Most creators trying to figure out how to get more comments on YouTube Shorts are editing the caption when they should be editing the last two seconds of the video. Comments are a downstream signal: a Short that holds people to the loop point will collect roughly five to ten times the comments of one that leaks viewers at second three, even at identical view counts. The fix starts inside the edit, not underneath it.
Comments Are Downstream of Retention
A viewer has to finish your Short before they have anything to say about it. On a 25-second clip, someone who bails at second four has no opinion, no context and no reason to open the panel. That is why comment rate tracks almost perfectly with average view percentage across a channel’s library.
Before you try any comment tactic, check whether people are actually watching to the end. If your Shorts are losing half the audience in the first three seconds, the problem is the opening, and we broke that down in detail in our post on hooking viewers in the first second of a Short. Comment tactics layered on top of weak retention just move a small number around.
The other half of that equation is why people leave mid-clip, which usually comes down to pacing dead spots and unclear stakes. Our breakdown of why people swipe away from your Shorts covers the specific cut points where audiences drop.
Write the Comment Into the Script
The highest-comment Shorts we have posted were not the funniest ones. They were the ones with a deliberate gap: something the viewer noticed, wanted named, or wanted to argue with. You can build that gap on purpose.
- Leave one detail unexplained. A prop in frame, a sound, a name you never say. People will ask what it was, and the asking is the comment.
- Offer a binary choice, not an open question. “Blue raspberry or cherry” gets answered. “What do you think?” gets scrolled past, because it costs the viewer effort to invent a response.
- Be slightly, visibly wrong about something small. Corrections are the cheapest comment in existence. Use this once a month, not weekly, or the audience stops trusting the channel.
- End on the frame before the payoff. If the last thing on screen implies a next step, the panel fills with guesses about what happened.
- Hide something in the background. A returning object or running gag gives regulars a reason to prove they caught it.
We build most of our clips around a single idea, which makes this easier, and the process is written up in how we build Slushy Bros scripts around one joke. One joke, one gap, one reason to type.
Ask for One Thing, and Ask Late
Front-loaded requests fail. Asking for a comment at second two, before the viewer has any reason to care, reads as a tax on watching. Put the ask in the final two seconds, phrase it as a specific instruction, and only ask for one thing.
“Comment and subscribe and share” splits attention across three actions and usually produces none of them. “Tell me the worst one” produces a list. Spoken asks tend to outperform on-screen text asks on Shorts, because the viewer is often watching with the panel already half-open on mobile.
Pin the First Comment Before Anyone Else Does
An empty comment section is a social cue that nobody has anything to say. Post your own comment within the first minute of publishing and pin it. Make it a reply-prompt rather than a promo line: the pinned slot is the most-read text on the entire video, and wasting it on a link to your other channel costs you the thread.
Good pinned comments do one of three jobs: they name the thing people are about to ask about, they take a side that invites disagreement, or they add the detail you cut from the edit. Heart the first genuinely funny reply within ten minutes so the section reads as active.
Related reading: How We Got Millions of YouTube Shorts Views Without Knowing What We Were Doing.
Related reading: How to Create a Recognizable Brand on YouTube.
For a closer look at this topic, see our guide: Do YouTube Shorts Need Thumbnails?.
The First Sixty Minutes Decide the Thread
Shorts move fast, and a comment section that gets no author replies in the first hour tends to stay flat for its whole life. Replying early does two things: it signals to early viewers that someone is reading, and it pushes those replies into notifications, which pulls people back to the video.
- Reply short. Three to eight words beats a paragraph, and you can do forty of them in the time one essay takes.
- Reply to the odd ones. Answering a weird question generates a sub-thread; answering “nice video” generates nothing.
- Ask back. A reply that ends in a question doubles the odds of a second comment from the same person.
- Heart generously. It takes a second and measurably increases repeat commenting from the same viewers.
Those repeat commenters matter more than raw volume, because they become the people who watch everything you upload. That loop is the whole subject of our guide on getting more returning viewers on YouTube.
