YouTube channels can no longer hide their subscriber counts

As part of its comment spam combating efforts, YouTube is no longer allowing any user to hide their channel’s subscriber count.

“We’ve seen bad actors hide their channels’ subscriber counts to impersonate larger, more prominent channels on YouTube—they pretend to be other creators in comments, then lure people to their impersonating channel page,” a member of Team YouTube wrote in a Community blog post today.

Numerous creators have spoken out in recent months about their comment sections being clogged by a growing deluge of spam. Some of it’s just plain odd and doesn’t seem to have a nefarious purpose beyond being obnoxious, like the weirdly complimentary copy/paste comments Jacksepticeye called attention to in March. But some of it comes from people aiming to trick unsuspecting viewers into falling for things like crypto scams.

The Team YouTube rep added that YouTube recognizes “not all creators using this option are bad actors,” and that some creators simply “prefer to hide their subs count as they try to grow.” But if you’re one of those, you’re out of luck thanks to scammers.

YouTube is also introducing a crackdown auto-moderation setting for comments called “increase strictness.” It’s been testing the feature for a few months, and now is making it available for everyone to enable in YouTube Studio.

Those who turn increase strictness on should see more comments being filtered into the “Held for review” tab, where they must be approved by a video’s creator before they can be added to the video’s comment section.

One last anti-spam rollout: YouTube says it’s actively “reducing the character set available when choosing a channel name, as some characters can be used to impersonate channels.”

For example, it says, “channels won’t be able to update their name to something like ‘¥ouⓉube✅’ with this change.”

YouTube says it’ll keep an eye on creator feedback about these features, and says its efforts to eradicate spam “in comments and beyond” are ongoing.