Game Theory - Why YouTube Will NEVER Fix Rewind (YouTube Rewind 2019)

Episode Date: April 10, 2024

Join former Game Theory Host MatPat as he solves what the heck went wrong with YouTube Rewind 2019... Credits: Writers: Matthew Patrick Editors: Tyler Mascola,  Koen Verhagen, Alex "Sedge" Sedgwick, and Shannon (Bomb0i) Assistant Editor: AlyssaBeCrazy Sound Editor: Yosi Berman

I wonder what they should do at this point. Like, what can YouTube do to have a successful rewind? Well, sit down, Felix. Let's talk about that. Actually, you're already saying down. So, let's just move on, shall we? Welcome to Game Theory, where we always talk about everything. Two weeks after it's relevant, because this show is so darn hard to produce. Seriously, no matter how many New Year's resolutions I make,

in the last eight years of doing this show, I've never been able to get, like, more than a week at. So today I really want to talk about the YouTube Rewind. The last time that I talked about Rewind was back in 2015. Way back then in that theory, I predicted that 2015's YouTube Rewind would be the final good one. And okay, I wasn't that far off. I missed it by like a year, right? At this point we all know the story.

2016's was good, not great. 2017 started the massive decline, and then 2018, well, let's just cut to footage of 2018, shall we? Oh, that's hot. That's hot. Hot indeed, YouTube and TikTok sensation, Will Smith. It was a literal garbage fire. And so this year, they just kind of gave up, threw up their hands and said, You know what? We don't know what you like.

So here's a bunch of videos that objectively got a lot of likes instead, minus, of course, the ones that didn't fit into the arbitrary rules that we listed out on our website. At this point, Rewind appears to have an unfixable problem. Pute Pie himself was called into review. this year's Rewind and even he couldn't fix the darn thing. I actually got to see it and I got to give feedback on it and they took some of my feedback, but it's still bummed. You were the chosen one.

Honestly, there probably wasn't a whole lot that he was in a position to do, but still, the point is there. Overall, the reaction to the watch mojo list that was YouTube Rewind 2019 was, well, best described as not as negative as 2018, but outside of that, the creator community didn't have a whole lot to say about it. And I mean that literally. When reacting to it, that was just everyone's general response. Oh, that's it? That's it.

Oh, that's how they ended. Okay. Okay. It's like a bowl of rice. Not bad. It's a little plain. That's probably the greatest analogy I've ever heard. And it's fine, I guess, but it's so boring. But you know what? I think that there's actually a lot to unpack from this year's rewind that's largely gone ignored in favor of people arguing over whether there was either too much or too little K-pop in it. Because when you stop and analyze this years, rewind, we get ourselves a preview of what the next 10 years on this platform are going

to look like. And let me tell you, it's going to be a very different looking platform. First, let me get something personal off my chest. I recently posted a full interview I did with YouTube CEO, Susan Wojcicki, where the very first question I asked her was about YouTube gamers being treated as second-class citizens. Her response was that we're not. My answer would be no. I mean, gaming is an incredibly important part of our ecosystem.

It's why I'm here. It's why we're having a gaming summit. Okay, fair enough. But then, less than a week after I post that video, I see this year's Rewind, which features lists of the year's top individual musicians, individual dance creators, individual beauty creators, and then this. A list of games.

Not the gamers who play those games, create with those games, help those games grow and sustain popularity. The creators who are some of the platforms most well-known and successful personalities, no! It's a prime example. of the problem that I leveled at Susan in that interview. Gamers as second class.

You don't see beauty gurus being boiled down to the list of the top palettes that were talked about this year. We're not presented with the lists of the top music genres on the platform this year, but rather the top musicians. And yet gamers are only as good as the games that they play. Not even worth being mentioned by name. And that's not being salty on my own behalf. Far from it. There is no chance that I would ever be mentioned on a list of like,

top-liked creators on the platform, we're not that well-liked. I just think that it's indicative of the way that this platform continually treats creators who communicate through the medium of games differently from those who communicate through other mediums, like vlogs or makeup or music and dance. It's just, it's inequality, and you don't notice it unless you're looking for it,

and it's there, and it's sad, and I wish it would change, because gamers are pretty awesome, and we do a lot for this platform. But okay, that was just a minor nitpick. I now want to talk about the big picture stuff, right? Let's start by attempting to fix the impossible problem that is the YouTube Rewind. And a big problem requires itself a big screen, so if you'll excuse me, I gotta get out of the couch for this one.

