YouTube gets pinned comments, cute ‘creator hearts’

If you were to give the internet an enema, you’d probably stick the hose in YouTube’s comments section. Between the racism, sexism and trolls, it can be a rather toxic place. But Google is continuing its push to gussy up the service, introducing pinned comments and several other features in the process.

YouTube uploaders can now pin comments on videos, allowing you to “highlight great engagement from your fans or share information with your audience”, the company wrote on its Creator blog.

That’s not the only way you can show love to your favourite comments, as the team has implemented the ability for uploaders to “heart” desired comments as well.

YouTube has also implemented a few new measures to fight abuse in the comments section

Of course, these new features don’t exactly tackle the issue of dodgy comments, so YouTube is giving users the ability to hold “potentially inappropriate comments” for review.

The new feature, which will launch as a limited beta at first, uses algorithms to identify potentially dodgy remarks.

“We recognise that the algorithms will not always be accurate: the beta feature may hold some comments you deem fine for approval, or may not catch comments you’d like to hold and remove,” the team clarified.

This new feature joins two previously announced measures to combat abuse, in the form of a word/phrase blacklist and the ability to choose moderators.