The comments section on YouTube has long been considered a place lacking in moral fiber. YouTube is making a series of improvements to try and make its community more welcoming and inclusive, one of which is reminding people to reflect before posting potentially offensive comments.

YouTube Adds New Respect Reminder

As announced on the YouTube blog, the video website is launching a new feature that will warn users when their comment may be offensive to others.

The reminder might pop up before posting a comment that has been automatically detected to potentially be offensive.

youtube comment reminder

"Keep comments respectful," reads the notice. "If you're not sure whether your comment is appropriate, review our Community Guidelines."

The primary action on the reminder is to edit the comment, or you can choose to post it anyway as is.

YouTube hopes that this reminder will make users pause and reconsider their comment, in a hope to lead to better and more understanding discussions.

The system learns what a potentially offensive comments is based on what other users have reported. YouTube notes that the system is continuously learning and may not always get it right, which is why the notification contains a link to leave feedback.

This new feature is simply a reminder. It doesn't mean that your comment won't be removed later for violating the Community Guidelines, nor does it stop the comment being removed by the channel owner.

Comments Can Be Automatically Hidden From Creators

According to YouTube, creators have said that they want better protection from seeing hurtful comments. As such, YouTube is testing a new filter in YouTube Studio.

This filter allows creators to hide inappropriate and hurtful comments that have been automatically held for review. Though creators can still see these comments if they choose, they now won't be immediately confronted with them.

YouTube also says that it is streamlining the comment moderation tools to make the process easier, though hasn't elaborated further on what the changes are.

The company also continues to make improvement to its technology that removes hateful comments by taking into account the topic of the video. Since early 2019, the platform has increased the number of daily hate speech comment removals by 46 times. In the last quarter, 54,000 channels were terminated for hate speech.

Watch YouTube Videos Outside of YouTube

It's great that YouTube is cleaning up its comments section, but it still has a long way to go. If you've had enough of YouTube comments, be sure to check out our guide on how to watch YouTube videos without even visiting the site.