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How to View Your Full YouTube Comment History

As an avid YouTube user and content creator for over 10 years, I often need to look back at my previous comments to reference conversations or revisit threads. However, YouTube only shows your last few comments by default. If you want to view your full comment history, you need to go through a few extra steps.

Viewing your full YouTube comment history can be useful for:

  • Referencing previous discussions and conversations
  • Checking your engagement over time
  • Identifying spam or unwanted comments to delete
  • General personal record keeping

Fortunately, with just a couple quick steps, you can unveil your entire YouTube comment history. Here is a step-by-step guide:

Step 1: Export Your Full YouTube Data

YouTube stores your full history of activity and data associated with your account. While not all of this is visible from your YouTube account page, you can export the full data file to get access.

To export your full YouTube data:

  1. Go to Takeout.Google.com
  2. Make sure you are signed in to the Google account with the YouTube channel you want to export data for.
  3. Deselect all data and just check the box for “YouTube and YouTube Music”
  4. Click “All YouTube data included” to expand the option
  5. Scroll down and enable “Comments, shares and other data”
  6. Choose export frequency and file type. I recommend exporting once as a JSON file.
  7. Click “Export” and Google will prepare your downloadable file.

Depending on how much YouTube data is associated with your account, it may take Google some time (hours to days) to compile and create your export file. You’ll receive an email when your export file is ready.

Step 2: Download and Unpack Your YouTube Data

Once you receive the email that your YouTube data export is ready:

  1. Click the link in the email to go to the Takeout Google page.
  2. Download the provided ZIP file to your computer.
  3. Unpack and extract the contents of the ZIP file.

Inside the extracted folder will be a single JSON file containing all your YouTube data, including comments, video history, playlists, and more.

Step 3: Open the JSON File

The downloaded JSON file can be opened with any basic text or code editing program, like Notepad, TextEdit, Visual Studio Code, etc.

I recommend using Visual Studio Code as it will nicely format and syntax highlight the JSON data structure, making it easier to parse.

When you open the JSON file, you’ll see a structured dataset containing your full YouTube data broken into sections like comments, videos, playlists, and more.

Step 4: Navigate to the Comments Section

Inside this large JSON file, you need to find the “comments” section to view your full comment history.

You can use the text search in your editor to find “comments” quickly. The comments will be contained in a “comments” array.

Step 5: Interpret and Check Your Comment History

Within the “comments” array, each individual comment will be structured as an object containing details like:

  • commentText – The actual text content of your comment
  • commentThread – Information on the video and thread the comment was posted on
  • likeCount – Number of likes for that comment
  • published – Date the comment was posted
  • updated – Date the comment was last updated/edited

You can scan through your full history of comments made across any YouTube videos here. It contains your entire record of comments from opening your YouTube account till your time of data export.

Check for any comments you want to reference back to or evaluate your commenting activity over time.

Step 6: Delete Any Unwanted Comments

Now that you have your full YouTube comment history available, it’s also a good chance to remove any unwanted comments.

Maybe you spot some old comments that are now embarrassing, irrelevant, or even spam comments that should be deleted. You can now easily delete these directly from your YouTube account.

To delete comments:

  1. Go to the video page that contains the comment thread you want to delete.
  2. Locate the specific comment and click the three dots icon to open comment options
  3. Choose “Delete” to permanently remove that comment.

Doing a full comment history check and some clean up can be useful YouTube account maintenance.

Additional Tips for Managing Your YouTube Comment History

Here are some additional tips related to browsing and maintaining your YouTube comment history:

  • If you just want to check comments from a specific timeframe, use the “published” timestamp in the JSON data to filter.
  • Consider setting up automated YouTube data exports on a schedule to keep your history. Monthly or quarterly exports are common.
  • You can export and download data from multiple Google accounts to compile a complete record.
  • Beware that deleting your entire YouTube channel or account will erase your full history. Download archives ahead of time for records.
  • Use Google Takeout to export data from other linked Google services like Gmail which may contain additional YouTube comment history and details.

Summary

I hope this guide gives you a complete overview of how to access your full lifetime YouTube comment history. While YouTube only shows a limited recent history directly on their platform, you can use Google Takeout to export then dive through your full, detailed, JSON comment data.

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