We're headed to Green Screenland, my friends. YouTube, you say at the beginning of this thing that you don't know what we like, right? That it's so hard to figure out. But the thing is, you managed to do it for five years before this fairly successfully, So it must be able to be done and for all the talk around how big the platform has gotten and how many creators there are and how global it is and how impossible it is to satisfy everyone in a single video Honestly, I think that's just making a lot of excuses that's not getting to the core problems that made 2017 and 2018 so disliked when you look at those two rewinds relative to all the others it becomes clear that Rewinds problems all boil down to two core issues

The first one is dishonesty. The thing is, we first and foremost want YouTube Rewind to be what it promises it is, to be a rewind of the previous year. I'm sorry, but that's the brand that you created and now you're stuck with it. And believe me, I feel your pain. I do theories for a living, and theories are hard to write, especially one a week. But if I suddenly do something that isn't a well-researched, fully scripted out, thoughtful essay and call it a game theory, well guess what? But people get mad at me, and rightfully so, to be honest. Same with a rewind that doesn't actually rewind the events of the year.

When multiple months feel a, I don't know, a worldwide movement supporting an independent creator racing to cross the 100 million subscriber mark before a large corporate channel, that's something that I think you should probably cover. When a massive battle between two rival beauty guru spills out into the mainstream media and sets records for unsubscribes in a day, spawning live stream counter trends that follow the drama outright prompting you to change your platform. Well, that's probably something that you're gonna wanna cover.

When a Logan Paul versus KSI boxing match is one of the biggest pay-per-view events on your platform, that's something that you're gonna wanna cover. Now, don't get me wrong, I know you wanna put on a good face for your advertisers, that you're ashamed of some of the more controversial or edgier stories on your platform, But YouTube was a platform that won the Media Wars by being first and foremost a source for authentic content.

Authentic doesn't mean perfection. And if you really do want to do a rewind, like you say you do every year, you have to take the good with the bad. You have to honor both sides of this thing. Now, real talk, I understand why you'd be scared to slip into your platforms edge your stories. But just because something might have negative connotations back when it happened doesn't mean it still has to be negative when it appears in a YouTube rewind setting. Take the three examples that I just brought up, right?

The Tati versus James Charles drama, T-Series versus PewDiePie, Logan Paul versus KSI boxing. Three huge stories that any yearly recap should absolutely have included. Three stories that you might be sensitive to. I mean, I would assume that you were since they didn't really appear in their respective yearly recap. But consider this. Set up a giant boxing match. Three rounds. each round comedically riffing on one of these respective battles. Or, you know what, if you don't like the boxing metaphor,

use another YouTuber trend example. Mr. Beast, Mr. Beast's YouTube paintball challenge, with each duo who were fighting at a certain point, now being recast as a team. It keeps things fun, light-hearted, and grouped thematically, while also, and most importantly, not sweeping those events under the rug. Massive trends that happened on a global scale

that everyone who lives and breathes YouTube expects to see here because it was such a massive cultural event for this platform. Because when you ignore stuff like that, that is when people get mad at you. That's when they hit the dislike button. That is when it starts to feel dishonest, which is like the antithesis of why people love this platform in the first place.

Second major problem, don't virtue signal. Or at least don't tell us that you're doing it. What do we do? It's the classic adage of showing, not telling. Early Rewinds didn't have kumbaya circles of creators saying how proud they are of this community. No. Instead, that message, that same message, was communicated through the imagery of the rewind, a rainbow backdrop, riffing on the Love Has No Labels viral video, featuring creators of different backgrounds without feeling the need to explicitly call it out.

This is and has always been an inclusive platform. of diversity, but calling it out as explicitly as you did in those last two rewinds is not only cringy, but it's self-aggrandizing. It feels gross and self-serving. It takes a beautiful thing that happened organically on this platform and suddenly feels like it's being used to pat a corporation on the back. So again, you say that you don't know what we like. Well, clearly audiences of YouTube like a pretty diverse selection of things, but I can tell you two things that we seem to universally not like. like dishonesty and preachiness.

