Now matter how much you dislike a song from an artist and want to show it by throwing it a thumbs down on YouTube, you’ll never get close to how much the world hates this year’s YouTube Rewind. As of today, the video is officially the most disliked video on the platform, taking the place of Justin Bieber’s “Baby.” At time of publishing, YouTube Rewind has 10.3 million dislikes, while “Baby” now has 9.8 million. In fact, the amount of dislikes on “Baby” has actually decreased since the Rewind was published, seemingly in an effort to get Rewind to the status of “most disliked” even more quickly. And while it took Bieber’s video approximately eight years to rack up that dislike count, YouTube Rewind beat it in closer to eight days.
There are a lot of issues with the video, not least of all that it tried to pretend like a lot of the bad moments of the year never happened; events with PewDiePie, Shane Dawson, and Logan Paul are the most commonly cited. Another issue was that it seemed to gloss over some of the true creators on YouTube who have made an impact this year, in favor of advertiser-friendly celebrities and artists who YouTube can pitch to agencies.
A YouTube representative issued the following statement to The Verge, saying that “dethroning ‘Baby’ in dislikes wasn’t exactly our goal.”
“Honest feedback can suck, but we are listening and we appreciate how much people care,” the representative said. “Trying to capture the magic of YouTube in one single video is like trying to capture lightning in a bottle. We also learned that creating content can be really hard and this underscores our respect and admiration for YouTube creators doing it every day. Keep the feedback coming and maybe we’ll release a top 10 list of ‘Rewind dislike’ reaction videos.”
See what all the fuss is about in the video below.