YouTube’s fight against ad blockers is well-documented. This isn’t unexpected given that ads generate significant revenue for the company. Unsurprisingly, these restrictions are also designed to encourage users to pay for the ad-free experience with Premium.
While YouTube is transparent about some of these measures, the platform continues to develop new methods to deter the use of ad blocking tools. Several reports on the YouTube subreddit over the weekend mention that comments are turned off on every video (via PiunikaWeb).
The issue appears to occur on the web/desktop version of YouTube, with users reportedly seeing it on Brave Browser, Microsoft Edge, and Google Chrome, among others. We were unable to find reports of this glitch affecting the YouTube mobile apps. Meanwhile, I was unable to reproduce the bug on the desktop version of YouTube, suggesting it has either been fixed or is only affecting some users.
There are a few theories on fixes and potential causes
Thankfully, this issue isn’t as major as some of the other YouTube bugs we’ve covered in the past. As one user notes, comments appear to return after refreshing the page. This is a simple enough fix, but one that means users will have to tap refresh every time comments appear to be turned off, without knowing whether the uploader has actually disabled comments or if it’s a bug.
Another user suggests this glitch may be related to ad blockers, saying that turning off their ad blocker returned the comments in subsequent videos. We weren’t able to independently verify this claim, though this wouldn’t be beyond the realm of possibility given what we’ve seen from the platform in the past.
One user has also found that this glitch removes the video description, seeing “No description has been added to this video” in its place. It’s unclear whether this can be fixed using the remedies suggested by other affected users, including the ones we touched on above.
In the meantime, the content unavailability error we discussed recently still hasn’t been fixed as of this writing. This bug appears to impact both free accounts and ones with a Premium subscription.
Similar to the disappearing comments bug, users can get the content to play after refreshing the video. However, it’s not ideal to refresh a video when you want to watch something or switch between multiple videos on your feed. This bug also appears to be limited to the web version of YouTube.
Are you seeing either of these bugs on YouTube?