But you know what, this whole conversation's pointless. You know it, I know it, and it's time everyone at home watching knows it. Because I've read between the lines of your 2019 rewind. I see where your heads at, YouTube. I get that none of this matters and that the rewind is now and forever gone and it ain't coming back and he ain't interested in fixing it, so all these conversations are just moot points. But in order to fully have that conversation,

We need to sit back down on the couch. Another transition! You see, 2018 was the last year that YouTube attempted to put together a rewind that actually felt like a human made it rather than YouTube's own AI systems. Like, for all we know, an AI could have actually edited this thing together because goodness knows, a human cannot watch this. There's so many awkward jump cuts. Like, why would you put a cut there? You put the cuts on the beats and the music, guys! 2019's rewind had more glitch effects than a Five Nights at Freddy's theory. But aesthetics of the whole thing aside, what I actually mean by that is that this year,

YouTube gave up pretending to be something that it's not. A person. A person has a perspective. A person makes judgment calls about what's relevant, what's cool, and what isn't. This year, YouTube started doing what it does best, being a machine that can read numbers. You didn't like what you got last year? Fair enough. We'll stop deciding what we think you. we think you'll like and let the numbers choose for us. Beep boop, boop, beep boop, just like our algorithms.

Over and over throughout 2019, YouTube has had to assert that it is nothing except a platform, a flat surface where people build things. YouTube is no longer a part of the YouTube community. It used to be, that was the heyday of the YouTube Rewind, but it's not anymore. It's not a person, it's a platform. And this is just the latest in a whole slew of reactions that YouTube has had recently.

Back in 2018, we experienced the adpocalypse. Advertisers complained about their ads running against content that they didn't deem as brand safe, and so YouTube was forced to react by changing ad policies. And along the way, their response to advertisers was, we're just the platform. People can post anything here. We're just a machine, so you can't expect everything to be perfectly brand safe all the time. Fast forward to Article 13 slash 17, was being passed around Europe.

YouTube was again forced to react by working with countries to set up copyright policies, but along the way, they maintained what's called a safe harbor position. Basically a stance that says, hey, we're just the platform. We're not responsible for the content that gets uploaded here. If people upload copyrighted material, well, that's not really our problem. We shouldn't be held accountable. We're just the platform.

Earlier this year, when the FTC came a knocking about Kappa, Complating that there were kids' content running ads on the platform. Again, YouTube was forced to react by changing kids' content policies, but also reacting to us in the creator community by not offering advice, by not being able to help us in any way, just direct us to the guidelines because you know what? If they were the help, they step beyond the lines of being just the platform. They are neutral.

So YouTube's 2019 Rewind happens to be the perfect distillation of where YouTube is in 2019. A neutral observer of what happens on the platform, completely disconnected from those things for its own self-preservation. Things that happen here. The Rewind is just the latest in a long series of two years worth of YouTube saying, we're just the platform, we don't speak for the creators on that platform. Instead of trying to interpret the culture that exists here, the YouTube rewind in 2019 shows that YouTube is essentially washing its hands of the culture that exists here.

No judgment calls. No deciding who's cool and who should have 10 frames or who should be driving the YouTube battle bus Just an auto-generated mirror held back up to us This is numerically what you told the platform that you like data in data out YouTube is the platform they play by the numbers They're not here to get involved with us say what you will about YouTube rewind 2018 It was bad it was cringy it was preachy it didn't represent the platform But guess what it did do got people to care

It has 20 million likes and dislikes, most of them dislikes, and over 2 million comments. This year's, half that. 10 million, with only a million comments. Almost exactly half anyway you slice it. The response was lukewarm at best. And that's the problem with being neutral. You lose all that passion, that fervor, the excitement about what's going on there. You lose the enthusiasm for being here as a part of the community.

But the thing is, at least from where I'm sitting, the old rewinds are never coming back. YouTube still has a community, a culture, right? We know this, because if I say T-Series versus PewDiePie, pretty much everyone who watches this platform recognizes them, right? But YouTube itself is, from this point forward, opting out of its own community. And I gotta say, it feels kind of sad, right? Feels like a bit of a loss, a changing era, a tech company that is moving on, from its first and hardest core users,

which means that, I guess, now it's up to us to pick up that torch and run with it. Creators like the ones that you see cycling through on screen right now, the people who are working to create the real rewind, one that we feel really recaps the year in the way that we want to see, because we are still a part of this community. We still believe that there's a culture here,

and we're not ashamed of it, and we're excited to be a part of it. It's sad that YouTube doesn't feel the same way. But hey, that's just a theory. A rewind theory. Thanks for watching.