Lately, I have been seeing comments on Youtube that were written using some basic text formatting. In these comments, text was bold or italic in some places. Naturally, I became curious about how to achieve the same result. Like everyone else I tried to use the HTML tags at first, but it did not work. It turns out that Youtube comments follow the same guidelines as many other social networking apps or services. You can make your text bold, italic or strike-through using very simple methods.
In order to make the text bold in your Youtube comments, you have to enclose it inside a pair of asterisks. For example, if you type *Hello* in the comment it will become Hello. Similarly, you can enclose text inside a pair of underscores to make it italic or inside a pair of dashes (also called hyphens) to make it strike-through. For example, _Hello_ will turn into Hello and -Hello- will turn into Hello.
And of course, you can combine all of these text effects together in the Youtube comments to get the desired affects. For example, if you want the text to be both italic and bold, then you have to enclose the text inside asterisks as well as underscores. But these asterisks, underscores or hyphens should be used in the proper manner. For example, *-Hello-* will produce Hello but *-Hello*- will not show any desired effect because the asterisk is placed before the hyphen pair.
To do things correctly, first apply one effect and then on top of that effect, you can use another one. The order in which you apply these effects does not really matter, for example, *_Hello_* and _*Hello*_ both will produce the same effect: Hello . If you overlap these, then none of the desired effects will be visible.
Conclusion: Youtube comments allow a little text formatting and all it takes is appropriately placing asterisks, underscores and dashes in your comment. You can even combine these to get the desired effect in your Youtube comments.