Conversations happen on Medium. But with the increased popularity of Responses, we began to realize these conversations were being split between the Notes in the margin and the Responses at the bottom of the page.

Notes are bound by character restrictions and don’t appear anywhere beyond the original post itself. Additionally, we saw that a very low percentage of Notes were ever made public, and were restricted by the participation of the original author.

To fix this, we have changed the way these features work. In our apps and on the web, we launched a new and improved experience for “in context” responses, enabling you to respond to any quote or part of someone’s story. The context and quote always travel with the response, so they can live on their own in streams and profiles, always linking back up to the right spot and providing context for readers.