The most disliked video on YouTube is YouTube’s own Rewind 2018, which collected a staggering 20.3 million dislikes before the platform hid the numbers for good. I have watched this list evolve for years, and the final version of it is frozen in time: YouTube made dislike counts private in November 2021, so the rankings below reflect the last public data ever recorded, as of December 2021, preserved in Wikipedia’s list of the most disliked YouTube videos. No new video can officially join or leave this club anymore, which makes it one of the strangest hall-of-shame documents on the internet.
Here is the full top ten, what each video is, and why the internet turned on it. Counts are rounded from the final December 2021 snapshot, and the order has not changed since, because it cannot: the scoreboard itself was retired with the data.
The 10 Most Disliked YouTube Videos of All Time
- YouTube Rewind 2018: Everyone Controls Rewind (20.3 million dislikes). The champion, and it belongs to YouTube itself. Rewind 2018 was meant to celebrate the year’s creators and instead became the fastest-disliked video in the platform’s history, packed with celebrity cameos nobody asked for while ignoring the creators and moments people actually cared about that year. The community treated the dislike button as a referendum on how out of touch the platform had become, and the verdict was unanimous. It needed less than a week to pass Baby and claim the all-time record, a speedrun no other video has come close to matching.
- Baby Shark Dance (14.9 million dislikes). The children’s earworm that conquered the planet also collected dislikes at an industrial scale. Part of it is honest adult exhaustion, but most of it is a quirk of kids’ content: toddlers tap every button on the screen while videos loop for hours, and the data piles up. The same video is also among the most viewed and most liked of all time, which tells you the dislikes never slowed it down.
- Sadak 2 Trailer (13.6 million dislikes). The Bollywood sequel’s trailer landed in 2020 in the middle of a massive backlash against industry nepotism that followed the death of actor Sushant Singh Rajput, and the dislike campaign became the way millions of users chose to express their anger at the industry’s gatekeeping. No trailer has ever received more dislikes, and none is likely to get the chance.
- Baby by Justin Bieber featuring Ludacris (12.4 million dislikes). The original record holder. For most of a decade, Baby was the undisputed most hated video on YouTube, the punchline every list like this one was built around. It took until the end of 2018 for Rewind to take the crown, and by then the dislikes had become part of the song’s legend. Bieber outlived the joke; the count stayed.
- Johny Johny Yes Papa (11.9 million dislikes). A nursery rhyme that became a meme precisely because of how strange it is, then collected dislikes from both ironic adult viewers and the usual toddler button-mashing. The meme era passed; the numbers remained, split between adults in on the joke and children who were not.
- YouTube Rewind 2019: For the Record (9.5 million dislikes). YouTube’s apology lap for Rewind 2018 was a safe, data-driven listicle of top videos, and the community disliked it almost as enthusiastically, this time for having no personality at all. Two entries in the all-time top six for your own annual celebration is quite a record for a platform to hold.
- Bath Song by Cocomelon (8.9 million dislikes). Another children’s juggernaut. Cocomelon videos run on loop in millions of households, and the bath song’s dislikes grew the same way Baby Shark’s did: scale, repetition, and tiny fingers.
- Learning Colors: Colorful Eggs on a Farm (8.4 million dislikes). A Russian-language kids video about colored eggs that almost nobody over the age of four has watched deliberately, sitting in the all-time top ten purely on the physics of children’s content at planetary volume.
- Lakdi ki kathi (7.2 million dislikes). A classic Hindi children’s song in animated form, beloved across generations in India and disliked at scale for the same structural reasons as every kids entry here.
- Wheels on the Bus by Cocomelon (6.9 million dislikes). The second Cocomelon entry on the list closes the top ten, and at this point the pattern is impossible to miss: half of this list is music videos for adults who angered the internet, and half is music videos for children who simply conquered it.
Why These Numbers Are Frozen Forever
For most of YouTube’s history, the count sat on every watch page in public view, first as a rating bar and then as the familiar thumbs-up and thumbs-down tally, and an unfavorable ratio could sink a trailer before the comments even loaded. Then, on November 10, 2021, YouTube made dislike counts private across the platform, arguing that visible counts fueled targeted dislike attacks and harassment of smaller creators. A month later, on December 13, 2021, the dislike data was removed from the public API entirely, which killed the live counters and the browser tools that relied on them. The numbers above are the final public data, the last honest snapshot before the lights went out.
The dislike button itself still exists, and pressing it still does something: it feeds your personal recommendations and remains visible to creators in their own analytics. What changed is that the public scoreboard is gone. Browser extensions claiming to show current dislikes are extrapolating from samples of their own users, which is an estimate, not news from the source. So when anyone asks what the most disliked video on YouTube is right now, the truthful answer is that nobody outside YouTube knows, and the official history ends with this list.
It is a strange legacy. The dislike count was one of the internet’s bluntest instruments of online public opinion, capable of humbling the biggest platform on earth twice in its own annual showcase, and it was retired at least partly because of how well it worked. Creators were split on the change: smaller channels welcomed the end of dislike mobs, while viewers lost the fastest signal for spotting a scam tutorial or a broken product review. Both things were true at once, which is exactly why the debate never settled.
Former Record Holders and Honorable Mentions
The frozen top ten erased some YouTube videos that older lists of the most disliked, including ours, were built around. Their stories deserve a place here:
- Friday by Rebecca Black, the early era’s defining most hated video, which once held a higher dislike-to-view ratio than nearly anything on the platform before being taken down and re-uploaded.
- Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare reveal trailer, which gamers dislike-bombed in 2016 hard enough to briefly make it the second most disliked video on YouTube.
- Can this video get 1 million dislikes? by PewDiePie, the only entry in history to win its dislikes on purpose, from an audience happy to oblige.
- Wrecking Ball and the wider 2013 Miley Cyrus catalog, fixtures of every most-disliked list of that decade.
- Gangnam Style by Psy, which earned its dislikes the honest way, by being so colossally viewed that it famously forced YouTube to rebuild its view counter.
Every one of these was overtaken in the final years of public counts, mostly by the steady march of children’s content, which is the quiet punchline of the whole list: the internet’s anger is loud, but it is no match for the world’s toddlers watching the same five songs on loop. If public counts ever returned, the smart money says the top of this list would belong almost entirely to nursery rhymes within a year.
What This List Actually Measures
Reading the final standings honestly, the dislike button measured three different things and never told you which one you were looking at. Sometimes it was a genuine verdict, as with both Rewinds and Sadak 2, where millions of people clicked exactly what they wanted to say. Sometimes it was a meme, as with Baby and Friday, where disliking became a participatory joke that outlived the original feeling. And sometimes it was pure volume, the Cocomelon effect, where any video watched billions of times by small children will accumulate millions of every kind of click there is.
That ambiguity is why this frozen list will never really age. It is the last complete index of the internet voting in public, preserved from the era when the data was still live, and no ranking that comes after it will ever be official. The most disliked video on YouTube is YouTube Rewind 2018, it will be forever, and there is something perfectly fitting about the platform holding its own record for eternity.
