How Discord Broke YouTube

The Discord April Fool's joke effectively turned into a viewbot. What a wild ride. Normally wouldn't put something like this here but my experience with views and video infra from Twitch felt applicable
SOURCES
/ 1775225927842369611
/ 1774999195675402320
/ 1774990406033264846
mashable.com/article/discord-...
[www.forbesindia.com/article/e...
Check out my Twitch, Twitter, Discord more at t3.gg
S/O Ph4se0n3 for the awesome edit 🙏

[@catbreadisme]

This is really funny to see because this feels like the exact kind of mistake I would make

[@Gregorius_]

difference is you wouldn't cause as much damage, cause you're not discord xD

[@Ramon314]

​@@Gregorius_it wasn't a mistake of Discord though.

[@4.0.4]

Your example about uBlock makes me understand why KZbin doesn't make it hard to download a stream. Making it harder would lead to "solutions" that simply cost them more.

[@Wampa842]

It's a bad idea for companies to get between nerds and their entertainment. Spite is the greatest motivator.

[@opfipip3711]

Especially when you, like KZbin, need to deliver videos to all kinds of platforms with all kinds of outdated/low end compatible players. yt-dl has AFAIK used KZbins old android API for precisely that reason. I even thought about how ad blockers would/could work should KZbin really embed ads into videos. And most of the solutions that i can see are basically... ddosing KZbin. You could e.g. start loading videos before they are clicked, to have a buffer when the ad comes. And tracking user behavior and enforcing hard limits on such a huge platform is actually quite expensive itself. So tracking users and figuring out who to ban would probably cost much more than those users would ever have made if they watched ads.

[@MonoBiphonic]

My problem with twitch adverts is that they completely interrupt the stream while the stream continues. Imagine watching a movie that injects a random advert and continues playing in the background. Ads don't work for live content that's not designed for commercial breaks of some sort.

[@pfqniet]

To some extent that is also on the streamer failing to provide a good experience to their viewer. I roll with the automatic ads as I get a big yellow banner in my Twitch dashboard telling me an ad break is coming, and I use that break to literally take a break from what I'm doing. Maybe chat a little more, but nothing important happens in my ad breaks. If I'm streaming a game like a moba, I'll make sure to manually run an ad break while I'm in the queue to ensure an ad doesn't automatically play during the game. If you get an ad break in and miss important content as a result of it, that's the streamer caring more about ad revenue than about providing you a good streaming experience.

[@300mare]

Yeah, but all of this feels so unnecessary. Mandatory ads? Really? Idk my people, I am getting a grim vibe, low-key dystopian. We are forced to play ads, fans are forced to watch them. Idk

[@pfqniet]

@@300mare This is unfortunately the users' fault. We have collectively decided that we do not want to pay for online services. We don't want to pay for KZbin. We don't want to pay for Facebook. And so on. But these services cost money to run. A professional streamer has bills to pay, and if they aren't getting the money from their viewers - the vast majority of which do not want to pay for the content they consume - then ads are pretty much the only way money can be made.

[@vdynmx]

Google / KZbin doesn't pay retail. They own the infrastructure. I'd argue it's just part of a significant fixed cost of the infrastructure. Unmetered Connections have been around since dawn.

[@capn]

Agreed. There's only a cost if your bandwidth is saturated or you're metered, neither of which concern Google.

[@devxsadik]

Underrated comment

[@nonlinearsound-001]

Still, owning and maintaining network and server infrastructure is extremely expensive as well. So, it might not make that much of a difference compared to if you are paying for using infrastructure as a client.

[@gljames24]

Also Google has custom processors specifically for streaming video.

[@EamonnMooney]

Not only do they not pay retail. For Bandwidth they pay exactly $0 as they are a tier one peering partner on the internet, they own dark fibre and undersea fibre so they have settlement-free peering with every ISP on earth.

