This was a really useful feature. By seeing all the comments, you could ctrl+F and find ones you were looking for. I.e. comments by a specific person or about a

This was a really useful feature. By seeing all the comments, you could ctrl+F and find ones you were looking for. I.e. comments by a specific person or about a specific topic. And before the days of Plus, it was necessary to find people that had replied to your comments, or read comments in the proper order. It sort of still is, because of how mangled comments are with their weird threading and sorting system. It's also very useful for search engines. Comments on the video determine what keywords the video should be indexed by. This follows their move a few years ago of removing the tags from video descriptions, which also seriously hurts search engines. Now most comments will probably not be indexed. I found this necessary awhile ago when I was searching for something embarrassing I wrote years ago and wanted to delete. I also just generally dislike the trend of infinite scrolling and very confusing sorting systems. I used to have a very hard time finding old posts on Facebook because of that. The all_comments page offered an alternative for that, but now you have no choice. I'm sure there will be a bunch of comments complaining about youtube comments, or people not understanding why anyone would want to read them. There really is a big problem with the quality of youtube comments. That's because most of youtube is lowest-common-denominator stuff with no moderation. But there are sections of youtube that aren't terrible. There are academic lectures on youtube. There are channels about math, programming, science, and every obscure subject you can think of. I've found some of the most insightful ideas from youtube videos. And the comments on videos like that will generally be better, reflecting the audience of people that watch those things. Video creators use comments to get feedback and talk to other people interested in that subject.