Rather than forums (although they are very useful for other things), feels like an answer for a different problem. The problem space, as I understand it, is that the conversation is broken up between responses and the main story/idea. I find myself jumping between responses here, then having to go back to the main story and read through more interesting comments; follow them and wash, rinse, repeat.

Medium should simply overhaul the commenting system so as to make the flow of conversation linear. This would be familiar to people who follow Facebook (ick) or Google+ (yay). Another option would be to make a threaded response setup. This would look more like a Reddit setup. Where conversations can break away from the linear responses which you can still follow by expanding them within your stream of responses.

In my mind, forums seem to be more geared for what Medium is using tags. Separating subject matter/categorizing ideas. Medium can have forums, they are a great idea, and I would love to see them. I just am not certain that forums are a direct solution to the problem that is the response/comment system.

Forgive any perceived jumping around with terms or ideas. I wrote this on a mobile device!