How to Make the Best of Medium’s Broken Commenting-System

The History, the Good, the Bad, and my Ugly Solution

This story may look like a bit of a rant. The inspiration to write it arose after being really annoyed once again, like so often in recent days of reading and writing on Medium, about the extremely cumbersome way of how comments are currently handled here.

Using my best google-fu, I tried to find out if someone maybe has already added an entry on UserVoice that I could support (spoiler: UserVoice publishes on Medium, but apparently Medium has no way for users to voice their feedback), or if other people were just as frustrated about this as I am (spoiler: yes, and yes, and maybe, and oh, I digress).

The History

Interestingly, what fascinated me most about Medium when I first read an article on this then new platform, was how sections in the article were highlighted with comments, right next to the highlighted section.

Those were the good days — image from: How To Create medium-like Side Comments With Javascript

I had been using this kind of comments for collaboratively working on documents for years. In fact, that specific feature is why I still use Google Documents instead of Cryptpad (but they do have proper collaboration…