Responses front and center?
Wonderfully said. I love the crap out of someone engaging with my work (all three times it’s happened), and seeing how they engage with others too. Interactive ideas are beautiful.
Couple of challenges:
(if you have any ideas for getting around these, don’t hold back)
- It’s really easy to miss a comment. I once responded to someone’s comment months later, because that’s how long it took to notice it.
When someone responds to my work, the notification is lost in a pile of general Medium notifications.
Of course when I see a comment I respond, but they’re really easy to miss.
Not because I have soooo many comments. But because Medium sends all kinds of stuff in between.
- On someone else’s story, reading through comments — how people digests a piece — is often as interesting as the piece itself.
But here’s the thing. I use the Medium app, where to see comments you need to
- read through the story
- think “cool, how did people respond?”
- scroll down past Related Reads
- scroll down past anything else Medium is trying to push
- somewhere waaayyy down the bottom you click “show comments”
- Do a little happy dance because you found the comments
- read through responses
As both a reader and writer, I find comments aren’t really front and center.
Having said that, I have occasionally commented on a story (sometimes as the only one) and gotten no response at all.
Does the writer not care? Do they think I’m crazy? Have they not seen the comment? After that one article did they decide to run off and become a goat herder with no internet? No one knows. It’s not a great feeling, so completely applaud the idea of more engagement.
