At the bottom of every Medium story, there's a text field where you can respond to the story you just read: When you find a story on Medium that inspires, enrages, or otherwise engages you, and you want to respond, just start typing. After you publish your response, it becomes its own stand-alone story on Medium. It is available on your profile page, and distributed out to your Medium followers. It also includes a link back to the original story to which you are responding.
this reminds me a lot of the thoughts behind the indieweb idea: publishing a response of it’s own, on one’s own turf and then syndicating, linking & connecting it to the article. i like it a lot and it seems pretty user friendly and easy to use and understand — which is not necessarily the case with the concept and excecution of the indieweb-response-thing.
i also like the idea of letting authors recomend responses and making them visible in the process.
it would be much cooler, of course, if medium supported webmentions, too.