I don’t know how to tell you folks who love YouTube unconditionally, but the site has been terribly out of touch with its users for a while now.
If you aren’t familiar, YouTube releases a video called YouTube Rewind at the end of each year that is supposed to be a summary of the most watched videos on the platform. Basically, watching the video should somehow be equivalent to watching a crash course on the most eye-catching events of the year in a fashion entertaining to the viewer. YouTube Rewind 2018 was anything but that.
People lashed out quickly against the video. It was posted on December 6th. As of December 14th, YouTube’s “Everyone Controls Rewind” surpassed Justin Bieber’s “Baby” as the most disliked video on the platform with 13 million dislikes. Yikes. It must really suck to be the most disliked video on your own platform. To best summarize this video, it was full of cringe, dead memes and YouTubers that had bad acting skills in a not-funny way. From what I can tell, there are two major reasons that this video tanked so badly besides its general cringe-factor.
First, the underestimation of how far people are willing to go for people they support.
Example A: PewDiePie—a famous Youtuber, the most famous on the platform if you didn’t know—was excluded once again from the YouTube Rewind. The guy has 77 million followers. Why would they not include him when each of his videos garners millions of views. He said in a video that he wasn’t invited to participate. Which makes absolutely no sense as far as I’m aware. The YouTube Rewind even left out the drama between PewDiePie and T-series which was a major source of entertainment and strife for many of his fans. Why? They would rather add in a bunch of Viners rather than actual YouTubers?
Example B: BTS—an internationally acclaimed Kpop group that has smashed charts all around the world for the past two years—has crazy protective fans. I am one of them. Let me tell you something about ARMY (BTS’ fandom). We don’t take kindly to anyone messing with our guys. Ever since BTS has been getting more fame, people are always trying to use them for clout. YouTube did exactly that. There was already an issue with the term “K-pop” being used to describe one group when other groups have also taken off this year like BLACKPINK with their track “DDU-DU-DDU-DU” opening at No. 55 on the Billboard Hot 100 charts. Nobody appreciated YouTube’s gross oversimplification of Kpop and everything it stands for, but I’ll ignore that for this particular explanation. Now, the main issue is the “deleted views” on their music video for their track “IDOL,” which allowed Ariana Grande’s “thank u, next” to take their place as the video with most views garnered in 24 hours. (The song is a smash. I love Ariana Grande.) It’s not hate toward Ariana Grande that has ARMY angry. It’s YouTube’s use of the “IDOL” aesthetic and music even though they deleted views from the video. ARMY is kinda like a rabid dog; you really don’t want to get on its bad side and YouTube just did.
Second, it was simply not as entertaining as they presumed it would be.
Did they really think that we want to watch more cringe-fest Fortnite dances and more “In My Feelings” challenges? I feel like that was too much of the video. Also, the random part about mental health just didn’t seem to coincide with the theme of “fun and entertaining.” It was an awkward transition, to say the least. I imagine it must get more and more difficult to accommodate everyone now that YouTube has grown so much as a platform in different countries, but this video feels squashed. A lot of the YouTubers were entirely unfamiliar, which was a little strange. Maybe they need to create a video for each continent or region or maybe there needs to be a “serious” video and a “funny” video. Either way, the composition of the video is jarring and hard to watch.
Again, YouTube is really out of touch with its viewers, and it was sad seeing them struggle to fit it all in. Check out some of these comments!
So, no. People are not happy with the video. In fact, the comments section is more entertaining than the actual video. Letting the “creators” control Rewind? Maybe next time… don’t do that. Thanks.