Most people wouldn’t expect Youtube’s most disliked video to be one produced by Youtube itself, but the 2018 Rewind has brought in a whopping 15 million dislikes and was only uploaded on December 6. It immediately sparked a great deal of controversy online, and people flooded the comments section expressing their distaste for the video. Most of the comments highlighted issues such as how the Rewind videos have been getting worse every year, how cringey the video was, and that none of the creators that had a large impact on Youtube were included. This year’s Youtube Rewind, “Everyone Controls Rewind,” was disastrous and appeared to be a low-budget production with its flimsy acting, choppy editing, and random trends carelessly placed throughout the video.

Although this has been a common complaint for many years, many viewers were especially upset with Youtube leaving out some of the most popular Youtubers. Many of the site’s biggest content creators, such as Pewdiepie and Shane Dawson, were left out. Pewdiepie, who has the most subscribers, expressed interest in working on the video and mentioned in his Year Review video that he hadn’t been invited by Youtube. Instead, the video featured channels that had a low subscriber count of only one or two million.

Another problem was the outdated trends. Art related content such as melting lipsticks and science videos had reached their peak in mid-2017 while memes like “surgery on a grape” were not featured despite their popularity. Overall, it wasn’t an accurate depiction of the highlights of 2018.

The actual Rewind video was also disorganized and had a lot of choppy editing. There were clips of people dancing placed randomly throughout the video, and the acting in the party bus and around the campfire came off as scripted and out of place. With a five million dollar budget, this production did not meet viewers expectations in terms of filming quality, as backgrounds such the flying bus and the streets of Korea felt cheap and pasted on. Previously, many people looked forward to Youtube’s over the top Rewinds. The 2014 rewind, statistically being the most popular, had cinematic shots of the New York City skyline and Japan. The 2015 and 2016 videos did a better job at recapping the year by putting more focus on trending songs of those years, such as “Lean On,” “Can’t Feel My Face,” and “What Do You Mean.” The 2018 rewind was filmed in much fewer locations and focused little on popular trends, showing Youtube’s lack of effort into the production of the video. Some people mentioned that they didn’t mind the absence of  bigger youtubers, especially the Paul brothers, but the issue is that by excluding large Youtubers, Youtube is straying towards traditional media and is not acknowledging the controversial but more popular content creators. Although the theme of this rewind video was “everyone controls rewind” where the Youtuber users were supposedly in charge of choosing what would appear in the video,the streaming site seems to have missed the entire point of catering to every audience. Instead of featuring a small group of people with specific interests, Youtube should be catering to a larger range of people to create a more accurate representation of the year.