YouTube turns off video comments and descriptions, perhaps in fight against ad blockers

Getting utterly annoyed with ads while watching YouTube videos is something you must have undoubtedly faced, let’s suppose, but the real deal is how you get around this pain point.

Since the paid YouTube Premium subscription is apparently a costly way to skip those ads, the most likely and off the top of one’s head workaround is deploying an ad blocker, using which is what appears to have started disrupting the YouTube experience, as reported by some users on Reddit.

Some even shared screenshots depicting videos with comments turned off, perhaps owing to the use of ad blockers. This is something Google strongly advises against.

While unfortunate, this happening explicitly conveys that using workarounds gets you out of one problem and straight into another.

To vent out their frustration about the mysterious disappearance of video comments and descriptions, many users took to Reddit and other forums. 

While it is definitely triggered by ad blocker use, even though unconfirmed, some tech geeks nevertheless tried their hand, debating whether Google—being one of the richest corporations—should have this ad thing in place, or it is something that’s needed to keep the platform running and supporting Google’s cash outflow to creators in royalties.

Although chances are good that YouTube is deliberately disabling comments and descriptions whenever it detects an ad blocker in use, another possibility is such tools’ innate tendency to remove descriptions and comments from videos.

What needs to be noted here is that this isn’t the first time ad blockers have become a headache on the platform. Creators last year noticed a sharp decline in view counts. That happened because views from users with ad blockers were not being counted.

Google has even purportedly been resorting to slowing down playback speeds or blocking access straight away for those using ad-blocking tools.

While the absence of comments isn’t the worst thing Google could have done, it would surely hurt the community aspect of YouTube, since comments are crucial for engaging with creators, and many creators rely on ad revenue to support their work.

If at all, it seems like a losing battle for Google, and thus the ongoing cat-and-mouse game between ad blockers and platforms like YouTube will likely continue, with issues popping up and getting fixed, only to resurface again.