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

I wonder what they should do at thispoint like what can YouTube do to have a successful rewind we'll sit down Felixlet's talk about that actually you're already saying down so let's just moveon shall we hello Internet welcome to game theorywhere we always talk about everything two weeks after it's relevant becausethe show is so darn hard to produce seriously no matter how many New Year'sresolutions I make in the last eight years of doing this show I've never beenable to get like more than a week ahead so today I really want to talk about theYouTube rewind the last time that I talked about rewind was back in 2015way back then in that theory I predicted that 2015's YouTube rewind would be thefinal good one and okay I wasn't that far off I missed it by like a year rightat this point we all know the story 26 teams was good not great 2017 startedthe massive decline and then 2018 well let's just cut to footage of 2018 shallwe Oh God there's a hot indeed YouTube andtic-tacs sensation Will Smith it was a literal garbage fire and so this yearthey just kind of gave up threw up their hands and said you know what we don'tknow what she likes so here's a bunch of videos that objectively got a lot oflikes instead – of course the ones that didn't fit into the arbitrary rules thatwe listed out on our website at this pointrewind appears to have an unfixable problem PewDiePiehimself was called in to review this year's rewind and even he couldn't fixthe darn thing I actually got to see it and I got to give feedback on it andthey took some of my feedback but it still bummed there probably wasn't awhole lot that he was in a position to do but still the point is there overallthe reaction to the watch mojo list that was YouTube rewind 2019 was 12 bestdescribed as not as negative as 2018 but outside of that the Creator communitydidn't have a whole lot to say about it and I mean that literally when reactingto it that was just everyone's general response okay it's like a bowl of ricenot bad just a little plain that's probably the greatest analogy I've everheard and it's fine I guess but it's so boring but you know what I think thatthere's actually a lot to unpack from this year's rewind that's largely goneignored in favor of people arguing over whether there was either too much or toolittle kpop in it because when you stop and analyze this year's rewind we getourselves a preview of what the next 10 years on this platform are gonna looklike and let me tell you it's gonna be a very different looking platform firstlet me get something personal off my chest I recently posted a full interviewI did with YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki where the very first question I askedher was about YouTube gamers being treated as second-class citizens herresponse was that we're not my answer would be no I mean gaming is anincredibly important part of our ecosystem it's why I'm here it's whywe're having a gaming summit okay fair enough but then less than a weekafter I post that video I see this year's rewind which features lists ofthe year's top individual sessions individual dance creatorsindividual beauty creators and then this holistic games not the gamers who playthose games create with those games help those games grow and sustain popularitythe creators who are some of the platform's most well-known andsuccessful personalities know it's a prime example of the problem that Ilevel that Susan in that interview gamers as second class you don't seebeauty gurus being boiled down to the list of the top pallets that were talkedabout this year we're not presented with the lists of the top music genres on theplatform this year but rather the top musicians and yet gamers are only asgood as the games that they play not even worth being mentioned by name andthat's not being salty on my own behalf far from it there is no chance that Iwould ever be mentioned a list of like top liked creators on the platform Ijust think that it's indicative of the way that this platform continuallytreats creators who communicate through the medium of games differently fromthose who communicate through other mediums like vlogs or makeup or musicand dance just it's inequality and you don't notice it unless you're lookingfor it and it's there that's sad and I wish it would change because gamers arepretty awesome and we do a lot for this platform but ok that was just a minornitpick I now want to talk about the big picture stuff right let's start byattempting to fix the impossible problem that is the YouTube rewind and a bigproblem requires itself a big screen so if you'll excuse me I gotta get off thecouch for this one that you don't know what we like right that it's so hard tofigure out but the thing is you managed to do it for five years before thisfairly successfully so it must be able to be done and for all the talk aroundhelping the platform has gotten and how many creators there are and how globalit is and how impossible it is to satisfy everyone in a single videohonestly