YouTube Just Implemented Creators’ Most Requested Feature To Date: Comment Filters

YouTube is making it easier for creators to engage with their comment sections.

The platform has rolled out a new comment search function that lets creators filter the comments their videos receive using several different parameters. In a Help Center post about the update, YouTube said comment filters are creators’ No. 1 most requested feature.

“Comments can be a powerful way for you to continue the conversation from your videos and build a community with your audience,” a member of Team YouTube wrote in the post. “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.”

Now, this newest feature enables creators to sort their comment sections by: whether or not they’ve responded to a comment; whether or not the comment contains a question; whether or not they’re subscribed to the creator’s channel; whether the commenter has a channel membership; and commenters’ subscriber counts. (In re that last one, creators can choose to only see comments from people with at least 1K, 10K, 100K, 1M, or 10M subs.) Creators can combine the different filters to narrow comments by multiple parameters — comments that contain questions from people with more than 10K subs, for instance.

In addition, YouTube has tweaked its search function so searching comments by keyword will bring broader results. The example Team YouTube gives is that searching for “subs” will now also bring results for “subscriber” and “subscribers.”

Team YouTube says the goal of this update is to help creators “find and respond to the comments that are most important to you,” and says it plans to add more filters in the future.