YouTube’s Rewind 2018 video (above) is well on its way to becoming the most-disliked video in the streaming site’s history.
The recap video features some of the biggest YouTubers of the last 12 months (oh, and Will Smith, too), and has been released by YouTube every year since 2010. But this year’s effort seems to have rubbed people up the wrong way.
At the time of writing, 7.9 million people have hit the dislike button on YouTube Rewind 2018. That’s just 2 million short of the most-disliked video on the platform, Justin Bieber’s 2010 hit, Baby.
Considering Bieber’s video has taken eight years to reach that many dislikes, and Rewind has taken just four days, it seems like a safe bet that in the next week or two, YouTube will take the crown for the most-disliked video. On YouTube.
So what exactly is it that has so riled the global YouTube community? Well, looking through the video’s enormous number of comments, it seems to be just about everything you can think of.
For starters, some viewers were clearly put off by the video’s cringeworthy skits that feature many of the year’s most popular YouTubers.
One wrote, “If YouTube was really like this, I would never visit this site,” while another said: “It is unbelievable how disconnected YouTube has become with their audience.” Someone else wrote simply: “I feel uncomfortable.”
But the overriding gripe seemed to be about the absence of PewDiePie, who, with more than 75 million subscribers, has the most popular channel on YouTube. Other popular YouTubers notable by their absence included Shane Dawson and Logan Paul, though the latter was likely excluded because of the criticism he courted earlier in the year.
PewDiePie has already posted a video offering his own unique take on YouTube’s Rewind 2018 video, ridiculing its overuse of hit video game Fortnite and saying how it lacked what he thought of as YouTube personalities.
“I remember when Rewind was something that seemed like an homage to the creators … it was something cool to be part of,” PewDiePie said, adding that he was glad he wasn’t in it because it was just too cheesy. For next year’s Rewind, if YouTube is brave enough to post such a video, he suggested featuring only up-and-coming creators instead of the same old faces.
The comments section of YouTube’s Rewind 2018 video wasn’t all bad, though. One sympathetic soul managed to muster enough enthusiasm for a slightly more positive analysis, saying: “I believe that this video was okay in some parts.” But at the time of writing, only two people had liked that particular comment.
