Youtube Rewind Backlash

What Happened?!

This year’s Youtube Rewind was, to say the least, not up to everyone’s expectations. Youtube Rewind is a video that Youtube makes every year to see what has happened over the course of that year. However, the Rewind this year was disliked by millions. The video had only 2.4 million likes, and 15 million dislikes! This definitely proves the backlash toward this year’s Rewind. Why was it so disliked, might you ask? Well, the video reviewed items that many thought shouldn’t really be there. Youtube Rewind was poorly created because of what people disliked that was in the video, what Youtube could have done better, and what people’s expectations might be for next year.

What were the negative reactions?

This year’s Rewind was hated for many reasons. The video included K-Pop, which is Korean pop music. The negative reactions were fueled also because the famous boy band group BTS was not in that scene. Another scene that gained cynical feedback was Fortnite. Don’t get me wrong, we all know that many people enjoy Fortnite, but the whole video seemed to revolve around the game! It was just too much in one video to take in. Youtube also didn’t include a memorial to any of the people who we have lost this year, including Stan Lee, George H.W. Bush, Barbara Bush, Aretha Franklin, or Stephen Hawking. Finally, one of the last things that people were upset about was that iconic youtube star Pewdiepie was not included on the Rewind. For a few years now, Youtube has not included the rising star even though millions of fans have wanted him in the Rewind. These are only a few of the many reasons why the video was disliked.

How it could have been better?

The main reason that people hated YouTube Rewind was that is wasn’t really a rewind of the main events this year. In the video, the theme was what would happen if YouTubers took over the Rewind. But, YouTube didn’t let them do that. In the video it allegedly shows YouTubers expressing their ideas on what they should do in their videos. But Youtube selectively choose comments that didn’t reflect all a broad range of viewer preferences but instead made it seem as if all opinions reflected what the company wanted to incur more publicity. The limited comment selection seemed to have happened because the video was heavily disliked by YouTube fans from around the world. YouTubers had several different goals for the Rewind that were not reflected in the actual video. An example of what was included is putting so much about Fortnite in the video and even “Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response” (ASMR), which is the sense of feeling satisfied and calmed when they watch a video. This is outrageous because YouTubers who have ASMR channels are not even in the Rewind! Some YouTubers even took and stand on these fallacies, such as Pewdiepie, who took it upon himself to make his own version of the video, which got more likes than the actual video! Pewdiepie’s video got 7.4 million likes.

Expectations for next year.

We all know that almost the whole video could be better with including and taking out some parts of the Rewind. I hope that you now know how Youtube’s Rewind can be better next year and what the standards should be. What did you think?