[@almeidaofthejoel]

just fyi, at 1:25, assuming a million users at 1 minute each, thats $960

[@Adam4]

Yeah that was a bit of a weird mistake, three orders of magnitude off and didn't blink

[@shubbb66]

@@Adam4idk what ur talking about 0,00096 * 1.400.000.000 = $1.344.000 He was pretty spot on

[@v1d300]

@@shubbb66 That timestamp is not about discord's view count and the associated cost. The timestamp OP is referring to is where Theo says for millions of users it will cost hundreds and thousands of dollars. But as OP correctly said, for million users it will cost $960.

[@shubbb66]

@@v1d300 am i responding to op?

[@chiroyce]

@@shubbb66 0.00096*1,000,000 = $960 - OP and @Adam4 BOTH are not talking about Discord's 1.4B views, but instead a minute of video for a million concurrent users, as an example for MUX.

[@vicenteriverad]

I feel like this went under the radar *because* it's an Aprils' fools thing. Had it been a permanent, full-fledged feature, then it would have been more thought out and probably gotten detected earlier. It being an Aprils fools / temporary feature, they probably didn't want to invest too much effort into it, part of which is QA

[@Pencil_Frog]

It's funny, but I'm confused why discord is at all "at fault" here (aside from the crime of annoying auto-playing videos). Understandably KZbin doesn't want to enable view bot-ing, but they allow embeds so... it's just an issue with their own view tracking system. What am I missing?

[@AwesomeAdmirak]

They did nothing wrong other than have the play/stay loaded while offscreen. If youtube didn't want this, they could easily have made it impossible. (e.g. rate limiting a specific video in the context of embed)

[@aeghohloechu5022]

discord is at fault for making their video play on a loop on millions of devices. That wastes energy and bandwidth.

[@precumming]

Well yes KZbin gave Discord the tools to make this situation happen, but by Discord misusing it they risk KZbin taking the tools away for others. KZbin might realise that yeah they don't want developers to be able to get autoplay, and no controls, and looping, because it doesn't bring them to the platform. This video was a huge instance and higher ups in KZbin may want to lock down their videos. Discord is still at fault even though they didn't bypass any restrictions, it's the good of the commons.

[@EnderCrypt]

theres no view-botting here each view was a legitamete view by an actual person, as seen through youtubes embed feature

[@-Rune-]

​@@EnderCryptAbsolutely not. The view count ended up being 1,48 Billion, that's 18% of the world population. 18% of the world did not watch that video in 24 hours 😂 They changed the view count shortly after to a few million.

[@webluke]

8:40 That's a great story. Rather than letting a few users view without the ad, it caused problems and cost the company more money. I will block ads because I find no value in them, and they waste my time. But I know enough people out there are clueless and generate enough of a return for the companies advertising that the system of ad-supported content works. And Google will take their money and roll around in the billions they have.

[@ark_knight]

Except youtube only recently became profitable. Or maybe they are still not generating profit. Its their other services that make them roll in billions

[@webluke]

@@ark_knight Headlines like "Google parent Alphabet reports net profit of $19.6 billion in Q3" don't support your argument. The they also report "KZbin went up 12% to $7.95 billion" partly due to the increase views on shorts. Not sure where Google gets the put in peoples minds that its some kind of charity, they kill of anything that doesn't make them billions a year.

[@jonathandawson3091]

Didn't really break KZbin. Cost them a penny.

[@TangiersIntrigue]

Man, the fandom streams... I don't miss that on mobile browsing. Felt like the early 2000s pop-ups everywhere experience.

[@Zeragamba]

3:03 what's their pricing interval? since the video is only 20 seconds long, the price could a third of of that. (Still expensive, but lower)

[@DrDuckmann]

I was wondering the same thing...

[@ThePapanoob]

Its per minute… so if youre under 1 minute you still pay for a minute.

[@DrDuckmann]

@@ThePapanoob I got curious enough and went to read their docs. @Zeragamba is right, it would be much less. Copy/paste from the docs: "You pay for the exact number of seconds of video. We don’t have a minimum or round to the nearest minute."

[@Zeragamba]

depends on how accurately they record usage

[@libradrag0n]

The interval is per second. It says so in their pricing FAQ. Additionally there are four usage based tiers.

