YouTube Launches Whale Feature To Prevent New Comments From Appearing

JAKARTA - YouTube announced the launch of a new comment moderation setting, Paue, which allows content creators and moderators to prevent viewers from adding new comments but still maintains comments already in the video.

"This feature has been tested for some time and we are very happy to be able to launch it to everyone based on the positive input we received while testing it," YouTube wrote in its announcement on Friday, December 8.

Before this feature launches, if you want to prevent people from being able to provide new comments, you only have 2 options - to hold back comments to be reviewed before publishing or disabling comments from your channel completely.

Now, you'll see an option to select Pau in a video comment suit in the form of a gear icon in the upper right corner of the comments panel, either on the YouTube app or on YouTube Studio on desktop and mobile.

If you decide to pause your comments, your viewers can still see all the comments they have they can't add new comments," the announcement concluded.

During the trial period, content creators and moderators in experimental groups said they were using Pau for:

Getting more flexibility in how they manage comments, and can also control the comments column if there are inappropriate comments, without having to turn off the comments column completely.