YouTube Comment Picker

Running a giveaway on a YouTube video usually means picking winners from the comments. This tool does the draw from any list you paste — one entry per line — and gives every entry an equal, unbiased chance. Everything stays in your browser; the list you paste is never uploaded.

Getting your entries in

Copy the commenters' names or comment text and paste them into the box, one per line. Blank lines and stray leading or trailing spaces are ignored automatically, so a rough copy-paste from the comments section works fine. The tool shows a live count of how many valid entries it found, which is a quick way to confirm your paste came through as expected.

The duplicate toggle, precisely

Turn on Ignore duplicate entries so the same person can't win twice. It removes lines that are exactly identical after trimming whitespace. Two important details follow from that: matching is case-sensitive, so John and john are treated as different people and both stay in the pool; and only truly identical text is merged, so John S. and John Smith are two entries. If someone left several identical comments, this collapses them to one shot at winning.

How the draw works

Set the number of winners (you can't request more than the number of entries), then click to draw. The picker uses a partial Fisher–Yates shuffle, drawing without replacement, so the winners are always distinct entries and the order shown is the order they were drawn. Click again for a completely fresh draw.

Is it actually random?

Each draw is seeded from the entry count combined with a high-resolution timestamp, then run through a fast pseudo-random generator (mulberry32) that produces a statistically uniform shuffle — every entry has the same probability, and re-drawing reseeds for a new result. Note this is a general-purpose PRNG, not a cryptographic one: it's ideal for giveaways and raffles, but don't use it where an adversary could try to predict or manipulate the outcome.

Tips for a clean giveaway

• Deduplicate spam first. Remove obvious bot or "first!" comments before pasting, since the picker treats every line as a valid entry.
• Record the draw. Screen-recording the moment you click adds transparency for participants who want proof the pick was fair.
• Paste unique handles where you can. Because dedup is exact-match, consistent names (rather than display names people share) make the "one person, one entry" rule reliable.
• Draw a few extras. Winners sometimes don't respond, so picking one or two more than you need — or keeping the list to redraw for a replacement — saves a scramble later.

Because it works on any list, the picker isn't limited to YouTube: it draws just as fairly from Instagram or TikTok comment exports, email sign-ups, a roster of student names for cold-calling, or numbered raffle tickets. Anything you can put one-per-line into the box is a valid pool.