Dealing with Toxic Users and Trolls on YouTube

Managing the interaction of your community on your YouTube channel is one of your responsibilities. Through your journey as a content creator, you will encounter people that demonstrate toxic behavior or are trolls. People that disagree or critique in a non-toxic manner is not being referred to as toxic or nuisance. Healthy interaction at a level you are comfortable should be encouraged. The behavior can damage your ability to create content and your community that you have invested in developing for your YouTube channel. It is important to address this behavior as quickly as possible and in an appropriate manner.

If you are using YouTube and using comments to engage with your community, comments impact your community. The toxic interaction can result in people to leave your community. While you can delete the occasional toxic comment, you also need to address interactions persistent toxic interactions. When a user steps over a line or becomes a persistent nuisance, YouTube has two tools you can use to protect your attitude and your community. If you are new to managing a YouTube channel, you might not be aware of the capabilities available to you.

Hide and Block Users

After deleting comments, there are two capabilities you have to address the issue of toxic users. I view the capabilities as progressive response to the users interactions. You can hide a users interactions from your community and you can block them.

Hide User

Hiding a user results in the interactions of the users like comments to be hidden from everyone except the user that was hidden. The user has the ability to subscribe, post comments, and like/dislike your videos. There is no direct way for the user to know they are hidden. If they do not login to YouTube with the hidden user account, they will not see the comments they submitted.

Block User

If you choose to block a user from your channel, this will prevent the user from interacting with your channel. The blocked user will not be able to subscribe, leave comments or like/dislike a video. The Blocked user will not be able to message you via YouTube. My recommendation is to use block when the user steps over a line with you and your community, they have not yielded to any warnings you have provided, or they have become a nuisance to you or your community.

Conclusion

Take advantage of the tools to manage the quality of interaction from your community. Don’t let toxic behavior destroy your creative capability. Address it with the tools mentioned for hiding and blocking users as needed.