I think that's just making a lot of excuses that's not getting to thecore problems that made 2017 and 18 so disliked when you look at thosetwo rewinds relative to all the others it becomes clear that rewinds problemsall boil down to two core issues the first one is dishonesty the thing iswe first and foremost want YouTube rewind to be what it promises it is tobe a rewind of the previous year I'm sorry but that's the brand that youcreated and now you're stuck with it and believe me I feel your pain I dotheories for a living and theories are hard to write especially one a week butif I suddenly do something that isn't a well-researched fully scripted outthoughtful essay and call it a game theory well guess what people get mad atme and rightfully so to be honest same with a rewind thatdoesn't actually rewind the events of the year when multiple months feel of Idon't know a worldwide movement supporting an independent creator racingto cross the hundred million subscriber mark before a large corporate channelthat's something that I think you should probably cover when a massive battlebetween two rival beauty gurus spills out into the mainstream media and setsrecords for unsubscribes in a day spawning live stream counter trends thatfollow the drama outright prompting you to change your platform well that'sprobably something that you're gonna want to cover when a Logan Paul versusksi boxing match is one of the biggest pay-per-view events on your platformthat's something that you're gonna want to cover now don't get me wrong I knowyou want to put on a good face for your advertisers that you're ashamed of someof the more controversial or edgier stories on your platform but YouTube wasa platform that one the media wars by being first and foremost a source forauthentic content authentic doesn't mean perfection and if you really do want todo a rewind like you say you do every year you have to take the good with thebad you have to honor both sides of this thing no real talk I understand whyyou'd be scared to slip in your platforms edge your stories but justbecause something might have negative connotations back when it happeneddoesn't mean it still has to be negative when it appears in a YouTube rewindsetting take the three examples that I justbrought up right the Tati versus James Charles drama teasers vs.

PewDiePieLogan Paul versus ksi boxing three huge stories that any yearly recap shouldabsolutely have included three stories that you might be sensitive to I mean Iwould assume that you were since they didn't really appear in their respectiveyearly recap but consider this set up a giant boxing match three rounds eachround comedic ly riffing on one of these respective battles or you know what ifyou don't like the boxing metaphor use another youtuber trend example misterbeast mister beasts youtuber paintballchallenge with each duo who were fighting at a certain point now beingrecast as a team it keeps things fun light-hearted and group thematicallywell also and most importantly not sweeping those events under the rugmassive trends that happened on a global scale that everyone who lives andbreathes the YouTube expects to see here because it was such a massive culturalevent for this platform because when you ignore stuff like that that is whenpeople get mad at you that's when they hit the dislike button that is when itstarts to feel dishonest which is like the antithesis of why people love thisplatform in the first place second major problemdon't virtue signal or at least don't tell us that you're doing it what do wedo it's the classic adage of showing not telling early real lines didn't havekumbaya circles of creators saying how proud they are of this community knowinstead that message that same message was communicated through the imagery ofthe rewind a rainbow backdrop riffing on the love has no labels viral videofeaturing creators of different backgrounds without feeling the need toexplicitly call it out this is and has always been an inclusive platform ofdiversity but calling it out as explicitly as you did in those last tworewinds is not only cringy but it's self aggrandizing it feels gross andself-serving it takes a beautiful thing that happened organicon this platform and suddenly feels like it's being used to Pat a corporation onthe back so again you say that you don't know what we like but clearly audiencesof YouTube like a pretty diverse selection of things I can tell you twothings that we seem to universally not like dishonesty and preach eNOS but youknow what this whole conversation is pointless you know it I know it thistime everyone at home watching knows it because I've read between the lines ofyour 20 19 rewind I see where your head's at YouTubeI get that none of this matters and that the rewind is now and forever gone andit ain't coming back and the ain't interested in fixing it so all theseconversations are just moot points but in order to fully have that conversationwe need to sit back down on the couch last year that YouTube attempted to puttogether a rewind