Comments YouTube

What are comments on YouTube?

Comments on YouTube are text replies viewers leave under a video, a Short or a community post. They are a public engagement signal and a moderation surface: the channel owner decides whether comments are on, paused or off, who may write them, and which ones are held for review.

Why comments matter for a channel

Comments are one of the interaction signals that feed engagement rate, alongside likes and shares, so a busy comment section is usually read as a sign that the video landed. They are also the cheapest feedback a creator gets: recurring questions become the next video, and recurring complaints show where the edit or the title over-promised.

The reply itself does work too. Hearting, pinning or replying to a comment may notify the commenter, depending on their notification settings, while likes and dislikes on comments stay anonymous. A pinned comment sits at the top of the watch page, which makes it useful for a correction, a link or a question that drives more replies. Pinning a different comment unpins the previous one. More tactics: how to get more engagement on YouTube.

How to change comment settings for a video

Comment settings live in YouTube Studio, per video:

1. Sign in to YouTube Studio.

2. From the left menu, select Content.

3. Click a video's thumbnail.

4. Scroll and click Show more.

5. Under “Comments and ratings”, choose your settings, then click Save.

Comments can be On, Paused or Off. Pause keeps the existing comments but stops new ones; Off hides existing comments from the watch page and from Studio until you turn them back on, at which point they reappear. With comments on, the Comment moderation dropdown offers 4 options: None (hold nothing), Basic (hold potentially inappropriate comments), Strict (hold a broader range) and Hold all. The same section sets Sort by to Top or Newest for the watch page.

You can also restrict who writes at all: set Who can comment to Subscribers and members and pick a minimum subscription time of any duration, 1 hour, 1 day or 1 week. That restriction is per video, not channel-wide.

Some videos cannot have comment settings changed: content whose audience is set as made for kids has comments turned off, private videos have no comments, and supervised accounts cannot change these settings. Posts have their own comment settings — see community posts.

Channel-level moderation

4 settings apply across every video and the channel homepage rather than to one upload:

• Hidden users — their comments stop showing anywhere on the channel and do not appear in Studio. Hidden users also cannot create clips of your videos and live streams.

• Approved users — their comments publish automatically and skip filtering for blocked words, blocked links and potentially inappropriate content.

• Blocked words — comments containing or closely matching your list may be held; matching live chat messages are blocked.

• Blocked comments with links — comments containing URLs are held, except from you, your moderators and approved users.

Held comments are kept in YouTube Studio for up to 60 days, are not publicly visible unless you approve them, and can be reviewed in over 100 languages on the Comments page under the “Held” tab. Basic and Strict moderation use AI to decide what to hold, so they will not always get it right — you can ignore, remove or approve anything they catch. Blocked words, hidden users and link blocking cannot be limited to a single video.