Blog · How-to
Six places YouTube comments hide: the Held filter, Most relevant sort, follow-ups in answered threads, the bell, Shorts and posts, old videos. My 104k channel.
By Rahul Wagh·· 19 min read
If a viewer says "I commented and you never answered" and you are sure you answered everything, you are both right. YouTube Studio does not lose comments. It files some of them where you do not look: behind the Held filter (and a second "show hidden" click inside it), below the fold of the Most relevant sort, inside threads you already answered, in a notification bell that stops being useful somewhere above 50 comments a week, under Shorts and community posts that live in a different filter, and on videos you published three years ago and stopped thinking about.
I run a 104,000-subscriber tutorial channel with a full-time job, and I answer every comment. On 11 October 2026 I went through my own Studio, my own tool's ledger, and a read-only scan of 33 other channels to see exactly where comments slip past a creator who is trying. Below is each hiding place, what it looked like on a real channel, what YouTube's API can and cannot see there, and the weekly routine that closes the gap. It is long because the problem has six parts and a short answer would be wrong for at least four of them.
From my channel on 11 October 2026, plus the 33-channel scan from 6 October:
Before the hiding places, the scale. On 6 October I ran a read-only scan, using only public data and the official API, of 33 established creator channels in the United States: teaching channels, course sellers, people who have been on the platform for years and clearly care about their audience. The scan read the newest comments on each channel's recent videos and counted how many had no reply from the channel itself.
| Channel size | Channels | Comments read | No reply from channel | Share |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Under 50,000 subscribers | 4 | 825 | 677 | 82% |
| 50,000 to 200,000 | 15 | 3,848 | 2,671 | 69% |
| 200,000 to 1,000,000 | 14 | 7,314 | 5,673 | 78% |
| All 33 | 33 | 11,987 | 9,021 | 75% |
Three of every four recent comments on those channels never got an answer. The spread was wide: one channel had answered none of its last 415 comments; the most attentive had answered 84 percent of its last 754. Not one of the 33 was under 10 percent unanswered. These are not lazy creators. Several of them pin a comment asking people to "drop your questions below". The questions are there. The creators are not seeing them, or are seeing them in a shape that makes answering feel impossible.
I do not think that is a motivation problem. I think it is a user interface problem, and the rest of this post is the user interface.
Studio holds comments it thinks are "potentially inappropriate" (the default setting), and, if you tick the option, comments with links or hashtags. Held comments are invisible to viewers and to you unless you open the Held view. Here is the catch: when you open it, the held comments are still not shown. You get a line that says "Comments that may be offensive have been hidden" and a button. Click it and a dialog asks again.
Behind those two clicks on my channel was exactly one comment from the last month: a viewer swearing at me under Part 2 of the AWS Organizations series because the free tier does not apply to organisation accounts. The language was ugly. The point was fair, and I would rather know. I left it held. The same question arrived from another viewer this week, politely, and that one is in my inbox to answer.
If a real question gets caught by the same filter, it waits there until you go looking, and nothing tells you to. The classifier is tuned for safety, not for your inbox. It catches swearing reliably. I have not measured what else it catches, but a DevOps channel, where comments contain words like "kill" (as in kill the process) and "attack" (as in attack surface), probably trips it more often than a cooking channel does.
In Studio, go to Settings, then Community, then Defaults. Two choices matter:
There is a third box, "Hold comments with hashtags and URLs". I found on 3 October 2026 that it had been unticked on my channel for seven years, which is why link spam was reaching my viewers directly, and why the "you look like Sundar Pichai" lookalike scams I wrote about in spam, scams and lookalike comments could post a link under my videos within minutes. I ticked it. Check yours today.
Each held row has four actions: Approve (publish it), Remove (delete it from your channel), Report (send it to YouTube as a policy violation), and Hide user from channel (every future comment from that account is held automatically). I use Approve for real questions with rough language, Remove for abuse with no question in it, and Hide user for repeat offenders. I almost never use Report; it is for threats and scams, not rudeness.
