2019 YouTube Rewind apologizes for 2018 Rewind, is still massively disliked

YouTube

Creators and viewers get all the praise — but it didn’t help

YouTube can’t seem to get Rewind right.

Like Tumblr’s year-end fandom rankings or Spotify’s personalized playlists, YouTube finishes the year off by aggregating notable moments on the platform. Appropriately, this year’s “YouTube Rewind,” so it’s dubbed, starts off with a self-own.

Last December, the 2018 YouTube Rewind became the single most disliked video on YouTube, with creators and fans accusing it of being too corporate, highlighting brands and celebrities instead of the platform’s actual community. The video racked up 10 million dislikes in just eight days, and became a notorious example of the discrepancy between YouTube, the corporate entity, and YouTube, a community of creators on the platform.

This year, the company apologized.

YouTube

The opening of the 2019 Rewind is full of clips of YouTubers cringing at last year’s video. The rest of the video returns to the straightforward top ten, highlighting creators, music videos, and other staples. But the YouTube community isn’t happy.

At the time of writing, the 2019 YouTube Rewind has amassed 2.6M dislikes compared to 1.3M likes. A brief scan of the comments reveals much discontent, along with the copy-and-pasting of similar comments (something YouTube cheekily responded to in the pinned commnet). Many in the comments say that while the video does highlight more creators than last year’s, it doesn’t actually feature them, instead relying on preexisting clips. Elsewhere, some point out that now it’s just a “thing” to dislike the YouTube Rewind

Source: Polygon