The YouTube Rewind 2018 dislike ratio is worse than the ratio of previous years and it’s continuing a downward trend that has been growing since 2015’s entry in the annual video series.
It’s that time of the year – YouTube Rewind 2018 has come out as a celebration of the “videos, people, music and moments that defined 2018”. This is the ninth year that the video streaming service has created a video of this style and the YouTube Rewind dislike ratio is much worse than it has ever been.
Redditor /u/mechanical_mechanic posted a bar graph on the /r/dataisbeautiful subreddit last evening showing just how bad 2018’s YouTube Rewind dislike ratio is when compared to previous years.
YouTube Rewind had a relatively tiny amount of dislikes for its first five years. It begins to climb in 2015 and appears to have doubled for 2016. 2017’s YouTube Rewind is where things appeared to have gone off the rails. The dislike ratio for that year is more than 2 to 1 with 3.7 million likes and 1.9 million dislikes.
The reception for this year’s video is the worst we’ve seen so far. The YouTube Rewind dislike numbers were already outpacing the likes when the graph was originally created. At the time of writing, 2018’s version has 956,000 likes compared to 2 million dislikes. This means that the 2:1 ratio has effectively flipped from positive opinion to negative opinion.
It is not immediately apparent why the YouTube Rewind dislike numbers are so high for 2018’s video. YouTube, Reddit, and Twitter comments contain a wealth of complaints, though there are a few common trends. The absence of the platform’s most popular creator PewDiePie is one issue that is repeated time and time again. A handful of commentators are upset that there was no representation for the late Stefan Karl of Lazy Town fame. Others take issue with YouTube appearing to push an agenda or supporting creators that they want to be popular rather than the creators that actually are popular.
We can’t really be certain why things have gone sideways for YouTube Rewind this year. It could be one or more of the above reasons or something else entirely. What is clear is that the majority of people who have seen the video so far aren’t terribly fond of what the streaming service has done with this year’s YouTube Rewind and the dislikes don’t show any signs of stopping.
Header image credit: YouTube / Bar graph image credit: /u/mechanical_mechanic on Reddit’s /r/dataisbeautiful
