Don’t Write Alone

Work with others to clarify your thinking—and your words—before you publish.

We’ve had a mantra at Medium since the beginning:

People create better things together.

Most great creations involve some form of collaboration—even famous recluses like Emily Dickinson and J.D. Salinger corresponded with others about their work. And the Internet specifically has helped people work together to create amazing things no one could do on their own, from open source software to Wikipedia.

But when it comes to publishing ideas and stories online, for most individuals, it’s a solitary venture. As I wrote in my first “Welcome to Medium” post, “It’s great that you can be a one-person media outlet, but it’d be even better if there were more ways you could work with others.”

Since starting Medium, we’ve maintained a focus on collaboration. We’ve touched on it with collections, which allow many people to contribute to the same idea. But today we’re taking it a big step forward with pre-publish collaboration:

You’ll now see this button in the top right when you’re editing a new post. Click it to reveal a secret link to your post, which you can send via email to anyone you want feedback from. Those invited can leave feedback via our notes feature—which now includes highlighting text:

Once you make changes (or not) based on this feedback, anyone who made notes before you published will be listed in the “Thanks to” section of the post:

You can remove them if you want—or they can remove themselves if they want to be anonymous. Then, it’ll be time for you to help them with their posts.

Whether it’s getting a friend to help you recall a story, asking a colleague to help you construct an argument, or just finding a second set of eyes to catch typos, on Medium, you can share the best version of your stories and ideas—and start creating better things together.