How to block someone on YouTube

How do you block a user on YouTube? Walking through step by step how to remove a nasty comment and block YouTube channels and users. 

I also go thorough how I deal with bad comments on YouTube. It's difficult. Every comment increases data for the YouTube algorithm... and I genuinely want to thank every comment, especially if it's letting me know that this video is not for them. But spending any more time than that is a complete waste of time. As creators, and human beings, it's difficult to acknowledge that sometimes.

How to block someone on YouTube



TRANSCRIPT: (CLICK PLAY ON THE VIDEO ABOVE)

THIS IS THE TRANSCRIPT - CLICK PLAY ON THE VIDEO ABOVE!

hello I'm Neil welcome back to the Happy Hut and I'm sorry to say you have just got a horrible comment on your channel 

I know exactly how you feel: I get hundreds of really positive messages on my channel... They're really uplifting, kind, helpful... sometimes they ask questions. It's Community Building. But about once a month or six weeks I get one single message that is really off key or just not nice. 

This week I got one and it was just out and out nasty! 

I wish I could show it to you right now to demonstrate this video but I... I... I made the big mistake of replying to it and guess what? It got even nastier! 

But it's okay because it was the biggest lesson to myself for the thing that I already knew which is that it's never a good idea to reply to bad comments. 

Mostly because it's a complete waste of time. 

It's time that you're spending on someone that doesn't deserve it when you could be spending that time on replying to the nice comments. 

Removing them completely from our channel is absolutely the best thing that you and I can do. 

Someone explained it really brilliantly to me like this: If a visitor comes to your house and takes a dump in your living room... you clean it up and you do not let them come back ever again. 

It's exactly the same with your beautiful YouTube channel. 

Now I'm gonna do this on the desktop first and then I'll show you how to do it on a mobile but you can do this on a mobile. If you go into your browser and put in studio.youtube.com 

Here is my lovely video that I spent ages on and look oh no someone's left... left an off-key comment! A comment that I don't really like.

It was me so don't, don't worry, I did this to myself. 

On a desktop it is really easy: you hover your cursor over the three dots on the right hand side of the comments and that brings up this mini menu - pin, remove, report or hide user from Channel. 

I'll just show you how the first one works. You can just hit “remove”. 

There's a problem with this though which is once you've removed it, you've now lost who that person is or who that YouTube channel is, so it's a bit more difficult to block them now that you've removed it.

But look here's... here's another comment from them so let's just explore the other options. 

You can report a comment and these are the reasons that you might want to remove a comment from your channel: it's spam or it's just harassment or bullying. 

The problem with this is I think the AI looks at it itself so if you're giving it a reason that isn't actually the reason you don't like the comment, it’s probably best not to do it that way. The much easier way is to just “hide user from channel” 

Should I do it? Should I hide myself? 

Let's click on it.

The second way we can do this is in studio.youtube.com it's your YouTube Studio dashboard. 

If you click on the three lines and go down to the tab comments that opens up all the comments that you've had for your channel... and here are the lovely comments waiting for me here. Again if you go to the three dots on the right hand side of the comments you get a few more options with this but you can remove it or hide user from Channel. 

There's a third way and this is where you can see all your hidden users on your channel. 

If you click on the avatar for the commenter, it opens up their YouTube page. 

Guess what! They've been horrible about our stuff without actually making anything themselves! Well that's a huge surprise. 

If you click on the URL and just take this URL up here and copy it, we can go back into YouTube Studio - go all the way to the bottom to settings - go down to the community tab here - and that opens up this window. 

There are three Windows here: moderators, approved users and hidden users. 

If I paste the URL into here it's now a hidden user and I'll hit save and if I go back in I can show you that that worked - Community - There You Go! Hidden users: “Damaged YouTube commenter” is one of your hidden users! 

Let's move on to the mobile now and let me know what you think about how YouTube handles comments on YouTube. 

Obviously you go into the video and you click on “comments” 

For mine I have to click “newest” to see the newest comments and oh look there's some lovely messages here! 

This is slightly different on the mobile. First we'll click on the three dots and that brings up “pin”, “remove”, or “report” so you can report the comment here and you can remove it. 

To block the user you've got to do something slightly different. 

We're going to click on the Avatar - so this little D here for damaged YouTube commenter - and that brings up this window and we're going to go to the bottom here and click “View Channel” 

And then on the top of that user's Channel there are three dots. 

If we click on that you can see the second option down is “block user” that's what we're going to do, so I'm just going to hit block user. 

“Blocking this user will prevent them from commenting on videos that you've uploaded” so if I hit “block”... “user has been blocked” 

And then hopefully if I reload the comments, I'll go back into newest comments, it’s gone! 

All the comments have gone and to make us feel even more positive I'm going to quote an author now one of my favourite authors: Seth Godin. 

“He's a jerk. He deserves everything you throw at him: you're cutting remarks, your sarcasm, your enmity. 

You are totally justified in spending a lot of time and energy in evening the score. 

The thing is, it's not clear that we benefit from carrying around all that vitriol. 

All the time we spend hating is time that we've given away to someone who hasn't earned our time.

It's time we're being controlled by someone we don't like or respect very much.  

Teaching someone a lesson is often overrated. Doing the lesson teaching in your head helps no one. 

What happens if we walk away and make something magical instead? 

You deserve it.

Can you please help my daddy get 10000 subscribers, just click on his face. 

Thanks bye! Alright this is going to be the proper one right?

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