This matters if you have ever run a "find my unanswered comments" tool, including mine. The public YouTube Data API only returns published comments. A held comment, or one marked as likely spam, is not visible to anyone reading your channel with an API key. Even when the channel owner signs in and the tool reads with permission, held comments only appear if the tool asks for them explicitly with a moderation status filter, and acting on them (approving, removing) costs 50 API units each, the same as posting a reply. The free unanswered comments checker cannot see them at all, by design, and I would be suspicious of any public tool that claims to. The Held view in Studio is the only complete list.
Because of how the default view sorts. Studio opens on Most relevant, which favours comments with likes and replies, which by definition are not the ones waiting for you. The comment below was under my AWS EC2 full course, a long video with a long comment section, and it sat there for 13 hours while I answered newer ones elsewhere.
The filter that fixes this is one click: the Published dropdown, then Response status, then Unresponded. Combine it with View: Newest and you have the closest thing Studio offers to an inbox. The filter state is in the page URL, so once you have set it, bookmark the address and it opens the same way every time, on the phone too.
What this view still cannot do: it is one list for the whole channel, which is good, but it has no sense of priority. A "thank you" and a "step 4 fails with a 403 and I have a demo tomorrow" sit next to each other with the same weight. It does not know which video the viewer is on, beyond the thumbnail. And it does not remember what you have seen; close the tab and come back, and you re-read from the top.
Note the new row under the comment: "Replies made with AI". Studio now drafts two short thank-you replies for you, in a generic voice. They are fine for "great video" and useless for "step 4 fails with a 403", which is most of what I get on a tutorial channel. I wrote up the difference, with examples from my channel, in ReplyDial vs YouTube Studio's reply suggestions. The short version: the suggestions save you typing a sentence you could type in five seconds, and do not help with the comment that needs three minutes.
I ran our free unanswered comments checker on my own channel the same morning. It read the 157 newest comments on my last 20 videos and reported 0 without a reply from me.
And yet Studio showed one unanswered comment at the same time. Two reasons, both worth knowing, because they apply to every public comment tool, not just mine.
First, caching. The checker stores a result for 24 hours to save API quota (each check costs about 22 units of the 10,000 a project gets per day; I explained that budget in YouTube API quota for creators). A comment that arrived after the last check is not in the result until the cache expires.
Second, windows. The checker reads the newest 100 top-level comments per video, on the 20 newest videos. That is 2,000 comments at most, and on my channel it was 157, because most of my recent uploads have fewer than 100 comments each. But look at the per-video rows in the screenshot: my Google Cloud Shared VPC video had 9 recent comments; an older video with 400 comments would show only its newest 100. A comment at position 101 is outside the window. Public tools work on windows and caches because they have to. Your Studio does not. Use the checker to size a backlog and to look at channels that are not yours; use the Unresponded filter to clear today's.
This table took me a week of building to learn, and it is the single most useful thing in this post if you are choosing tools.
| Can it see... | Studio (you, signed in) | A tool you connected with Google sign-in | A public tool with an API key |
|---|---|---|---|
| Published comments on videos | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Published comments on Shorts | Yes (Content type filter) | Yes, same as videos | Yes, same as videos |
| Comments on community posts | Yes (Viewer posts tab) | No, not in the API | No, not in the API |
| Held for review | Yes (Held view, two clicks) | Only if it asks with a moderation filter | No |
| Likely spam | Yes | Only if it asks with a moderation filter | No |
| Replies under your reply (follow-ups) | Yes, inside the thread | Yes, if it reads replies, not just threads | Yes, if it reads replies |
| Which comments you have answered | Yes (Response status) | Yes, by checking the author of each reply | Yes, same way |
| Comments older than the newest 100 per video | Yes | Yes, with more pages (1 unit per page) | Depends on the tool's window |
Two cells deserve a second look. "Comments on community posts: No" means that if your audience talks under your posts, no tool built on the official API will ever show you those, and any tool that claims to is reading Studio in a way YouTube's terms do not allow. And "Follow-ups: yes, if it reads replies" is the difference between a tool that lists comment threads and one that reads what is inside them. The first version of ReplyDial only did the former. That mistake has its own section below.
