How to hide YouTube comments

Why hide comments

Comments under a video can be useful: corrections, timestamps, the one person who explains the step the video skipped. They can also be a stream of arguments, spam and spoilers right below the thing you came to watch. Hiding them by default, and opening them only when you choose to, gives you the useful part without the rest.

The built-in way

As of October 2026, YouTube doesn't give viewers a setting to hide comments on desktop. The comment controls YouTube does have are for creators: a channel owner can turn comments off on their own videos, hold them for review, or hide specific users from their channel in YouTube Studio. None of that changes what you see on other people's videos.

YouTube has tested showing comments collapsed by default in its mobile app in some regions. That isn't a setting you can turn on, and it doesn't apply to the desktop site.

The manual way

A few habits keep comments out of the way:

• Theatre mode (press T) makes the player wider, and the comments sit further down the page.
• Full screen (press F) hides everything except the video.
• Don't scroll. The comments only load when you scroll down to them.

These work until you scroll down for the description or the chapter list, and the comments are right there underneath.

Make it permanent with a tool

The page can be changed so comments start hidden. A userscript is a short piece of JavaScript that runs on a website you choose. One for YouTube finds the comment section under the player, hides it, and puts a small Show comments button in its place. Clicking the button brings the comments back for the video you're watching. When you move to another video, they're hidden again.

YouTube moves between videos without fully reloading the page, so the tool has to notice each new video and hide its comments too, rather than only acting once when the site first opens.

ScriptPanda is a Chrome extension that writes this kind of tool from a description. Open its side panel on any YouTube video, paste the request at the end of this guide, and it builds and installs the userscript. From then on every video opens with its comments tucked away and one button to reveal them.

Hiding page elements doesn't call AI, so the finished tool doesn't use your plan's requests when it runs. Building it and changing it do.

You can adjust it afterwards, for example:

• Remember your choice per channel, so comments stay open on channels where they're worth reading.
• Hide the live chat on streams as well.
• Hide only the comment count and the replies, and keep the top comments.

Go further

If comments are one distraction, recommendations and Shorts are usually the others. The related guides hide those. Each is a separate tool, so you can turn any one of them off on its own from the extension.

Switching it off

The tool appears in ScriptPanda's list of tools in your browser. Switch it off there and comments show as normal on the next video you load. The Show comments button is for one video, switching the tool off is for every video.

Limits

The tool works on YouTube in Chrome on your computer. It doesn't change the YouTube app on a phone or TV, and it can't remove comments for anyone else, only hide them from your view. It hides the section after YouTube loads it, so the comments may appear for a moment first. If YouTube changes its layout and the comments start showing again, or the button stops appearing, open ScriptPanda on a video, say what changed, and ask it to fix the tool for the page as it is now.