Dear Medium, Can we please have Forums?

A recent “conversation” led me to thinking about a feature I’d love to see Medium provide. It started like this: Tom Farr wrote a story on fiction writing and Medium, and then Niya Marie responded about how she’d hoped to find an audience on Medium but found the network difficult to penetrate. The back and forth that ensued with Niya Marie and Tom led me to respond that I found paying attention to the stats and traffic depressing. The conversation continued through various responses and notes in different responses, blooming outward, but at that point to actually follow it you needed to perform a very impressive feat of what Gutbloom so aptly calls “digital spelunking”. Which then led everyone to discuss what could make the social part of Medium better.

Lots of things were mentioned, and I’m sure other people have their own ideas about this, but I think the thing I’d most love to see would be a forum of some kind. We need a place to have discussions. If you want this platform to be a network and not just a place where everyone stands on their soapbox next to each other and yells simultaneously (some with much bigger megaphones than others), we must have a place to interact as equals.

It would be great if we could use a story as a jumping off point for a conversation board or forum of some kind where everyone’s “responses” read like a conversation and didn’t show up as stories on their profiles. This would allow people to make new connections and most of all just loosen up and communicate.

Thanks!

P.S. It’d also be really great if you had some kind of group function so we could start online writers’ groups. The commenting/editing features are already in place. We just need some kind of semi-private group gathering space. Then we could just take our posts public when we were ready.