This one bit me in the first week of October. A viewer asked a question under a new video, I answered, and a second viewer replied inside that thread with a question of their own. Every "unanswered" view I had, including the first version of my own tool, considered that thread handled, because I had replied once. The second question sat there until I happened to open the thread.
Nothing in Studio flags "a viewer replied after you". The Unresponded filter works on whether you have responded in the thread at all, and you have. The bell shows the reply if notifications are on, mixed into everything else. You find it by opening the thread.
I changed ReplyDial on 6 October so that a thread comes back into the inbox when a viewer's reply arrives after mine and reads like a question. The rule is deliberately plain: the newest reply is by someone other than the channel, it came after my last reply, and it contains a question mark or starts with a question word (how, why, what, where, which, when, can, does, is, should). "Thank you, that worked" does not bring the thread back; "thanks, but what about Terraform 1.9?" does. The entry for 6 October in the changelog has the details, and the thread view shows the whole conversation with my replies marked "You" so I can answer the latest message without re-reading the video.
In Studio, the only reliable habit is to sort by Newest and scan replies, not just top-level comments, which means opening threads. On a tutorial channel I estimate one in eight of my answered threads gets a follow-up within a week. If you answer 50 comments a week, that is six conversations a week that look finished and are not.
The bell shows a stream of recent activity across comments, likes, mentions and subscriptions. At 10 comments a week it is a to-do list. At 200 a week it is a river. There is no "mark as done", no filter for questions, and on the phone it truncates long comments to one line so a question and a compliment look identical until you tap.
I stopped treating it as a list and have missed fewer comments since, because I replaced "did I see a notification" with "is the Unresponded view empty". That is a different question. The first depends on YouTube deciding to show you something and you happening to look. The second is a state you can check and make true.
A few things the bell will never do, so you stop expecting them: it will not tell you that a comment was held. It will not tell you that a thread you answered has a new reply from a third person unless you are mentioned. It will not group comments by video. And it does not exist for the past: there is no way to scroll the bell back to a comment from March.
The Studio Community page has a Content type filter with three values: Videos, Shorts, and posts. By default all three are ticked, which is correct, but the moment you or someone on your team narrows it (to answer Shorts in a batch, say) and forgets, the other two vanish from the Unresponded view and stay vanished until the filter is reset. Studio remembers the filter between visits, so a narrowed filter is easy to carry for days without noticing.
Shorts comments behave like video comments everywhere else: same API, same held rules, same Unresponded filter. The difference is volume and tone. Shorts attract more one-word comments and more spam, so the "potentially inappropriate" classifier holds proportionally more of them, which sends you back to the Held section above.
Community posts are different in kind. Their comments live under the Viewer posts tab and, as the table above says, they are not in the YouTube Data API. No connected tool, including mine, can list them, draft replies to them or count them. If a big part of your conversation happens under posts, Studio is your only inbox for that part, and your routine has to include the Viewer posts tab explicitly.
My channel has a back catalogue of a few hundred tutorials. Most of the comments I get in a week are not on this week's upload; they are on a Terraform video from 2022 or an AWS IAM video from 2021 that Google keeps sending people to. I wrote about what that did to the channel in nearly seven years on YouTube with a full-time job.
