The New Mobile YouTube Comments Are Bad

I don’t know what’s the matter with tech companies. They seem to just love changing what works and has worked for many years into something that just doesn’t.

I remember a Netflix with star ratings. I remember when your TV and video apps weren’t bundled into one annoying folder on your PS4. I remember a Facebook before it become an outdated meme and video wasteland.

YouTube have become notorious for pointless, miscalculated changes like these over the last few years — remember that bizarre YouTube Heroes initiative they tried for a minute that was immediately shot down?

But now YouTube has made its biggest mistake yet. A bigger mistake than not permanently banning Logan Paul when he did that bad thing in the forest, or when they decided to release the 2018 Rewind.

Their biggest mistake is whatever the hell they decided to do to the YouTube comments section on mobile devices.

I discovered this aberration, mid-mid-afternoon coffee-induced toilet visit and I initially thought that they had just removed comments altogether. Rather than featuring prominently below the video you’re watching, they have basically been shoved into a letterbox that’s incredibly easy to miss.

This seems like a major oversight in an age where people want as few steps as possible to get to what they want. You used to have to simply scroll down to see four hundred people repeating the same joke, and what times they were. Now? You need to tap the screen to open comments.

As much as this might not seem like an issue, try browsing comments while in bed, your fat fingers clumsily jabbing the comments letterbox before inevitably selecting one of the obnoxiously large video panels instead.

It’s a change that simply doesn’t make any sense. Yes, the YouTube comments section usually holds as much value to society as a condom to a priest does, but it was our comments section, dammit.

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