YouTube has added a new feature to how “creators” can interact with comments. After each comment, there is a three-dot menu, and when I click on those three dots now, I get the menu that you see above. The new feature in the menu is the second one: “Find similar comments.”
I don’t know when this feature was introduced, but I just noticed it this week. Of course, I don’t know exactly how the feature works or what it looks for when it finds similar comments. It probably just looks for comments with similar keywords. It might be more sophisticated than that if it uses AI tools and can detect tone and meaning. But I doubt it. It’s probably just based on a simple word search.
While testing it, it seems to work fine. And the extent and range of its search depends on the where you are viewing the original comment. If I access ALL comments through the Community section, it searches for similar comments across all videos on the entire channel. And it groups them. But if I look at the comments for just one video, then using this feature searches through only the comments left on that same video.
I can see this feature being very useful for someone with a large following on a popular YouTube channel. There is no way, for example, that a YouTuber can personally read or respond to comments if there are thousands or even hundreds of comments on each video. I think those YouTubers just eventually give up. They probably don’t even look at the comments other than the occasional brief scan. BUT if they had something specific they wanted to look into, they could use this “Find similar comments” button to deal with a bunch of comments that are all asking the same question or offering the same information or opinion.
For me, it’s probably just a fun tool that I will play around with at first and then forget about. I can think of all kinds of tools I’d like to have related to YouTube comments. The one feature I’ve always wished for is the ability to see ALL the comments left by a single person. That would help me out a great deal. It would help me keep people straight in my head and remember who is who. It would be a bit like the ability to go back in time and review your WhatsApp history with a friend. You can go back and scan through all your messages and see what you’ve been talking about. And with comments, I’ve love to be able to click on a comment and then see ALL the comments left by that person in the past and see my replies. Then I get a sense of our history and I can refresh my memory about this person, who they are, and what we’ve been talking about. As it is now, especially with the confusion surrounding YouTube names, it’s hard to keep track of things like that.