YouTube hyperlinked comments starting to appear more widely on mobile

4 weeks ago 3

YouTube hyperlinked comments are now starting to appear more widely in video comment sections as a – somewhat spammy – way to help you find more about a specific topic or interest point.

Originally hyperlinked comments were rolled out as a limited experiment on YouTube, but it appears to be more widely available after this small trial run in 2023. Effectively, if someone posts a comment and there are lots of related topics or information on YouTube, you’ll see a blue hyperlink with a small eyeglass icon to indicate that this word or phrase is clickable.

YouTube says that hyperlinked comments are a way to “reduce friction” when attempting to learn about a subject or content. Clicking initiates a search that will take you to a new page while the mini-player remains so that you are still watching. As a commenter, you cannot add or edit a link. However, YouTube originally said in the Creator Insider announcement video that creators can remove links on their video comments if they wish. We have checked YT Studio, but are unable to see an obvious toggle to enable or disable this.

You can see that multiple words or phrases within a YouTube comment can become hyperlinked. It’s not clear what the criteria are before a specific tag phrase is converted. From what we can tell it’s almost completely random with some comment sections devoid of the option, while others like a recent Linus Tech Tips video littered with links related to the video topic – Fallout 76:

The implementation so far looks pretty awful and is eerily reminiscent of some of the scammy Chrome extensions that will laden your browser with ads on phrases and search terms by taking you to storefronts and shady websites. It also clogs up and creates a strange spammy look to what has been a fairly clean experience for a few years.

This change is only visible on YouTube mobile in our testing. While it could be useful to some, it seems like a strange change to implement and one that could be yet another attack vector for the constant problem with YouTube comment spam.