[@sgiath]

Or they could bundle the 18s video into the source code? Every time I open the Discord it is downloading something to update itself, doubt few seconds of video would make a huge idfference

[@inanefool8781]

This makes me wish we could have had a working P2P solution for embedded video. Something that can offload video hosting duties to select users, maybe on an opt in basis with some kind of reward, and help share the load when videos get huge like this, especially really small ones. Then again I imagine this particular video had the 10th the data of a high res photograph.

[@robertsky]

Peertube?

[@akam9919]

@@robertsky lbry?

[@overloader7900]

Apparently twitch uses P2P in parallel with centralised distribution (see their korea articles)

[@inanefool8781]

@@akam9919 weren't LBRY's P2P abilities vastly overstated? Or was that bitchute?

[@inanefool8781]

@@robertsky I wasn't sure if Peertube did full P2P among all viewers or if it was just self-hostable. Does it share over a swarm when a lot of people watch?

[@vladislavkaras491]

Interesting how "accidentally" a big company can DDoS another big (or not) company :D Thanks for the video!

[@wywarren]

The last time I wrote embed with KZbin at least for iOS I don’t think you were able to autoplay. When I need an autoplay to work on iOS in the past I had to resort to a video tag using a hosted video. Maybe there is a way to do it that I wasn’t able to do at the time, but if this holds true, I wonder how the count metric is tallied as well.

[@JamesMCrutchley]

I wonder if a developer had a twitch add-on that just hits the twitch API at rate limit for every user connected to a stream automatically every time twitch runs an ad? I have twitch turbo but I would run that add-on if it ran in the background making requests. No single stream would have a huge impact but a large number of users across the platform spamming the API within the API limit would at least cost them insane amounts of money.

[@spkim0921]

I saw that popup and clicked "didn't ask X" because I thought it was some nitro paywall thing

[@phizc]

They could make the embedded videos not auto-play as default. As an added bonus, I wouldn't have to have an extension to prevent auto-playing videos in Chrome.

[@SXZ-dev]

18s of video is how many chunks? I'm pretty sure you can probably pass that stuff to some edge server and have it serve it to your users. Unless the pure bandwidth cost is the same as what MUX would charge you. Way easier ofc to just have KZbin handle the whole thing for you

[@Hexalyse]

How to not get mid-roll ads on Twitch : install an extension that basically switches to 480p quality when an ad is played. 480p and lower streams don't have those ads :) Unfortunately, it doesn't work for the preroll ad, and you'll see the ugly purple video feed telling you an ad is playing (but if you have an ad blocker you shouldn't see the ad)

[@fexxix]

Prolly a good call to upload it on this channel. There's a youtuber called "No Text To Speech" who does discord content and in one of his videos I saw that one of your videos were recommended to him. I'm pretty sure it was from this channel too. His content isn't related to coding but he was still recommended this channel and I'm not sure if he even watches you a lot but the fact that he was recommended your channel kind of confuses me about the audience of this channel (not in a bad way) lol.

[@_Yolandi]

Theo the Discord video is 18 seconds long, based on the mux pricing it will be $403.200 and not $1.344.000 with 1,4 billion views. And with this pricing ($403.200) they still make some money, so the effective costs would be lower. I'm sure KZbin has also lower and cheaper infrastructure costs than mux.

[@TheColonThree]

They count by minute I'm pretty sure.

[@_Yolandi]

@@TheColonThree maybe

[@TricksterRad]

On top of that, if Discord went with hosting the clip on R2 instead of Mux they'd pay only 360$ for all those 1.4bn views (0.36$ per 1M GetObject requests against an R2 bucket)

[@solaris9426]

Doing the math of Mux's prices, taking into account that the video in question is only 3/10 of a minute long, the end price goes way down, from 1.3 million to around 400 thousand dollars, assuming the price modules do that same math with videos less than a minute long.

[@litengut]

nice video, its nice to see it from a Backend side

[@wlockuz4467]

8:40 Why should the end users understand or care about the infrastructure at all. Its like saying you need to fully understand the electric grid of your city to turn a light on or off in your room.

