How I Manage To Reply To All My YouTube Comments

I make an effort to reply to all comments people leave on my YouTube videos. YouTube doesn’t always do a great job of notifying us creators when we receive comments, especially replies to old comments. So I wrote some custom software to help solve the problem.

You might not think that the details of this software matter to you, and maybe they won’t, but they’ll help explain why I sometimes reply the way I do:

My code reads all the comments/replies to all the videos on my YouTube channel.
Then it shows me comments or replies I haven’t read yet.
How does it know what I’ve read and what I haven’t? It’s based on whether I’ve replied or not.¹

So if there’s a comment with no replies, or there are replies under a comment and the last reply isn’t from me, then it assumes I haven’t read it yet.

Which means in order to tell the software I’ve read something, I have to reply to it.

And this is all well and good, except sometimes, it doesn’t make sense to leave a reply. For example:

Viewer: Did you know you can do that with a band saw?

Me: No I didn’t. Thanks for the cool tip! 😄

Viewer: You’re welcome.

Or how about this:

Viewer 1: Does anyone know where to buy this product in Australia?

Viewer 2: I found it at Bunnings.

In either case, it doesn’t make sense (in the context of the discussion) for me to leave a reply. So I usually reply with a thumbs up:

👍

I know it might seem a little strange when you read it, but that’s why I do it.

I’ll bet you’re glad you asked, right? 😳

Later.

Footnotes

Well, I actually have a way to “mark” a comment or reply as “read”, but it requires storing data locally in the browser, and there’s a limited amount of storage available, so I try not to use it much. ↩

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