Medium Meta-Blogging

Every Comment Tells a Story

Are your comments working for you, or just cluttering your Medium portfolio?

If the Medium staff could only change one thing, many of us would love for it to be this business of treating comments as Stories. Comments clutter our RSS feeds, our Stats, our list of Stories. We can’t earn a penny for our thoughts, if they’re expressed in comments. And they don’t always show our thinking and writing skills at their best, anyway. But perhaps it’s time to rethink that. Here are some reasons to treat each comment as if it were a part of your writing portfolio.

Audience Building

Comments are so important, here, for engagement and audience building.

Do you doubt that? I’ve been a member of Medium since 2015. Without writing a single story, I had over 700 followers. Just from comments, alone. I did not join Medium as a paying member until November 2019, and it was not until November 30 that I posted my first real Story.

Technically, though, this is my first Story on Medium:

That’s it; what you see above is all there is to that comment — er, Story. It’s nothing but a compliment, but it does demonstrate that I read the author’s bio and their Story. But here are the stats — it’s been read 364 times in 5 years!

The author of the Story never followed me back, but why should she? I wasn’t a contributor to Medium, at the time, and she hasn’t written for Medium since 2017. But still — 364 other people have read that comment, and others. And 700 followed me from them over the years even though I wrote nothing but comment.

But Comments Can’t Earn Us Money!

Comments are a form of “payment” we give to one another. Just as we “pay a compliment,” so we “pay a comment.” It is more personal, and in some ways much more rewarding, than giving claps. But which of the comments, below, would mean the most to you, as a writer?

“Great story! Loved it!”

If the author of the Story is a blogger, their first reaction to such a comment might be to roll their eyes and think, “Spammer.” Dear Reader, that’s not entirely fair, but readers ought to understand why such passing kindness is not always seen as the compliment it’s intended to be. This is how spammers slide a link onto someone else’s site, typically. So we’ve been conditioned to dismiss the “great post” type comments as great big nothingburgers. Sorry! If that’s all you can think of, 50 claps will do nicely.

“Very thought-provoking piece. Have you ever wondered whether this same theory might apply to the interactions among indigenous people who have not been exposed to people from outside their communities? How might this work on Mars? You’ve laid all this information out so clearly and given us so much to think about. Thanks for that!”

Who wouldn’t absolutely love to receive this one? It’s chock-full of free ideas for the next Story! It shows that the reader has really read the Story and given it some deeper thought. Doesn’t that feel good, as a writer, to know that? Absent cold, hard cash, a comment like that is pure gold.

“I read this last night, and couldn’t sleep. My mind was churning with ideas, and this morning, I leapt out of bed and wrote this. Thank you for the inspiration.”

I don’t know about you, but I love being someone else’s Muse, and I appreciate it when their comment includes breadcrumbs for me to follow, back to whatever piece my writing inspired them to write.

Payment to the Author, and a Little Interest Earned for Us

I was chided, early on, by my friend Rasheed for leaving links in comments on other people’s Stories. But I’m ready to push back on that, now — that’s exactly how Medium has designed comments to work. Comments are Stories and Stories are springboards — so dive right in and use Medium as it was designed to be used.

Did you know that you could add a featured image to your comments, format them just like Stories, add tags, and even optimize their SEO settings? So why wouldn’t you invest the effort in making this part of your Medium “portfolio” shine?

Just beware: Comments should be relevant. First, indicate that you’ve really read the original story by discussing some of the points the author made and what you thought or felt while reading them. Second, only include links, images, and tags if they relate clearly and strongly to the original Story. Never “hijack” someone else’s work by inserting your own where it doesn’t belong — where it doesn’t add to, extend, or reference the original topic of conversation — the Story. But if “great post” is all you have to say, then 50 claps will do the trick.

Dear Readers Who Never Plan to Write on Medium: I wish someone had told me this five years ago. When I became active, here, as a writer, and I discovered that comments were also Stories, I cringed and I deleted some of the “great post” type comments. And then I stopped; I realized that, from a reader, any comment is appreciated and valued. I was a reader, then, and not a fellow contributor to Medium. Now, now I was selfishly cleaning up my own portfolio by taking back all my simple compliments. That wasn’t fair to the authors of the Stories I’d enjoyed, either. Trust me, none of us hate comments, not even the drive-by “great post” type comments. But we love real feedback, even more.