Which social platform do you think has the best comments? And no, not the content of the comments per se, but the way they’re actually laid out. Reddit takes the crown for me, and I’m sure it does for a lot of you too.
The threaded nature of Reddit’s comments and subsequent replies make following-through conversations a seamless experience, even on small-screen devices like smartphones.
Bluesky implements threaded comments to an extent, and so does Meta’s Threads (aha). Now, YouTube is following suit, and it is actually ‘properly’ threading replies.
The streaming giant first experimented with threaded comments/replies back in February this year. In its early state, the feature wasn’t really all that ‘complete.’ It only connected the commenter’s profile picture with the ‘X replies’ button, with no subsequent threading.
Additionally, I, similar to many others, did not actually get to play around with the redesigned section. This was because the feature only made it to a very limited number of users.
This time around, YouTube’s threaded comments are, well, actually threaded, and they’re also available to a much wider userbase.
Try it out now
The feature is still an experimental one, and limited to Premium users. However, this time, it seems to be available to all Premium users.
The implementation has significantly improved too. It finally threads the main comment to subsequent replies, and those replies to their subsequent responses, essentially creating a visual flow to help you navigate through all the “First” comments and get to the insightful ones. It’s worth noting that Reddit allows users to collapse entire comment chains by tapping or clicking on its attached thread. YouTube’s implementation still doesn’t offer this functionality, though it may arrive once comment threading leaves its current experimental phase.
To try out comment threading, head to www.youtube.com/new and turn on the experiment. Alternatively, you can enable the experiment on your smartphone by navigating to your profile → Your premium benefits → Try experimental new features → Comment Threading.
The experiment will stay live until August 14th.
