Responses
In 3 min read. More on Medium.
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…
At Medium, we value discussion, discourse, and conversation. We encourage users with similar and divergent viewpoints to engage over the ideas and stories that matter to them.
But we live in the real world and recognize that sometimes you may not want to get in a discussion. Sometimes, you just need to come and post. We welcome that use of Medium as well and want to help you feel safe and comfortable doing so.
You can now choose to hide responses from the bottom of your post:
We also realize other users may want to use your post as a starting point for their own thoughts, so they can still write a response…
Earlier this week, a conversation that began last summer about tech and work came back to life on Medium. Monday morning, Amazon’s Jay Carney posted a statement revisiting the New York Times’ August story about work culture at Amazon. A few hours later, Dean Baquet of the Times responded. And then, a few hours later, Jay Carney responded to him.
For us, this felt big. The planet’s largest online merchant and the nation’s paper of record took it to Medium. Some noticed that responses were disabled on Amazon’s two posts. Others wondered if we had suspended normal features and worried…
It’s not obvious, but it’s quite an elegant system. ☺ — @ev, circa May 21
obvious responses
Responses are a big part of the Medium platform and play an important role in tying our growing network together.
The response system is a means of purposeful expression, which can scale from a shorter reaction to a full-blown manifesto of your own. When you’re reading a story, we surface responses from people you follow on Medium by default, while still providing a way to dive in deeper and explore more.
We’re already seeing the power of this system. Hank Green wrote a great piece…
and using publications to help do it
We’ve been pretty excited about how Medium is evolving beyond a place for long-form, polished magazine-type stories (although we still love those for sure). Publishing a story on Medium can be the beginning of a rich conversation, as we see from the following examples:
- Ev responding to Chris Dixon about open vs. closed systems (and then Julien Genestoux, John Borthwick and John Lilly joining in).
- Paul Cantor taking issue with the result of Casey Johnston’s epic bracket to determine the greatest Kanye song of all time (@Paul I’m with you btw).
- Adam Nagourney responding to Steven Johnson’s post about the…
