There wasn’t a midweek post this week because I was working on a couple big projects and finishing Jonathan Haidt’s new book The Anxious Generation. But expect an extra free post next week!

Onto the week in social media:

Accidental Discord ViewBot Scam

One of the YouTube records that people pay attention into is first-day views. MrBeast has a ton of the top ten with his biggest videos. Will Smith’s Oscars slap used to be #1. A week ago, the top spot was held by the trailer for Grand Theft Auto VI. Then a new video took over - not just taking the top spot but shattering the old record by an order of magnitude. Where the GTA announcement got 90M views in its first 24 hours, this video got well over a billion. What could possibly be so much more popular than Grand Theft Auto or MrBeast?

How about this 17 second video from Discord with no plot or words?

As an April Fools prank, Discord announced they were launching loot boxes. Typical corporate ‘prank’, haha, great work Brayden from Marketing. But without realizing it, Discord’s team embedded the announcement video into the background of their in-app announcement for the prank. Which every Discord user in the world got every time they opened the app.

That led to this chart, comparing the hottest first-day videos in YouTube history:

Discord essentially viewbotted their way to a completely, utterly unbreakable record. There’s a great recap video from Ludwig Ahgren if you want more detail.

Stupid Twitter Story the First

It’s been a while since we had a big dump of Twitter/Elon news. Partially this is because Twitter’s leadership settled down a little bit. Partially it’s because I got tired of reporting that Elon endorsed yet another conspiracy about how woke illegal immigrants are gonna make your cucumbers trans. You may have been lulled into a false sense of security. You may have thought you were free from the bad Elon man.

You are never free from the bad Elon man. He’s going to keep doing increasingly stupid things until the sun burns out. This is how we live now.

Anyhow! Arguably the defining change from pre-Elon Twitter to post-Elon X is the blue check mark - what used to be a sign of prestige became a sign that you paid 8 bucks. Now, less than two years into his ownership, famous people are getting their free blue checks back: