Why

Most comments below YouTube videos are, well, irrelevant, to say the least. Since they’re pretty much in the middle of the page, they still regularly caught my eyes and distracted me when I was checking the recommended videos and scrolled down the site. That’s why I built a little userscript to hide the comments by default and make them visible with the click of a button.

Installing the script

Chrome

Just download the script by right-clicking and selecting Save link as. Open chrome://extensions and drag-and-drop the file into Chrome. Chrome should ask, if you want to install it. You can also disable or remove it here.

Alternatively, you can also use a dedicated userscript manager from the Chrome web store. Read the paragraph on Firefox, to learn how to install the script in such a manager.

Firefox and others

Firefox requires you to install a userscript manager add-on. One of the most famous ones is Greasemonkey. I’m using a relatively new add-on called Tampermonkey, though, because it is available across different browsers and also offers a nice configuration interface with a built-in editor. Feel free to use whatever you want. I’ll describe how to install the script in Tampermonkey here.

After Tampermonkey is installed, click on the following link. Tampermonkey should ask, if you want to install the script: Click to install

Using the script

With the script enabled, comments will be hidden by default.

You can make them visible by clicking the button Show and scrolling a little.

You can also easily modify the texts on the buttons. Just open the script and change the two values of the two variables at the very top as you wish.

Source code

The source is available on GitHub.