The YouTube Comments Panel and Teaser are my new favorite thing

I was watching videos on YouTube the other day when something caught my attention: The placement of the comments on the video was not in the same place I’ve known it to be for years. Instead, it appeared in a small section next to the channel’s information. I thought this was odd, as I recall it always being underneath the video description in an ever-expanding area that got longer the more comments the video got.

But things got more interesting after that. Clicking on this small new section pushed down the feed of recommended videos on the right and placed the full list of comments to the right of the video, similar to how chat appears on live videos. I was surprised, yet very pleased, to see this change work natively on YouTube. For a while, I’ve looked into extensions that can do that but ultimately decided against them simply because some seemed outright fishy, and the implementation felt half-baked.

Where did this change come from, and why is it good?

It turns out that I somehow missed this feature’s announcement back in May. Unfortunately, there was no blog post to refer back to, but my research took me to a video on the Creator Inside channel that covered it. This is how the “Comments Panel” feature is described in the video:

Currently, comments live below a video on the watch page for desktop users. On mobile and tablets, comments are shown in a teaser which then open in an engagement panel when tapped. We are streamlining the comments experience across surfaces by adding a comments teaser, like on mobile, to desktop that will appear below a video and open comments in an engagement panel to the right of the video. Comments will still appear below the video when the teaser is not engaged.

Now, the goal is to enable users to continue to watch videos while scrolling through comments.

And there it is. The reason why I think this new feature is a winner. You can now continue to watch your video while scrolling through its comments. You could not do this on desktops in the past, as you had to scroll past the video to get to the comments. The only workaround I was aware of to solve this was to pop out the video in a picture-in-picture window, so I could position it where I could still see it while perusing the comments. Thankfully, I won’t have to do that anymore.

This will be a huge plus for YouTube creators and viewers who want a way to engage with videos while continuing to watch them. It’ll be a bit of an adjustment, and many users may not like having to relearn how to use the app. However, I can see a lot of potential with this when comments are timestamped, and the playback is aligned in a way that shows you other viewers’ comment reactions as things are mentioned in the video. This could be a whole new way in which you can react to and interact with others while continuing to watch your favorite content.