[@helleye311]

It is absolutely absurd, which makes it an even better joke. It's been a while since we had some high quality april fools troll. Also, interestingly enough, the video is down to just 2.7M views. I guess they removed the duplicate viewcounts generated by the same person reopening the app. Doesn't change the fact it must've costed a lot of money for all the replays.

[@logicweaver7152]

A stupid question, but the number of views does not matter at all right? It'd still add to cost if video has been delivered regardless if youtube considers it a view? The only value a view has should be in giving an approx estimate on how much it is costing.

[@lelilimon]

02:46 They charge per seconds for buffered video (delivered). Discord video is 18 seconds long, so divide dy three and you get 448,000$

[@Jrakula10]

2:55, wouldnt the math be less because its a price per minute but the video is only 17 seconds long. would come out to around $380000. also not sure exactly how imbeds work with regards to caching, or videos with caching i would assume some data was saved.

[@vilaahmed]

Even tho nothing beats free lunch, I would argue that there are substantially cheaper options compared to Mux given they charge per minute while video viewport being quite small that costs Mux fractions of what they charge. Even a simple S3 bucket, that I would consider costly compared to some CDN options out there, could do a trick by simply having appropriately pre-encoded HLS or MPEG Dash files served with HTTP file streaming enabled. Things gets even better if you choose to encode multiple resolutions so video.js/hls.js can pick appropriately depending on the viewport size.

[@OneOfThePetes]

I feel like I've watched this before.... Fuck it. I don't mind watching it again. Theo, you rock!

[@eedoan]

I like how the thumbnail of this video had an actual real tweet this time (slightly changed but still)

[@RandomGeometryDashStuff]

01:24 what about discord's own servers (where messages attachments go)?

[@erkinalp]

discord does not have its own servers, they host everything at google cloud

[@ZipplyZane]

The fact that these videos are still playing in the background is just horrible design. You're wasting people's bandwidth and battery for no reason. No site should get a pass for doing that. Program it not to play unless visible.

[@wyndmill]

absolutely wild

[@chiroyce]

ikr

[@adamgenshaft706]

Isn’t Cloudflare stream the cheap good solution for video?

[@whoknows3679]

Cheaper, than most, but not cheap at scale

[@TricksterRad]

It's slightly more expensive than Mux (0.001 vs 0.0009... on Delivery, 0.005 vs 0.003 on Storage). But if you're willing to roll your own solution around packaging and transcoding, you can actually use CloudFlare's R2 for significantly cheaper (works out to around 1/200th the cost on delivery, assuming 5s segment size).

[@TrimutiusToo]

and here I was wondering why is my GPU overloaded on April 1

[@trappedcat3615]

It was probably not the video in this case. But collectively, everyone put in a lot power to run it so many times.

[@TrimutiusToo]

@@trappedcat3615 nah i was running a game which was intensive on GPU and then having discord open for some reason worsened my performance is what i meant... Now i know the reason...

[@yellowice0]

y'know, my computer can reliably load one good quality video at once without buffering/stuttering or going down in quality, I recall trying to load a 3 minute video that day on April 1st and discord would load like 5 seconds of it then freeze and crash, I tried to about a dozen times and gave up, it wasn't even designed for users in mind, terrible.

[@realcundo]

If the video runs in the background without users seeing it and it still counts as a view, I can't imagine how unreliable ad revenue tracking and reporting is. This must be happening all over the place on a much smaller scale (fewer views) on other websites.

[@ees4.]

Embed views don't pay any money.

[@realcundo]

@@ees4. Thanks, didn't realise that! Edit: the docs say "Only KZbin and the video owner will earn revenue from ads on embedded" so I guess my OG comment still holds.

[@ees4.]

@@realcundo I meant autoplay embedded videos

[@realcundo]

@@ees4. I couldn't find this in the docs (not that I tried too hard). Some docs say that embedded autoplay doesn't count toward views, other docs (updated recently -- wondering why) say embedded autoplay *might* count towards views. I guess ads are based off analytics i.e. views.

[@errormaker1]

Just put the mp4 in the build.

[@bluecup25]

And now you pay for the extra megabytes delivered in the build.

