Youtube Rewind 2019: For the Record

Shafe Asghar, Writer

YouTube can’t seem to get Rewind right.

YouTube finishes the year off by collecting notable moments on the platform, with their annual rewind. This year’s “YouTube Rewind,” starts off by apologizing for how horrible 2018’s Rewind was. YouTube will probably have to apologize again in 2020 for how bad 2019’s Rewind was too.

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 that showed the differences between YouTube, the corporate entity, and YouTube, a community of creators on the platform.

This year, the company apologized. 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.

The 2019 YouTube Rewind has amassed 7.2M dislikes and 2.9M likes. It’s on it’s way to compete with 2018’s Rewind for most disliked video. A brief scan of the comments reveals much discontent, along with the copy-and-pasting of similar comments. Many 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.

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