Why YouTube Rewind 2018 Failed

by Nicholas Lemieux

2018 was a rather...unique year for YouTube overall. Things already got off to a patchy start within the first days of January over the entire controversy over infamous YouTuber Logan Paul recording a video featuring a dead body and posting it on the site. Since then, things haven’t entirely improved, with various controversies such as TanaCon, the TidePod challenge incidents, and the case of more and more content creators becoming demonetised due to YouTube’s unpopular restriction policies. So when YouTube Rewind, a yearly video which recaps the past year for YouTube, was released last December to celebrate the year, it was overwhelmingly panned by critics, viewers and YouTubers alike. Within 24 hours, the video had amassed 29. 4 million dislikes and, in less than a week, it had overtaken Justin Bieber’s Baby as the most disliked video on the entire site. So, what was the cause for the negativity?

Firstly, it should be noted that the rewind videos had been declining in quality for the past couple of years, as many of the viewers can attest. One notable point of contention has been the increasing prominence of already well-known celebrities in these videos, whom many viewers believe steal the limelight from the content creators who justly deserve to be the main focus. Recent years featured appearances from celebrities such as Dwayne Johnson, James Corden and Stephen Colbert, but this year definitely takes the cake with Will Smith, the Fresh Prince himself, playing a prominent role alongside talk show hosts such as Trevor Noah and John Oliver. Much of the YouTube community were angered by the snubbing of various creators whom they felt deserved the limelight more. PewDiePie for example, the most subscribed creator on the platform, didn’t even warrant a mention; the most he got was a blink-and-you-miss-it appearance by his trademark chair in a brief animation. His playful feud with channel T-Series, considered one of the highlights of YouTube that year by many, was never brought up, as were other notable events such as the notorious boxing match between KSI and Logan Paul and Shane Dawson’s documentary on the infamous Jake Paul. But hey: At least Will Smith’s weird grunts beame a meme.

Another point of contention was the choice of trends selected to represent 2018 in the video. The video itself was titled “Everyone Controls Rewind”, insinuating that this was what everyone wanted in a rewind when it ended up not including what the vast majority wanted. As well as the snubbed creators mentioned earlier, other possible trends, such as jokes about Infinity War or anything to do with “it’s coming home”. Instead, YouTube settled for "family friendly" bottom-of-the-barrel trends and mainstream topics, including an overabundance of Fortnite references and the whole Baby Shark craze, instead of the events that were actually relevant to the site. There was even a whole skit where the creators mention they’ll “read the comments”. Many were quick to accuse YouTube of heavily cherry picking their comments to what they wanted to represent in the video. Not helping their case was that some of those comments, especially the Fortnite ones, were written in a seemingly sarcastic manner, leading the community to further lambast YouTube for being unable to detect sarcasm. It just went to further prove how many viewers felt YouTube was heavily out of touch with its audience

Perhaps most annoying of all was the 2-minute-long out-of-nowhere social commentary midway through the video. I do suppose the section had noble enough intentions behind it but, as well as taking up a third of the video, many viewers felt the segment to be blatantly shoehorned in and to be not entirely genuine in what it was saying, as though YouTube was trying too hard to pander to their advertisers. 

In particular, the discussion about mental health was thought to be in particularly bad taste, due to the fact that it basically served as an ad for BetterHelp, a company which went through controversy itself last year over its unfair pricing, and also the big hypocrisy of promoting and thanking those who spoke out about mental health while demonetizing videos that more or less did the same while raising money for charity. Lastly, to add further insult to injury, no tributes were made to any of the notable celebrities who passed away last year, such as Stephen Hawking, Stan Lee and Stefán Karl Stefánsson, whose deaths made a major impact upon the YouTube community.

Overall, YouTube Rewind 2018 is a perfect summary over some of the issues YouTube has been dealing with for some time and thoroughly deserves its title of most disliked video of all time. If that weren’t embarrassing enough, PewDiePie himself released his own version of the video under the title “YouTube Rewind 2018 but it’s actually good”, incorporating some of the more memorable events of that year and within two days of release becoming the most-liked non-music video on the entire site. I suppose the one thing we could be hopeful for is if this video serves as the catalyst for YouTube to start mending its flaws. And plus, those Will Smith memes are pretty funny.