[@Rushil69420]

The only takeaway from this is that I have no fucking clue how KZbin exists today

[@user-eh7wy9ne8p]

relatable maxx

[@martinleduc]

Was the video playing on loop in the background? If yes, the data would only have to be streamed once reducing the cost massively. EDIT: Ok, Theo mentions it as 5:10. And considering the fact that Discord has only 175 million monthly active users, loops must have counted.

[@Ahmedjerjawi]

what is the side bar you are using

[@tutacat]

Now you need to know that twitch does not get preferential pricing for amazon video services. It was likely using only 480p video by default, they likely either watched it or closed it, it only shows if you hover. KZbin makes it money from google cloud services, so everyone using google cloud is actually subsidizing youtube.

[@ridiche]

The real problem is that Discord forgot to only play the when hovering the button and delete it when the popup disappears

[@gttmone]

Bro that's why my pc started having frame issues a few days ago cuz of the stupid video taking up resources

[@chrisfaux3769]

How to add a calculator to arc browser new tab menu?

[@deldrinov]

They could've made this as svg animation, and push it with an update months in advance.

[@ivanrenescorcia]

I think youtube uses a P2P strategy with some ISP contracts benefits to decrease those costs.

[@dan2800]

Discord did a speedrun of getting 1.4bil views in a less than a day

[@arkord76]

Currently the view count shows for me about 2.78 million views. Maybe YT cleaned the stats.

[@XEQUTE]

good video, i was very selectively and this was good

[@krishnabharadwaj4715]

KZbin should have displayed ads. That would be a nice prank to pull on discord and ruin their plans.

[@dv_bassi]

3:02 you forgot to divide by 3 (since the pricing is per minute and the video is ~20 seconds long); still ~400K is plenty lol

[@RawbLV]

Read the top comment thread

[@digitalsparky]

I personally think it should've been a graphic that once clicked rendered the , as opposed to having it pre-rendered. That way you get real usage and don't cripple the infrastructure or users computers.

[@kreuner11]

The problem is that discord already has the ability to stream and host video on its platform, as part of voice chat and regular messaging, not sure why not use their already existing infrastructure

[@KHamurdik]

So you are saying I can implement KZbin viewbot using on some of my personal websites?

[@Fanaro]

11:40 Maybe KZbin should have other metrics for that.

[@xali2008]

If host the video yourself, somewhere like Cloudflare r2, if you have 10s segments for 18s video for 1.4B views (2.8B request total) your cost going to be about $1000.

[@dova5944]

The cost should be lower than 1 million $, the video was only 18 seconds long and youtube is much more efficient at streaming videos than any other platform on existence

[@Nekroido]

6:50 more so, Twitch may even ban a channel that gets viewbotted by malice

[@metropolis10]

9:09 imagine saying "people skipping obnoxious intrusive ads aren't considering how their adblocker software is affecting the PLATFORM (not the creator)"... ya no. It may be a cat and mouse game, but the model is broken, and adblockers are here to stay. The platform needs to do better.

[@pixyoutube538]

Today, I saw the Loot box views is 2 million, not billion

[@RandomGeometryDashStuff]

04:46 what if autoplay blocked?

[@EamonnMooney]

3:10 But KZbin does not pay anywhere near that amount as KZbin's bandwidth is effectively free. They will have had some compute cost, though their distributed cache will have reduced that too. But Google/KZbin is a tier one peering partner they have settlement-free peering with almost every ISP on earth. When you are at Google scale, you have a significant % of web traffic going through your pipes, so tier one ISP's want to peer with you. Google also owns a significant amount (Billions of dollars worth) of dark fibre and under sea fibre. Google knows ISP's want access to this so they are able to attract such beneficial peering arrangements.

[@hamzasaleem1537]

what is that calculator app ?

[@isocuda]

So how profitable (net) is KZbin and Discord again?

[@alessandroceloria4573]

KZbin Is not profitable, or maybe it just became profitable the last quarter. Of course this is due to their copious investments and not due to creative accounting for tax evasion or the fact that the massive profits are __technically__ generated at Alphabet since they manage adsense and are thus legally beneficiary of the ad revenue which is nonetheless distributed en masse through KZbin

[@mikixd7956]

i mean there is cashing they are not loading video every time so it costs way less but point still stands

[@blockshift758]

Can anyone explain why discord can't just host the video themselves?

