Why the video has no comments — and which of the three states it is in.

Most guides read this question as a rendering bug and answer with cache clearing. That advice helps exactly one situation on this page — and none of the three states is it. Off and paused are decisions, not failures, and an empty section is often just an empty section.

Which “no comments” is this?

Four different situations get described with the same sentence. Find your row first — three of them are states with different owners, and one is not this page’s problem at all.

• A note where the thread should be: “Comments are turned off” — state one — the section is closed. The video’s owner can reopen it; a viewer account cannot override a setting or a policy.
• Old comments read fine, but new ones will not post — state two — the section is paused. The thread is frozen in place, not hidden, and it reopens whenever the creator chooses.
• A working section with an empty list and a live comment box — state three — there are genuinely no comments yet, which is normal on a new or quiet video. If the video is busy, treat it as a display problem instead.
• No section and no note — nothing at all — not a “no comments” state: the panel itself is missing, which has its own causes. Start with the not-showing page below, or the not-loading page if a panel appears but never finishes loading.

The last row has its own two pages: a panel that never shows up is a visibility problem, covered by why comments are not showing, and one that never finishes loading is a rendering problem, covered by why comments are not loading. What this page covers is the other three rows: the states a section can be in.

The three states

Each state looks quiet from the outside and needs a different response. Read the fix line as carefully as the state itself: for two of the three, the honest answer is “somebody else holds the switch”.

1. Comments are turned offThe whole section is closed. The thread that existed before stays hidden while it is off, nobody can add anything new, and a grey note takes the place of the list. Four things close it: the creator’s setting (per video, or a channel default), a Made for Kids classification, a removal by YouTube itself for safety reasons — which can happen on content that breaks no rules — and the auto-generated Art Tracks. On a slow connection even the note itself can fail to load, which is why “off” and “broken” can look identical from a distance.What to do: No viewer action reopens it — a setting or a policy is not something an account can override. If the video is yours, the switch and the checks are below; if it is not, the thread returns the moment the owner turns comments back on.
2. Comments are pausedThe softer state, and the one almost every guide skips. What was already posted stays readable — you can still scroll the thread and quote it — but new comments are stopped, so the box will not accept one. The documented scenario is exactly what the name suggests: a video suddenly goes viral, and the creator pauses the section during the flood so it stays reviewable, instead of closing it for good or letting spam win.What to do: Only the creator resumes it, and only whenever they choose — there is no timer and no viewer-side unlock. Nothing is lost while it waits: every existing comment stays in place, and the box reopens with the section.
3. No comments yet — genuinelyThe section is open, working, and simply empty: a new upload before its first commenter arrives, a niche topic, a small channel. The tell is that nothing looks suppressed — no note in place of the list, and a comment box that accepts text. A busy video rarely sits here for long, so a popular video showing zero comments is almost always one of the two states above, or a display problem wearing their clothes.What to do: Nothing to fix — an empty thread on a quiet video is how YouTube works. If you expected a full discussion and this is not it, treat it as a display problem: the not-showing and not-loading pages tell those cases apart.

If the video is yours: turning them back on

Every state above has an owner, and for two of them the owner is you. These are the checks in Studio, in the order that resolves the most cases first — the state shows itself as you go.

• Start at the video level — video settings override the channel default. In YouTube Studio: Content, select the video, then Show more and Comments and ratings.
• Set comments to On, then pick a moderation level — holding comments for review is not the same as closing the section — “hold potentially inappropriate” is the default middle ground, and you can review the queue without turning comments off.
• If the option is greyed out, the block is elsewhere — check Audience first — a Made for Kids designation keeps comments off no matter what the setting says — then Visibility, where private videos cannot take comments at all (unlisted ones can).
• Set the channel default once — Studio settings, then Community, covers every future upload. Defaults apply to new videos only; an existing video keeps whatever it has until you change it there directly.

If comments were closed by YouTube rather than by you — a safety action — the current state is still visible in Studio, and reversing it may not be available at all. That one is a review process, not a setting.

If it is not your video, all of this is out of reach — but nothing is hidden from you either, once the state is known. A thread that was there before and is not there now is a different question: it is not a state but a removal, and where the comments wentworks through the ways a comment stops existing. The number under the video — which rarely matches what you can read — is its own subject on the comment-limits page.

Read what is still there

Two of the three states leave the thread readable, and the third can flip back at any moment. What can be read today can be saved today — a copy you exported is the version that survives every future switch.

• Read the thread — Anything still public loads into a clean list you can scroll and sort — the fastest sanity check on which state you are looking at.
• Keep a copy — Export what is readable now. A section’s state is not permanent, and an export outlives every future switch.
• Find one comment — Search the readable part of the thread for a phrase you remember, without scrolling it by hand.