The comment section on YouTube can make lesser great videos a lot more interesting, and quality videos to be significantly engaging.
But since popular videos can have tons of comments, creators of the videos can experience difficulties when dealing with those who have commented their videos. As a result many inquiries were left neglected, and fans as well as subscribers left unsatisfied.
This is why YouTube is making it easier for creators to engage with these comments, that may have otherwise flew under the radar. This is by introducing a search function that allows creators to filter comments using different parameters.
This would allow creators to sort their comment section by:
- Response status: has the creator already responded to this comment?
- Contains question: does the comment contain a question?
- Subscriber count: does the commenter have at least 1,000, 10,000, 100,000, one million, or 10 million subscribers?
- Subscriber status: is the commenter publicly subscribed to the creator?
- Member status: is the commenter a member?
Creators can even combine the different filters to narrow comments by multiple parameters - like comments that contain questions from people with more than 10K subsribers, for instance.
According to YouTube on its post, this kind of filter is the most requested feature YouTube gets from creators.
"Over the past two years, we’ve introduced a number of new ways to help you manage conversations within your community, including creator hearts, comment pinning, and a new setting to hold potentially inappropriate comments for review."
The goal for this update, is to help creators "find and respond to the comments that are most important to you".
YouTube has had a search filter in place, but wasn't quite as powerful.
For example, a common frustration the company has dealt with in the past is the limited use of keyword searching.
"Previously, searching by keyword only showed you comments with an exact match (so searching ‘subs’ would only find ‘subs’),” YouTube said. "With this update, you’ll see search results beyond exact match (so now you’ll also see ‘subscriber’ or ‘subscribers’ for that same search)."
Trying to deal with YouTube’s busy comments section is difficult, and is still an ongoing effort. The company is still working on adding more options to the filtering system.
Previous examples of features that were added to comment filtering included creator hearts, which allows YouTubers to like people’s comments, pinning top comment, and giving creators control over comment review.