Medium, Please Make Highlighting Optional

To: elizabeth tobey and Medium

I recently had a short story published in the publication, The Weekly Knob. I just went back into the story to read some new comments and was thoroughly horrified and disgusted to find that the story had been completely marked up with countless highlights. None of the highlights had any comments attached to them. Someone had just gone in and had gone utterly crazy highlighting every third or fourth sentence.

It was like an artist who is commissioned to paint a mural on the side of a public building who goes back after the mural is finished to find that someone spray-painted graffiti all over it. I was very saddened to see someone do that to my work. Sadly, there is no way to protect my work from this kind of attack.

If someone likes a certain sentence or paragraph then, by all means, copy it and paste it into a response and comment about it. That’s what comments are for. But please don’t mark up my work with highlights.

Medium, I implore you to please, please make highlighting an option that an author can turn off. If an author does not want their hard work marred by highlight/graffiti then they should have the option of protecting their work. Excessive highlighting (or any highlighting) can ruin the reading experience for subsequent readers.

Reading a story on Medium that has been highlighted is just as disgusting as trying to read a used book that has been highlighted. When I read a book it is a very personal experience between me and the author. I can’t stand other people sticking their nose into that personal experience.

Something else you might consider is making highlighting visible only to the person who does the highlighting so that the reading experience isn’t ruined for other readers. (Unless the author wants their work all marked up.)

I think the best solution is to give authors the option of whether or not to allow highlighting/graffiti on their work. This way authors have a way to protect their work from highlighting attacks. Would you please consider this?