Here is what that looks like in practice. These are the replies I posted through ReplyDial in the two weeks to 8 October 2026, from the tool's own ledger:
| Day | Drafts made | Replies posted |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-10-08 | 3 | 3 |
| 2026-10-07 | 5 | 4 |
| 2026-10-06 | 5 | 3 |
| 2026-10-04 | 5 | 5 |
| 2026-10-02 | 4 | 4 |
| 2026-10-01 | 1 | 0 |
| 2026-09-30 | 4 | 4 |
| 2026-09-29 | 1 | 1 |
| 2026-09-28 | 40 | 34 |
| 2026-09-27 | 23 | 22 |
The 27th and 28th of September were the days I first ran the whole-channel inbox and cleared a backlog that had been building on old videos: 56 replies in two days, almost all of them on videos more than a year old. Since then it has been three to five a day, which is the steady state of a 104k channel with a deep back catalogue. Not one of those backlog comments had produced a notification I acted on. They were all visible in Studio the whole time, under Most relevant, below comments from 2023 with more likes.
If you only ever open the comments of your latest upload, which is what the Studio dashboard nudges you towards, you are answering the smallest slice of your audience. The whole-channel Unresponded view, sorted by Newest, is the fix inside Studio. A whole-channel inbox that remembers what you have handled is the fix I built.
This is what I actually do. It takes about 20 to 30 minutes a day on the phone, which comes to roughly 2.5 hours a week for about 200 comments. I described the workflow itself in how I answer 200 comments a week; this is the schedule.
| When | Where | What | Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| Every day | Unresponded view, sorted Newest (or the ReplyDial inbox) | Answer everything new, across all videos | 15 to 25 min |
| Every day | Threads I answered yesterday | Scan for follow-ups | 3 min |
| Sunday | Held view, both clicks | Approve real questions, remove abuse, hide repeat offenders | 5 min |
| Sunday | Viewer posts tab | Answer comments under community posts | 5 min |
| Monthly | Settings, Community, Defaults | Confirm Basic or Hold all is what you intend; links box ticked | 1 min |
| Monthly | Free checker on my own handle | Sanity check the public view of the channel | 1 min |
The order matters. The daily pass is where the value is: questions answered within a day get follow-ups, which get answered, which is what a comment section is for. The Sunday pass is housekeeping. The monthly pass exists because settings drift, as my seven-year unticked box proved.
Four likely places: it is held (Held view, two clicks), it was caught as likely spam (same view, different status), it was posted under a Short or a community post and your Content type filter is narrowed, or it is a reply inside a thread rather than a top-level comment and you are looking at the thread list collapsed. If none of those, the viewer may have posted from an account that your channel has hidden, which holds every comment automatically.
Not in any tool, and not in Studio's Unresponded filter either; they are not published, so they are not "comments" to those views yet. Approve one and it immediately appears as a new unanswered comment with its original timestamp, which can be days old by then. Answer it the same day you approve it.
Notifications are a best-effort stream, controlled by your settings and your device, and they are not a record. On my channel the bell has never been a complete list of comments at any volume above a few dozen a week. Treat the Unresponded view as the record.
Caching and windows, as above. A public tool reads a fixed number of recent comments per video, caches the answer for a while, and cannot see held or spam-filtered comments at all. Studio sees everything, uncached. If the two disagree, Studio is right about the present and the tool is right about the size of the problem a stranger can see.
No. The YouTube Data API has no endpoint for community post comments, so no tool built on the official API can read or reply to them. Anything that does is automating Studio itself, which YouTube's terms prohibit and which puts your channel at risk, not the tool's.
What to do this week, no tool needed: bookmark the Unresponded view, empty it once a day for seven days, open the Held view on Sunday and click through both prompts, and look at the Viewer posts tab once. You will find at least one comment you did not know you had. On the 33 channels I scanned, the number would be in the hundreds.
ReplyDial finds every unanswered comment on your channel, including follow-ups under threads you already answered, drafts a reply in your voice, and posts only what you approve, one click each. The unanswered comments checker is free and needs no sign-in; it reads the newest 100 comments on your last 20 videos and tells you how many never got an answer.
ReplyDial lists every comment on your channel still waiting for a reply, drafts answers in your voice, and posts only what you approve. Free for 7 days on Creator limits, no card.
7 days on Creator limits, no card. Nothing is posted without your click. See the privacy policy.
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