YouTube’s 2018 “Rewind” video has become the most disliked video on the platform in history, surpassing Justin Bieber’s “Baby” music video in just one week.
Every year, YouTube publishes a Rewind video to summarize the highlights of videos and their creators on the platform over the past year.
This year, however, after growing animosity from YouTube content creators towards the Google-owned company, users could not contain their frustration after the annual Rewind video featured Hollywood and television stars, such as Will Smith, John Oliver, and Trevor Noah, and Ninja, the star of a rival video-streaming platform, over some of YouTube’s most popular stars, including KSI and PewDiePie.
Having been slowly gravitating towards a more sterile, corporate, and advertiser-friendly platform over the years, YouTube has taken efforts to avoid promoting its more controversial, yet popular, content creators, like PewDiePie, despite the fact that he is the most subscribed content creator on the platform with over 76 million subscribers.
YouTube’s attempt to become more corporate and advertiser-friendly, which has led to the demonetization of some of its most popular content creators and prompted others to leave the platform entirely, has angered most users.
YouTube’s 2018 Rewind video, which currently has over 10 million dislikes with only 2.1 million likes, further demonstrated this anger.
In comparison, Justin Bieber’s “Baby,” which was regarded as the most-disliked video on the platform for years, has just under 10 million dislikes, with 10 million likes.
The Rewind video also has more dislikes than Jake Paul’s “It’s Everyday Bro,” Call of Duty’s Infinite Warfare reveal trailer, Luis Fonsi’s “Despacito,” and Rebecca Black’s “Friday.”
“I’m almost glad that I’m not in it because it’s such a cringey video at this point,” declared PewDiePie in response to the video. “It’s so disconnected with the community and its creators.”
Most of the top comments on the Rewind video, some of which have hundreds of thousands of likes on their own, also called out YouTube for leaving out PewDiePie, or criticize the company for being out of touch and cringey.
Charlie Nash is a reporter for Breitbart Tech. You can follow him on Twitter @MrNashington, or like his page at Facebook.