The day YouTube took away "/all_comments"

[TechLord]

It was a cold late January 2016 day. I was opening the "/all_comments" page to a YouTube video to see only the comments without the video, and to submit them to the Internet Archive.

All of a sudden, I was redirected to "/watch" instead of seeing the comments. In an instant, I knew YouTube had killed "/all_comments". Part of me hoped it was just a temporary glitch, but realistically, it was never going to come back. So much history would be lost.

"/all_comments" was especially necessary because high quality comments were often lost as collateral damage when a video was taken down. While Reddit thankfully preserves comments to deleted posts, when a YouTube video goes down, so go its comments.

The page used to show hundreds of comments at once, served as HTML with no JavaScript. It was the only remaining way to submit comments to the Internet Archive, and the only non-JavaScript way to access YouTube comments. (Since roughly the 9th of July, 2013, YouTube comments on the watch page can only be viewed with JavaScript and are no longer picked up by the Internet Archive.)

The all_comments page was also paginated (page numbers, separate URL for each page), making it possible to archive older comments into the Wayback Machine as well. It was no longer paginated before it was removed, but still showed hundreds of comments.

Archives:

• Before removal
• After removal
• all_comments page from the Machinima video "Gooma Stompin"

10 years later, Reddit got rid of the only remaining archive-friendly front end, old.reddit.com (more details).

[mia2ndpassword]

sooo are you basically saying you got cuckolded by two websites?
the way you wrote this post makes me think you had a parasocial relationship with them.

[TechLord]

sooo are you basically saying you got cuckolded by two websites?
the way you wrote this post makes me think you had a parasocial relationship with them.

I wouldn't go so far, however, the fact that they got rid of this useful feature is bad for all users, not just myself.