HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

Or, someone at youtube saw the video and thought it was cool.

Like how this video will always have 301 views: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIkhgagvrjI

There's a good reason for it, and usually is a sign that the video is immensely popular. You can find out why on Youtube it self: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIkhgagvrjI

They cache view counts heavily on highly viewed videos for validating views, here's a good video on why it happens (with information from Youtube -- the 301 refers to the first point at which video views stop incrementing in real time): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIkhgagvrjI

⬐ swah

They could at least set the view count to max(view_count, likes+dislikes) on client side to prevent that annoying "301 views but 5k likes" issue.

⬐ mserdarsanli

Then they may need to explain the possible decrease in the view counts

Here's a video that explains it all: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIkhgagvrjI

tl:dr; caching, data syncing, abuse.

⬐ alister

Summary of the video

This was interesting question that was answered, but it's becoming an annoying trend to have 10-minute videos of things that can explained in a few sentences. Here's basically everything the video had to say:

Q: When you submit a video to YouTube, why the does view count grow nicely hour by hour, 6 views, 57 views, 188 views, and so on, but then seems to get stuck at 301 views and doesn't advance from there for a long time?

A: YouTube doesn't do much checking on the veracity of videos that get <= 300 views. The 300 was an arbitrary threshold that no one remembers the origin of. As of 301 views, YouTube will apply more sophisticated video analytics to check for cheating against the view count (by bots, etc.).

Once a video reaches a view count of 301, it'll stay stuck there for a half day or full day until YouTube does the video analytics, after which they will allow the count to be updated if it was not found to be fraudulent.