I have ranted quite a lot about widescreen video abuse in the past. The most common instance of this is the abuse people who own a 16:9 TV will do when watching a 4:3 broadcast or video (in other words, stretching the image, making everything look squeezed), and outright refuse to even acknowledge the fact that the image looks distorted.
Some time ago YouTube started supporting widescreen 16:9 videos. This has generated a curious widescreen botching phenomenon of its own.
More precisely, people will take their regular 4:3 videos, stretch them to 16:9 (similarly to how they would stretch the image with a 16:9 TV as above), making the image look squeezed and distorted, and then send that to YouTube instead of the original 4:3 video.
This is especially jarring when the original video material was already 16:9, but with empty space at the top and bottom, making it a 4:3 video, and then instead of cropping the empty space out (thus leaving the visible 16:9 video intact), they will nevertheless still stretch it horizontally to fit the 16:9 aspect ratio.
The end result is a video which, if the proper cropping had been used, would be properly shown at YouTube in widescreen without any distortions, but instead what is sent to YouTube is a horizontally stretched video with black bars at the top and bottom.
Why are people doing this? Are they completely blind? Are their brains completely unable to see that the image is distorted and has black bars even though it's supposed to be 16:9 in the first place? Can't they figure out that they did something wrong, and do it properly?
YouTube supporting widescreen videos has actually become a disservice because of all these idiots uploading distorted videos, making them look really jarring and irritating. As said, it reaches a whole new level of wall banger when the original video material was 16:9 to begin with and they still manage to botch it.