Medium Profiles and the Urge to Delete My Own Responses

Am I the only one who feels discouraged from writing responses because they feel too public? I feel this way in part because they get emailed around (as though they’re worthy of it, or weren’t just intended for the person/writing I was responding to). But an even bigger reason, for me, is that I don’t want those responses hanging out at the top of my profile for weeks on end.

If you try to be a thoughtful writer for bigger pieces, you might publish infrequently. Having the random response you wrote to a random piece be the first thing someone else reads from you is just…random. Which is how my profile feels right now.

In fact, I’m writing this because I was just tempted to kill a bunch of comments I wrote to people to remove them from the top of my profile page. Then I thought, “Hey, that’s messed up. Maybe you should just write a short note about this instead. You’ll see if anyone else is annoyed about this too. And at least it will hang out at the top of your profile for a while.”