YouTube announced a new set of commenting tools meant to help creators engage with and build their communities.

Courtney Lessard, product manager, posted on YouTube’s Creators blog: “We realise that comments play a key role in growing this connection and we’re dedicated to making your conversations with your community easier and more personal”.

There are now six handy comment moderations tools in total:

• Pinned comments: promote a specific comment by pinning it to the top of your feed. This lets you highlight great engagement from your fans or share information with your audience.
• Creator hearts: show some love by giving a heart to your favorite comments. This is a new and easy way to acknowledge comments from your community.
• Creator usernames: when you comment on your channel, your username will appear under the text with a pop of color around it so your viewers can easily tell that the comment is coming from you. If you are a verified creator, you will still have a verification checkmark appear beside your name.
• Choose moderators: Earlier this year, we launched a new comment feature that lets you delegate moderation, giving people you trust the ability to remove public comments from your videos.

• Blacklist words and phrases: You may have comments with certain words or phrases held for your review and approval before being published.
• Hold potentially inappropriate comments for review: We’re introducing a new beta feature that allows you to hold potentially inappropriate comments for review. If you choose to opt-in, comments identified by our algorithm will be held and you have the final decision whether to approve, hide, or report these comments. We recognize that the algorithms will not always be accurate: the beta feature may hold some comments you deem fine for approval, or may not catch comments you’d like to hold and remove. When you review comments, the system will take that feedback into account and get better at identifying the types of comments to hold for review. If you’d like to try this out, submit your channel information