Google-owned YouTube has announced a new comment moderation setting, "Pause", allowing creators and moderators to prevent viewers from creating new comments while keeping existing comments on videos. "We’re rolling out a new, optional comment moderation setting called Pause that allows you, as creators, to prevent the creation of new comments at the video level while preserving comments that were already published," YouTube said in a blogpost on Thursday.
Users can find the Pause option in the video-level comment settings in the upper right-hand corner of the comments panel on either the watch page in the app or in YouTube Studio. When Pause is enabled, viewers can notice under the video that you've paused all comments as well as previously published comments.
YouTube has been experimenting with the Pause feature since October. The company mentioned that creators and moderators in the experiment group have said they used the Pause feature to gain more flexibility over how they manage their comments.
Before the Pause feature, creators had only two options to prevent new comments from being posted on their content -- to hold comments for review before publishing them or to disable comments from your channels entirely. Meanwhile, in an effort to lure users to subscribe to its paid Premium service, YouTube has rolled out a collection of mini-games -- called "Playables", offering more than 30 mini-games that can be played instantly, without the need for any downloads. The games can be played on Android, iOS and desktop.