I experimented with not replying to Medium comments

And it was more successful than expected

Photo by Darya Ezerskaya on Unsplash

I’ve been meaning to write a “sorry I’m so bad at responding to comments” essay. I’ve read several of them on Medium and identify with the feeling of not knowing what to say.

That idea has been sitting on a mental “to write” ideas list for years. But before I actually sat down at my laptop to write it, I recently had another idea.

I noticed something about this essay “What’s so familiar about the phrase “You don’t look autistic”.

I didn’t reply back to comments at first and it got more comments than expected. And when I started replying to comments, it felt like I blocked off the flow of more comments.

Odd.

So with my recent essay, I was curious: What happens if I don’t reply to anyone’s comments?

I published a new essay and waited. And then I got the first comment notification.

My brain automatically began drafting a reply but I reminded myself “Remember the experiment?” and just clapped on the comment to show appreciation.

And I repeated that for every single comment. Each new notification, I widened my eyes, tapped the clap icon, and wondered: Is my hypothesis correct??

And now I’m curious about the results of my experiment.

Maybe Medium isn’t like a social media platform like Instagram, where you’re supposed to reply to all the comments to make connections. Maybe letting other people have a say is a better strategy?

Now, there’s obviously a few confounding variables in my experiment. This essay was published in a publication with a large audience and I’ve been on Medium longer now. And this was a different topic.

I don’t know what exactly is responsible for the results, but you know what?

I’m going to continue this experiment a bit longer to continue reading all your interesting comments.

(And also, stop agonizing over how to reply. Why is replying so hard?)

Thanks for reading (and commenting)!