There are five reasons you see YouTube comments disabled on a video, and only one of them is a punishment. The creator switched them off themselves, either on that video or as a channel default. The video or the whole channel is set as made for kids, which forces comments off with no override anywhere. YouTube applied an age restriction or a minor safety action and turned the section off for you. Restricted Mode is switched on in the browser, on the device or across the network being used. Or nothing is wrong with the video at all and the block sits on the viewer’s side. If this is your own channel and you are certain you never touched a comment setting, check the audience setting first. That is the one that catches almost everybody.
Table of Contents
Open YouTube Studio and find out which state your video is actually in
Go to studio.youtube.com, open Content, and click the video. Scroll down its details page and open Show more. The controls live in a block called Comments and ratings, and you will find one of three positions there. On allows comments, with a moderation level attached to it. Pause keeps every existing comment visible while quietly blocking new ones. Off removes the section entirely.
Before you touch any of that, look further up the same page at Audience. If the video is marked as made for kids, stop reading the comment settings. They have already been overruled.
The made for kids setting switches comments off and offers you no say in it
This is the cause I run into most, and the people it hits are usually the ones who never went looking for a comment control in their life. The audience declaration exists because of the American children’s privacy law, COPPA. When a video carries it, YouTube strips out everything that could collect data from a child or put them in front of strangers. Comments are the loudest casualty. They are nowhere near the only one.
- The notification bell does nothing for that video
- Save to playlist and Save to Watch later both disappear
- Cards and end screens stop appearing, and so does the channel watermark
- Channel memberships, Super Chat, Super Stickers and the donate button are all removed
- Merchandise and ticketing shelves vanish
- Autoplay on the home page and Miniplayer playback stop working
- Personalised advertising is switched off, which normally means less revenue per view
Set the whole channel that way and you lose two more things at channel level, posts and Ask Studio.
Now, here is where you were expecting me to say the fix is easy. Open Advanced settings, flip the audience over to not made for kids, comments come back, everybody goes home happy. That is the fix, and I will show you where it lives in a second. It is also a legal declaration about your own content, and that part is not a joke. The Federal Trade Commission enforces COPPA against individual creators, not only against platforms. If your video genuinely targets children, leave the setting alone and accept that the comment section is gone. If it was applied by accident, because you set a channel default two years ago and forgot, then correct it with a clear conscience.
Where the audience setting actually lives
For the channel: studio.youtube.com, then Settings, then Channel, then the Advanced settings tab. Under Audience you get three options. One marks the entire channel as made for kids. One marks it as not made for kids. The third lets you decide video by video, and it is the one most creators should be using.
For a single video: open it from Content and change Audience on the details page. During an upload the same control sits on the Basic info tab.
A channel level setting overrides whatever you intended per video. That is precisely why so many creators find comments missing from a video they were sure they had marked correctly.
Three of your own settings look identical to off from the outside
Assume your audience setting is fine and the comment control says On. The section can still look dead, and here is what does it.
- Hold all comments for review. Every comment goes into a queue and nobody but you can see any of it
- Basic or Strict moderation. Strict holds a much wider range of comments than people expect, and on a channel with any kind of edgy vocabulary it can swallow nearly everything
- Subscribers and members only. You can also add a minimum subscription time, so brand new subscribers are silently excluded
- Blocked words. A long list built years ago carries on filtering comments you would happily have published
- Blocked comments with links. Anything containing a URL gets held, and a surprising number of ordinary comments do
- Hidden users. A blocked commenter keeps typing away and sees their own words on screen, while nobody else ever does
Held comments sit under Comments in the left menu of Studio, in the Held for review tab. Go and look before you accuse YouTube of anything.
Sometimes YouTube switches comments off and never asks your opinion
Age restriction is the common one. An age restricted video is visible only to signed in viewers over eighteen, cannot be embedded on most other websites, and loses a large slice of advertiser demand. Studio will tell you if a restriction has been applied, and there is an appeal if you believe the call was wrong.
Minor safety is the harsher one. YouTube disables comments on videos featuring children in certain contexts whether or not the channel did anything at all wrong, because that kind of comment section attracts people it should not. No setting reverses it. The decision is about the footage.
Then there is one that almost nobody guesses. Automatically generated Art Tracks on YouTube Music have comments switched off when the primary artist has no Official Artist Channel. If you are a musician staring at silent comment sections on an album you distributed rather than uploaded, that is your answer.
If the video is fine, the block may be sitting on the viewer’s side
- Restricted Mode. YouTube states it plainly: when Restricted Mode is on you cannot view comments on the videos you watch. It works at browser and device level, so switching it off on a laptop does nothing for a phone. Libraries, schools, offices and other public institutions frequently have it locked on by a network administrator, and a parent can lock it through Family Link.
- A supervised account. Children using a supervised YouTube experience cannot post comments, and comment visibility is limited for them.
- Being signed out. Signed out viewers can read comments but can never post one, and age restricted videos will not load for them at all.
- A stale app. An out of date app, a corrupted cache or a weak connection produces a comment section that spins forever and then shows nothing. Force close it, clear the cache, update, then try a browser to compare.
Turning comments back on without breaking anything else
| What you are seeing | Most likely cause | Where to fix it |
|---|---|---|
| No comments on any video on the channel | Channel audience set as made for kids | Settings, Channel, Advanced settings, Audience |
| Missing on one video only | Video level audience, or that video’s own comment setting | Content, the video, Audience then Comments and ratings |
| Section is there but permanently empty | Hold all, Strict moderation or a blocked word | Comments, Held for review |
| You can see comments and your viewers cannot | Restricted Mode on their device or network | Their account menu, Restricted Mode |
| Missing on a video featuring a child | Minor safety action taken by YouTube | Nothing to change, the footage decides |
| Missing on an album track you never uploaded | Art Track with no Official Artist Channel | Claim your Official Artist Channel |
Two worries come up every time, and both can be put down. Turning comments back on has no effect whatsoever on monetisation. Moving a video out of made for kids restores personalised advertising, which usually raises what you earn per view, so if that setting was wrong you are fixing a revenue problem in the same click.
Then the reach question. Everybody tells you that switching comments off destroys your reach, and you were fully expecting me to nod along. I would rather be accurate. YouTube does not run a dial that punishes quiet videos. What comments really do is give people a reason to stay on the page longer and a reason to come back days later, which is what the system actually reads. Switch comments off and you lose the behaviour, so you lose the benefit that followed from it. The effect on reach is genuine. The mechanism behind it is simply less magical than the advice suggests.
Once the section is open again you meet the awkward part, which is that people join conversations far more readily than they start them. Answering the first few comments yourself works well. Some creators seed an opening thread deliberately, which is what our YouTube comments service exists for, although a pinned question written by you does much the same job for nothing.
Work through it in order. Audience setting, then your own comment setting, then the held for review queue, then Restricted Mode on whichever device you are testing with, and only after all four should you start suspecting YouTube of acting against you. Most of the time it turns out to be a box somebody ticked eighteen months ago and forgot.
