The greatest Internet controversies are the ones with the greatest audience, and therefore the most mainstream.
So here are the top ten greatest Internet controversies of 2018:
1. The BetterHelp Scam Scandal.
2. Patreon banning Sargon of Akkad in violation of its own terms of service, and imploding in the process.
For all the Sargon haters, this means that Sargon of Akkad killed something not by infiltrating and misusing and abusing it (as commonly attributed to him), but by getting kicked off of it and being unable to use it for his own purposes.
Patreon collapsed under the sheer weight of the irony of that one, as a mass exodus of the platform was initiated. Nobody wants to support a platform that will ban you from it for off-site happenings, especially not a payment processor.
3. #ChangeTheChannel. Channel Awesome (formerly That Guy With The Glasses) is no stranger to controversy, but this one nearly tanked the site. With stories of sordid states of affairs coming from both former fans and creators, nearly everyone who worked at Channel Awesome left the site. A small aside for the JewWario controversy, which shot down a creator's reputation posthumously, and shot down those of others who now only wish it happened posthumously.
4. #FreeMumkey. When Mumkey Jones, and edgy YouTuber, got banned solely for being a creator of Eliot Rodger related content (he severely criticized and satirized Eliot), it showed to at least hundreds of thousands that YouTube simply doesn't care about content creators anymore. Things have gotten a little better now that Mumkey has his own site, but his channel is still removed, and this all seems to be a prelude to much worse in the future.
5. YouTube Rewind 2018. To quote Emperor Lemon:
2017 was the year that YouTube fell completely out of touch with their users.
2018 was the year everyone realized it.
6. Zoosadism. 'Nuff said.
7. #WSJKillsKids. When Ethan Ralph did a stream on the family history of reporter for the Wall Street Journal, many things happened. Ethan Ralph got deleted from YouTube, his Google account shut down, and the money for a charity stream he did refunded. This caused a great backlash for the Wall Street Journal.
8. Mundane Matt undoing his own career on live stream.
9. The Continuing Downward Spiral of David Sherrat, Kraut and Tea, and the "Skeptics".
10. The Jonathan "Jessica" Yaniv Saga. Johnny is a walking, talking stereotype of transgender people, down to even the gross sexual perversion (pedophilia), yet he has accrued enough pull to basically shut down criticism of himself at a whim. But the Streisand Effect comes through, as always, and now he's in big trouble.