that actually felt like a human made it rather thanYouTube's own AI systems like for all we know an AI could have actually editedthis thing together because goodness knows like human cannot watch thisthere's so many awkward jump cuts like why would you put a cut there you putthe cuts on the beats and the music guys 20 19 s rewind had more glitch effectsgonna five nights at Freddy's theory but aesthetics of the whole thing aside whatI actually mean by that is that this year YouTube gave up pretending to besomething that it's not a person a person has a perspective a person makesjudgment calls about what's relevant what's cool and what is it this yearYouTube started doing what it does best being a machine that can read numbersyou didn't like what you got last year fair enough we'll stop deciding what wethink you'll like and let the numbers choose for usbeep boop boop beep boop just like our algorithms over and over throughout 2019YouTube has had to assert that it is nothing except a platform a flat surfacewhere people build things YouTube is no longer a part of the YouTube communityit used to be that was the heyday of the YouTube rewind but it's not anymore it'snot a purse it's a platform and this is just thelatest in a whole slew of reactions that YouTube has had recently back in 2018 weexperience they had pocalypse advertisers complained about their adsrunning against content that they didn't deem his brand safe and so YouTube wasforced to react by changing and policies and along the way their responseadvertisers was we're just the platform people can post anything here we're justa machine so you can't expect everything to be perfectly brand safe all the timefast forward to article 13 / 17 when it was being passed around Europe YouTubewas again forced to react by working with countries to set up copyrightpolicies but along the way they maintained what's called a safe harborposition basically a stance that says hey we're just the platform we're notresponsible for the content that gets uploaded here if people uploadcopyrighted material well that's not really our problem we shouldn't be heldaccountable we're just the platform earlier this year when the FTC camea-knockin about Coppa complaining that there were kids content running ads onthe platform again YouTube was forced to react by changing kids content policiesbut also reacting to us in the creator community by not offering advice by notbeing able to help us in any way just direct us to the guidelines because youknow what if they were the help they'd step beyond the lines of being just theplatform they are neutral so YouTube's 2019 rewind happens to be the perfectdistillation of where YouTube is in 2019 a neutral observer of what happens onthe platform completely disconnected from those things for its ownself-preservation savings that happen here the rewind is just the latest in along series of two years worth of YouTube saying we're just the platformwe don't speak for the creators on that platform instead of trying to interpretthe culture that exists here the YouTube rewind in 2019 shows that YouTube isessentially washing its hands of the culture that exists here no judgmentcalls no deciding who's cool and who should have 10 frames or who should bedriving the YouTube battle bus just an auto-generated mirror held back up to usthis is numerically what you told the platform thatlike data in data out YouTube is the platform they play by the numbersthey're not here to get involved with us say what you will about YouTube rewind2018 it was bad it was cringy it was preachy it didn't represent the platformbut guess what it did do got people to care it has 20 million likes anddislikes most them dislikes and over 2 million commentsthis year's half that 10 million with only a million comments almost exactlyhalf any way you slice it the response was lukewarm at best and that's theproblem with being neutral you lose all that passion that fervor the excitementabout what's going on there you lose the enthusiasm for being here as a part ofthe community but the thing is at least from where I'm sitting the old rewindsare never coming back YouTube still has a community a cultureright we know this because if I say t-series vs.

PewDiePie pretty mucheveryone who watches this platform recognizes right but YouTube itself isfrom this point forward opting out of its own community I gotta say it feelskind of sad right feels like a bit of a loss a changing era a tech company thatis moving on from its first and hardest core users which means that I guess nowit's up to us to pick up that torch and run with itcreators like the ones that you see cycling around screen right now thepeople who are working to create the real rewind one that we feel reallyrecaps the year in the way that we want to see because we are still a part ofthis community we still believe that there's a culture here and we're notashamed of it and we're excited to be a part of it sad that YouTube doesn't feelthe same way but hey that's just a theory a rewind theory thanks forwatching.