When Your YouTube Shorts Comments Disappear
Plenty of creators searching this topic do not have an engagement problem at all. They have a settings problem, and the comment count is zero because nobody can post one.
Made for Kids Turns Comments Off Permanently
If an upload is marked as Made for Kids, YouTube disables comments on it and there is no way to turn comments back on for that video. Family-adjacent channels trip this constantly. Check the audience setting in YouTube Studio before you blame the algorithm.
Held for Review and Blocked Words
Default moderation in YouTube Studio can hold potentially inappropriate comments for review, and if you never open that queue, your section looks dead while dozens of comments sit unapproved. A blocked-words list copied from someone else’s channel will also quietly eat normal replies. The current settings are documented in YouTube’s official Help Center.
Actual Glitches and Mobile Quirks
Shorts comments not loading on mobile is a real and recurring bug, usually fixed by clearing the app cache, updating the app, or watching the same Short on desktop. On a PC, the comment box sits in a panel to the right of the vertical player, which is why some viewers think Shorts comments do not exist on desktop. On Android, a viewer signed into a supervised or brand account may not see the comment field at all.
What Titles and Hashtags Actually Do Here
Titles influence who clicks and therefore who is in a position to comment, while hashtags do far less than most people assume. A title that poses a mild disagreement (“this is the correct order”) seeds the comment section before the video even plays. We tested the split between the two in titles vs hashtags for YouTube Shorts, and the gap is wider than the tips circulating on Reddit suggest.
One caution worth keeping: comment sections on Shorts skew younger and blunter than long form, which is where the “Shorts comments are cringe” reputation comes from. Bait that works on a 20-minute video can read as desperate on a 20-second one, so keep the ask casual.
A Fourteen-Day Comment Test You Can Run
- Days 1 to 7: post as normal, no ask, and record comments per 1,000 views for each Short. That is your baseline, and for most channels it lands between 0.5 and 3.
- Days 8 to 14: add one late binary ask, one pinned prompt within 60 seconds, and thirty minutes of replies in the first hour.
- Compare the rate, not the totals. A viral Short will distort raw counts, so divide by views every time.
- Keep whichever ask format wins and rotate the wording every few weeks before the audience tunes it out.
Most channels see comment rate roughly double inside two weeks with nothing but timing changes. Anything bigger than that usually means the content itself got better, which is the version you want.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why Is There No More Comments on YouTube Shorts?
In the majority of cases the comments still exist but are hidden by a setting or a loading bug, not removed by YouTube. The most common cause is the video being marked as Made for Kids, which disables comments permanently for that upload, followed by comments sitting unapproved in the held-for-review queue in YouTube Studio.
How Do You Get Comments on YouTube Shorts?
Ask one specific question in the last two seconds of the Short and pin your own prompt within the first minute of publishing. Binary questions (this or that) typically pull two to four times the replies of open-ended ones, and answering the first ten comments within an hour keeps the thread alive through the video’s peak distribution window.
How Many Views Do You Need on YouTube Shorts to Make $10,000?
Most creators report Shorts revenue between $0.02 and $0.10 per 1,000 views, which puts $10,000 somewhere between 100 million and 500 million views. Rates swing with audience country and advertiser season, so channels with heavy US traffic reach that number far faster, and brand deals or merch usually beat ad revenue long before those view totals arrive. YouTube’s own documentation explains how the Shorts revenue pool is split.
How Do You Get More Comments on Your Long Form YouTube Videos?
Place the ask around the 60 to 70 percent mark of a long form video rather than at the end, since that is where the largest engaged audience is still watching. Pin a comment that continues the argument instead of promoting something, and reply to at least twenty people in the first two hours after publishing.
See How We Make Ours
We post the same experiments we write about, and the results show up in our uploads before they show up here. Take a look at the Slushy Bros creators page to see the crew, the formats we run, and what we are testing next.
