A New Responses Experience

Russ d'Sa
The Medium Blog
Published in
2 min readMay 21, 2020

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Every day people publish thousands of stories on Medium, sharing thoughts or ideas that matter, with the world. Many of them spark important conversations via responses, which imbue stories with additional details and perspectives. One problem is, these conversations live on a separate page — they’re out of context and difficult to follow.

Today, we’re fixing that. As part of a broader effort to reimagine how readers connect with writers and each other on Medium, we’re excited to launch an update to responses.

Previously, reading responses took you to a separate page like this:

Now, when you read through or participate in a conversation on Medium, you’ll be greeted with a fresh design, which unifies a story and the discussion happening around it.

Responses are displayed in-context, conveniently housed in a new side-panel. Like before, you can just keep scrolling to read every response to a story. You can still clap for responses you love and click through to read replies to any response.

Without leaving the story page, share your own thoughts quickly using a new, inline editor. And when you want to get back to reading, simply click anywhere outside of the responses panel to dismiss it.

The new responses experience on Medium.com

We’ll be steadily rolling out this new responses experience to all Medium users over the next month. We know many of you have been waiting a long time for this, and it’s just the first of many planned upgrades to responses on Medium — all aimed at helping you have better conversations and build connections with other readers and writers. We’re excited for you to give it a spin and let us know what you think in the…uh, responses! 😉

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