YouTube comment notification but no comment on video
January 23, 2021
Since about a year that I’m actively posting videos on YouTube, I’m regularly getting new comments.
But I’ve been having an issue that whole time where sometimes I get a notification for a comment (via email and in the notification bell on YouTube as well) but the comment is nowhere to be seen on the video! 🤔
I’ve actually seen 3 different outcomes for this issue. The third one is quite underground and you should jump straight to it if you feel like you tried everything already.
Top comments
The first and easiest one was that the comment wasn’t displaying when in “top comments” display mode under the video (the default for me), for some reason.
But when switching to “newest first”, it would actually come up and I was able to reply to it!
This worked for some comments, but still many of them were missing for me.
Held for review & likely spam
The second possibility was that the comment ended up in the “held for review” or “likely spam” tabs that you can find on the comments section on YouTube Studio.
Going there you can approve the comment and then reply to it, and it will appear under your video.
Note: the “likely spam” tab is gone for me as you can see in the above screenshot, but I remember seeing there in the past and people online still mention it, so it might work for you.
Just gone
The third option though was that the comments were just completely gone, nowhere to be seen. Changing to “newest first” didn’t help, and they were not in “held for review” or “likely spam” either.
Maybe the user deleted their comment, but at least one of them was from a close friend and I could ask him directly if he removed his comment, and he surely did not.
This have been happening regularly all year and it’s so frustrating because it happens on nice, positive and constructive comments that I really wanted to answer, and none of those were against the YouTube rules and none of them seemed like a comment the user would go back to a couple days later to delete.
It happened one more time this week and I decided to try to find a solution again.
I found that support center thread where a lot of other users have the exact same issue.
With 1049 upvotes and 257 replies, this showed me that I was definitely not the first one to encounter this issue. Sadly this didn’t seem to bring any solution, everyone was essentially just complaining and desperately trying to find the comments they were notified for.
Except for one of the last comments.
Use the YouTube Studio mobile app!
This comment from Hannah was reposting an earlier advice about the “held for review” (which we saw above, doesn’t always work), but with one extra key element.
Turns out my the comment was in the need review section. It didn’t pull up properly on my computer but when I went to YouTube Studio in my phone it worked.
So far I only had been looking at YouTube Studio from my desktop browser, but I never tried the mobile app!
I went and downloaded the YouTube Studio mobile app, and went to the comments section, in the “held for review” part, and here they were! The comments that I couldn’t find earlier were there, and I could actually approve them, and then reply to them.
Nothing to see on mine because I approved them all already!
Sadly this only keeps the comments from the last 60 days so the ones from earlier last year that I knew disappeared are gone forever, but at least I now have a solution for the future times this happens!
More external feedback
I went on and commented on the thread as well to highlight the fact the mobile app do seem to fix the issue, as that earlier comment went mostly unnoticed (as did mine too in retrospective).
And this seem to have worked for other people as well, as we can see in this comment from Robert:
Now nearly a year after originally writing this post, one of my favorite French YouTubers, Benjamin Code, shared on Twitter that he was having the same problem:
Hey @YTCreateurs, deux ans maintenant que je vous remonte ce bug en permanence… Deux ans qu’une bonne partie des commentaires qu’on me laisse sont automatiquement supprimés par YouTube… Je crois que c’est l’un des trucs les plus frustrant de la platform. Ça en est où le fix?
Or in English, he’s been having this issue for over two years where a significant proportion of the comments he’s been getting just seem to disappear, and is looking for a fix.
I shared him this fix and it seem to have helped there too!
Ah en fait on dirait que si! J’en ai retrouvé quelques uns! À confirmer avec le temps! Merci beaucoup pour cette astuce perchée!
Essentially saying he managed to find at least a few ones thanks to this far-fetched trick.
Conclusion
If like many other YouTubers you’re struggling with disappearing comments and you’re pulling your hair out because of this issue that’s been happening for years now, I hope this trick helped you recover the comments from at least the last 60 days, even though you might have been struggling with it like me for much longer than that.