I personally really enjoy this (relatively) new feature, but I almost never see any comment under anyone's runs. I'm often shy about commenting myself because I don't know if people like having comments under their own runs or not...

I don't know if it's not popular because it is yet too new on the site or if people genuinely dislike this feature, or just don't really care. Also maybe I'm wrong and some communities make large use of it, of course I can't know about every game on the site. Oh and I'm aware that many games disabled the comments for obvious reasons, especially when there's hundreds or thousands of runners, that's why I'm only considering runs with their comment section open and empty for this post.

Anyway, do you use the comment feature and what do you think about it?

There’s no way to receive notifications for comments, so not many people are going to bother with them.

shouldn't exist tbh

main reason being: -pointless -can be easily abused by spamming -doesn't matter if you get notifications or not, it'll still impact in bad way

Notifications definitely matter. What’s the point of letting someone comment on my run if I’ll never know about it?

A few months back, I suggested through the support hub that they add a little indicator for the number of comments on a run like Mega Man Leaderboards has, figuring that they don't want to flood the notification system again given its past issues. Perhaps that'll happen someday...

To me, this is one of the more baffling changes. Not that it was implemented—plenty of people asked for it over the years, although there are also many vociferous opponents—but that it was implemented in such a useless way and just kind of left to rot.

From a moderation perspective, I'd trust the comment feature more if moderators could get notifications for comments. As it is, someone could write a hate comment and I wouldn't even know until I check the audit log. So I don't really trust it. Note: for some reason only the super moderators can see audit log...

Although maybe it isn't supported cause it could flood notifications for moderators otherwise, for popular games? Dunno.

In any case I've only allowed people who have a run on speedrun.com to write comments, for the games I moderate. It's a little extreme but it mostly serves as a good filter to only allowing actual humans to comment, as usually bot spammers don't go to the effort to make speedruns.

In general, I think that people generally interested in speedruns should take discussion to that game's speedrun discord/forum anyways, the comment feature isn't good for meaningful discussion outside of a few "congrats bro".

comments is one of if not the most useless feature on the site. most of the runs are uploaded on youtube which already has comments and a fellow runner of a game wont just go in your runs to comment since you probably are in the same community discord where you can congratulate each other + all that the others here have mentioned

When it initially rolled out it also did not have a way to disable it and people that were banned/blocked from a runner on other platforms could use srcom as a way to spam/harass them. That rough release didn't help the perception.

IMO comments exist elsewhere and have a guarantee they'll be stored (like almost every video site) so comments can just exist there. There's quite literally 0 benefit I can think of to also having comments on site, anyone who's gonna bother writing a comment would put it on the vid of your run.

its more worth it for people to get comments on the actual youtube videos of the run (unless they are twitch vods in which case their are no comments i think?)