YouTube released a new comment moderation feature that provides creators with better control over comments on their videos. The update introduces the option to pause comments, which allows YouTubers to temporarily stop new comments while preserving old ones.
The Pause feature
Until now, creators only had two options when moderating comments. They can either hold comments for manual review before publishing or disable all of them altogether. With the new Pause feature, they can now take a break from moderating the comments without entirely turning it off.
The moderation settings have also been updated, in addition to the new update, replacing complex options with user-friendly choices: On, Pause or Off.
Enabling comments opens up additional moderation levels:
- None — Completely unmoderated
- Basic — Holds potentially inappropriate comments for review
- Strict — Holds a broader range of comments for review
- Hold All — Holds all comments for review
To access the new Pause option, creators can go to the video-level comment settings on the watch page within the YouTube app or in YouTube Studio.
YouTube has been testing the Pause feature since October. Experiment groups have reported positive results, indicating that they aren’t experiencing difficulties when monitoring comments.
More moderation for creators
Giving creators more moderation options is always a good thing. If creators feel that they want to temporarily pause comments on a video, they should have the ability to. For instance, if a creator’s videos are suddenly being bombarded with threats from viewers intending to bully them, they can now stop the comments without silencing their community’s previous comments. Additionally, if a creator gets tired of receiving comments on old videos, they can pause comments but still keep up the old ones.
Though, we will likely see creators or businesses involved in controversies use it in various ways as well, like pausing comments, deleting the negative ones, and keeping only the positive ones. Ultimately, it makes controlling the narrative of your comment section much easier, which can be both a good thing and a bad thing. But we’ll just have to wait and see how the feature is used.