Medium
Treat Your Comments on Medium with Respect
Your responses may be as important to you as your articles
I was excited to discover Medium. As I remember, it is exactly what the early vision of the internet was supposed to be, where a person could post insightful articles, comments and dialog. The internet has degenerated somewhat since then.
Importance I learned early that my comments may be as important as my articles. They become part of your entire portfolio! People can find everything that you post, even comments, with a Google search. They may be buried in line 2,000 but they are there.
Comments attract followers. Only a few articles appear on the main page or a topic page. A curator may have 50 articles and only two slots. However, your articles will most likely appear on your follower’s pages.
That’s one reason to attract followers. If nobody reads your work, why write? Everybody has something to say. I choose to follow people when they have written an interesting article or an interesting comment on someone else’s article. I read comments on most articles.
Treat Every Comment as a Short Article You will be judged by the readers as if you posted a full article. So, always put a reasonable amount of effort and skill into a comment, as you would with any article. Just don’t spend too much time.
If you are not willing to do that, why bother with a comment instead of claps. It’s self destructive.
The same is true with tags. Before I got organized, I had 148 unique tags for 124 comments and articles. I now pull a few from nine standard tags. I may add a specialized tag in the last place, if needed. The article How I Became A Top Medium Writer In Only Two Weeks (sort of) has a nice section about tags (Keywords).
Methodology for writing comments When I started, I was writing the first thing that came to mind. Then I saw the first sentence coming up as the title in my stats.
The first sentence is the title.
Put some thought into it. If you say “Great article,” that is all that appears in a Google search. I don’t spend a lot of time on it, but I may run the first sentence through the headline analyzer. I went back and edited some of my “Great article” comments after I figured that out.
I build my comment in an open Word document while reading an article. By the end of the article, I have my first draft. I no longer use paper for notes.
Write as if you were talking to the author in your living room. If you would not say it to the author, don’t put it in a comment. You can expand on a topic or indicate any part of the post that you did not understand. It may wind up helping both you and the author.
I appreciate any comment that helps me navigate through Medium, like the size of paragraphs or ways to approach common problems.
Finally, reply to comments if you have anything pertinent to say. I also clap at least once if someone took the time to write something relevant to the article, whether I agree or not.
If you are upset and disagree about something, you can write your own article. A Medium comment is not the place to rant about something. You can do that somewhere else. Medium is much more professional.
Practice You get faster and more skillful with experience, as shown by a typical learning curve. Some people take 30 seconds and others will take 5 minutes to make the same quality comment.
I built an app to project production in an aircraft factory based on the learning curve. There is not much difference between the learning curve in writing comments on Medium and for building aircraft engines.
Links There are so many similar stories on Medium that I found I was posting almost the same comment over and over. Finally, out of laziness and after I had a list of my own stories, I started including links if they applied.
Why write a 100-line comment 20 times if a story exists saying the same thing?
I summarize my point and add the link at the end to provide support when I have one that fits.
Conclusion The comment should be as positive and constructive as possible. They should be clear, concise & useful. Always write the type of comment that you would want to receive.