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 document commenting on their roadmap, and also had this as feature request).
But seeing this as a way to comment on a published article, as a reader, really intrigued me as groundbreaking and genius.
I don’t know why but it seems that Medium Staff thought otherwise. If you never saw this, here’s an article that explains how you can add this to your own site or Wordpress Blog (it’s the one I already linked above because that’s where I found that historical screenshot).
Medium.com even still has responding inline in their Help Center. But … here is how the section of that article with the nice inline comments above looks now:
One could argue that maybe the people commenting simply removed those comments. But no, I tried it on Alex’s article. Here’s where I commented — with a selection on the text that I commented:
This also shows that I could still another comment. Or highlight it. Or tweet it. But this is what it looks like without my selection:
Looks like Medium.com has lost its best feature … I mourn the loss. No kidding! Yes, I could still highlight it. And I guess if many people did, it would show up like this (back in CamMi Pham’s article):
I wholeheartedly agree with the content of that screenshot. But this doesn’t solve my commenting problem, so I’m working hard and hopefully smart on this story. Bear with me, at least one thing can be kind of solved.
So here’s a screenshot of my actual comment:
Oh no. I lied! I haven’t deleted it, yet, and in fact, I won’t. For science.
My biggest issue right now is that in the sub-headline, I wrote:
The History, the Good, the Bad, and my Ugly Solution
… but this would actually be the perfect transition to “the Bad”.
Ok, I’ll squeeze in the good — it’s not much, anyways:
The Good
Comment sections are sometimes toxic. Making it harder for people to comment on articles, or making it harder for people to read comments, may remove a little bit of that toxicity. That would probably be good.
Done.
Well, not quite. Here’s the part about product-design: I’m pretty sure the people developing Medium.com are really smart and really do their best to create the best product for whatever problem they are trying to solve.
By the design choice, they put the stories on top of everything. Because really, the way things look now, on Medium.com, there are no comments.
Only stories:
Says 12. Twelve! Which is a nice number. But actually, so far, I only wrote three stories. Three!!! This is my fourth. I’m a noob in this game, trying to make some money, maybe. One funny side-note: That “Drafts 1” is actually not this story I’m writing now: I took that screenshot while still making notes for the Story on Notepad. Yes, notepad. That non-RTF text-editor that comes with Windows. So really, there was no draft. That number 1 is a bug!
This is the perfect transition to The Bad. And Ugly:
The Bad and Ugly
Of the three articles I have published, only two appear on that screenshot. Why? Because it’s cluttered with all the comments that I also wrote, my monitor wasn’t big enough to make a screenshot of all the stories.
I’m not gonna complain about this more because I already did before, and so did others. This is annoying but it’s not even what got me started writing this article.
This did:
This is actually not the bad screenshot. I posted it for context, and that’s actually the nice thing about it: Here you can see the text that I had highlighted for my comment, to give context to my content. That is still good (still transitioning, you see!?)
But this is:
As I wrote in that comment to myself: Quite often, when commenting something, we want to re-read the text that we are commenting on. The way comments currently work on Medium.com make it really really hard to have any context. And this does not only effect writing responses — this is quite cumbersome when you read an article, and then try to follow the comments on that article.
I guess everyone that recently tried doing that knows what I mean.
And yes, I can imagine that this is by design. It probably does serve a purpose.
But as a user of this platform, both as writer and reader, I consider this a terrible user experience.
While I love democracy, I don’t really think it has a place in product design. Democracy is a system of governance, and I think it’s the best system we currently have, and I may or may not write a lot more about this. For now, let me just mention that in theory, there are even better systems like Sociocracy and/or Holocracy. Those are already effectively applied in some organizations, and it’s awesome. But as larger societies, we currently have to do our best to even maintain a reasonable standard of democracy, so … well, enough of that.
When it comes to product design, I actually think Apple got that right, with Steve Jobs probably not being that much fun to be around, and certainly not anywhere near anything that could pass as “democracy”. But with product design, I believe the vision of one person, or a small group of people is simply more powerful than design by committee.
But that doesn’t mean you should never listen to your customers or users. In fact, you should always listen! Always! And then use both your listening to what people around you think, and the listening to what your heart tells you, to bring forth your individual, unique expression. Life is art. Product design is art. Both is intimately personal.
Feel free to discuss this. Even though, especially if you also write stories, it will ruin your Stories list.
Ha, at least for that, I kind of have a solution:
My Beautiful Solution
Before starting to write on this Story, I had actually already started fixing my mixed list of Stories and Comments. I actually reverted some of those changes to create the screenshot above with the list of my stories. So here’s what I do now, and while it doesn’t give us back the awesome inline comment of the good old days, and it also doesn’t solve the issue of comments being cumbersome to navigate, at least it makes it a little easier for me to find which of my Stories are actually stories, and which are just responses.
And also, it makes some of those responses more useful. That’s why I’m calling it a beautiful solution and why I’m not as angry at Medium.com as I used to be (because without their design decision, I wouldn’t have had that idea):
Here’s one of the comments that really didn’t say much in the list:
What I did there actually was give feedback on a broken link — but right now, I have to click it to see that:
Have you ever noticed that little gear icon that is also available on your responses? It’s the one you can use to Edit story:
And when you’re editing the story (even though it actually is a comment), the gear icon turns into three dots and lets you select Change display title / subtitle:
So I can turn this:
Into this:
You can also directly click on the little down arrow in the list of stories, to save one step in the process to make it a little faster and less painful (and also see my work in progress):
It’s even more convenient (well, a little less inconvenient) if you open editing in a new tab because that way, you can also check back with the list for consistency:
So, finally, I have this cleaned up. Meanwhile it’s fourteen stories, of which eight are actually comments. This is still one of my “two” drafts (the second draft is still just a bug and doesn’t really exist):
I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it.
And I’m happy to read your comments — even if the system still is broken.
But maybe some day, we’ll have both, an awesome publishing platform and a convenient way to have conversations on that same platform.