[@crugg]

I wonder what makes video hosting so expensive? Couldn’t you just put the MP4 in a storage bucket and call it a day?

[@rnts08]

Try to steam from a bucket to that many concurrent viewers and watch your cc melt at $cloud

[@crugg]

@@rnts08 What are you talking about?

[@pokefreak2112]

It's really just a matter of scale. Even just serving a simple static website to 1 billion people will not be cheap. If you replace that website with a 500mb file, possibly being downloaded several times a day by every person that's probably like 1000x more bandwidth being used

[@crugg]

@@pokefreak2112 Well, a video like that isn’t gonna be more than 1MB. Also for example Cloudflare R2 doesn’t charge bandwidth, only operations, so serving any video file, no matter how big 1.4b times there would cost

[@rajarshikhatua100]

I can make twitch's cpu-s hot with my little ublock, I feel powerful

[@MrDave34]

I still don't understand why the view count is so high? Is this video auto playing all the time while Discord is open and looping so every 18 seconds it counts as a new individual view? There is no way a billion individuals used Discord in one day especially if you need to hover over the video for it to play.

[@eustoliafukuyo6481]

3:15 But the Video is 18seconds and not a minute. Making it less than 0.00096

[@seyadeodin]

Damn KZbin rly is actually existing socialism.

[@tutacat]

me, not using discord for the whole day

[@kiballion]

3:06 mux is / minute and the video is only 18 seconds long ;)

[@jon9103]

Not "totally reasonable " but certainly an understandable honest mistake.

[@MrDave34]

Did I miss what part of KZbin broke? The view count pausing seems intentionally designed.

[@Frexuz]

So where's the "broken" part 🤷‍♂️

[@imnotan]

If you think about it there were probably about 1b people watching the video

[@kevkwa]

I guess the (April) fool here is KZbin - wonder how much it cost them on the infrastructure side.

[@lordmushroom723]

Hey Theo and guys in the comments: it shows 3M Views right now. Today is April 6th 2024 at 12:15PM EST Time

[@hellowill]

Honestly based from discord. They deserve those views if they have that many users. The mistake here is from KZbin for not preventing this. And that's only if you really think there is a mistake.

[@thripnixe]

3:02 your math ain't mathing, the discord video is only 20 sec long, so you have to divide that number by 3

[@TheColonThree]

You pay by minute, not second

[@sarjannarwan6896]

And the benefit of KZbin is you might get some discoverability with non discord users coming across the video.

[@BarakaAndrew]

I think YT should seriously consider P2P and get YT premium cost down, that would take their cost down by like 90%

[@bluecup25]

I have on my computer 1TB of hot tub streams downloaded directly from Twitch

[@railalis]

Looks like vector art. Why not just make an animated svg with css

[@damians.7859]

But why call it a mistake on Discord's part?

[@seasong7655]

The video only has 2.8 million views though. Not 1.5 billion

[@KaKi87]

So the tweet existed but you still doctored one 😂

[@abdullahX001]

I'm pretty sure KZbin have greater efficiencies than the likes of Mux so the cost would've been nothing close to that.

[@Weissenschenkel]

If KZbin stopped pushing scammy ads I'd gladly watch them. I'm tired of quackery, non-sense, get-rich-now and unrelated (e. g. maxipads for male audiences) ads in my KZbin experience.

[@MilesFlavel]

You could pay for premium, it'll get rid of the ads and support the creators you follow

[@zenpool]

fextralife be like 👀

[@DarkStoorM_]

Was about to comment on that. 10k~ viewers, 20 people in the chat

[@ukyoize]

KZbin is fine untill it nukes your video into oblivion

[@cjthedeveloper]

it does not cost KZbin anywhere near 1.6 million

[@pokefreak2112]

p2p file sharing would solve this problem

[@cherubin7th]

I couldn't care less how much money that cost KZbin. KZbin isn't playing fair anyway.

[@ilyos]

Wiiild

[@renderthegreatskycity]

hello;)