YouTube’s current blocking system (which they verbosely refer to as like “hiding a user on this channel”) evidently did not get enough feedback from actual users or community managers for its design, because it has a fatal flaw i ran into today: after blocking a user, you can no longer retrieve their channel URL to share with others.
i resolved an incident today where we unanimously decided upon an immediate cross‐platform permanent ban for a particular person. since we knew this person had also been engaging with a friend of ours on one platform, i wanted to give information about this user to this friend so they could also ban them if they wanted to.
YouTube for a long time has not worked like most other platforms when it comes to identification of users. although they have implemented @usernames recently (i assume in response to increased spam, though it doesn’t actually fix the spam problems), the only canonical way to identify a specific user used to be by their channel URL, and several parts of the service are still built around that system. the profile picture and display name of a user are much less useful to give to another channel manager as such, but they’re also the only user‐facing information in several parts of the web UI. unfortunately, this also includes the list of users your channel has blocked:
clicking on users in this hidden users list doesn’t do anything — no menu, no channel link, nothing. plus, upon blocking (sorry, “hiding”) a user, all of their comments and live chat messages promptly get deleted, so you can’t use previous interactions to get the channel URL anymore either. (they’re not “hidden” as the language implies — if you “un‐hide” them, their comments and chats do not come back AFAICT. so this system also sucks for maintaining receipts.)
i was still able to find the channel URL in this case by searching YouTube for the display name, using filters to restrict the search type to “channel”, scrolling through the results for several minutes until i found a channel with a matching profile picture and display name, and then confirming that the image for the channel icon on that channel page and the image for the channel icon on the hidden user list led to the same URL. i would not rely on this, as it is a lot more work (particularly for channels with common display names) and depends on YouTube’s search being able to find the channel at all.
tl;dr on YouTube, be sure to get the URL of a channel and receipts of their messages before blocking them. in cases of quick responses for live content, i would open the channel in a new tab to add its URL to my browser history and grab a quick screenshot before clicking “Hide user on this channel”.