Why the iOS App might destroy Medium

“Fred is incensed. Does he just sit there and stew over it until he gets home? No way. He can write a response directly from the bottom of the story.”

The essence of Medium is not (just) the beautiful presentation with its attention to typography. It’s that Medium is for Authors. There’s a lovely quality feedback loop in the sidebar comments in Medium — if you write a bad comment, it stays private. Note that I say “bad” rather than “critical”. The level of criticicism in public comments is up to the Author to decide what’s allowed.

This is an enabling mechanism for quality and it makes Medium special. Comments which add insight and are worth reading, in context, are made public. Comments which might be useful but are poorly written, may not make it. (Some improvement could be made here for Authors to request a rewrite).

Allowing anybody to add responses to the tail end of stories will degenerate into the standard blog posting commenting long-tail. Please don’t eviscerate something beautiful.