The Lies We Are Told

Introduction

I have been unable to post a new story since the 23rd of November 2025.

What This Means

I am not allowed to be awarded a Top Story, be considered for a challenge or appear on the Leaderboard.

Imagine if you came home and your electricity or water was not working, you would call the company and expect it to be resolved quickly. Today I got a message that we were 60% towards the SLA for a supposedly outstanding issue. I had resolved it yesterday, but the system had got it wrong. The user was fine when I called them to make sure it was OK.

I have not had constructive communication with this platform since December 5th.

That tells me they are ignorant, incompetent or both.

Then they set up this challenge as a slap in the face to me and others in similar situations.

Because I cannot create a new story, I have to find old stories that I can dispense with, but that means that any comments and tags stay with the new story.

Time that used to be spent reading other stories and supporting other creators is now spent looking for stories I can reuse and testing if I can create a new story. I have written a lot of pieces on the situation, and I feel they are wasting space I could use for something creative.

This is the last one that I did:

In that, they effectively told me there was nothing wrong, displaying both incompetence and ignorance of the situation.

Over the years, I have pointed out faults in the system that Vocal have ignored, so I have given up expecting any constructive response.

There is a fault in some old stories that causes a crash of the whole page when you access a page with that story on. I was trying to find an example, but the only one I have is in my drafts, and that was reported last year. It is an important story, but if I delete it, I can't replace it with a new story; I need to find another one to cannibalise.

I feel that Vocal seems to be like Apple and the GOP with the "We are perfect, you don't matter, keep paying us" attitude.

A lot of creators have also blamed me for the situation, saying that I write too much.

By setting this challenge, they seem to be treating all creators' issues as trivialities.

They still have the resources to choose Top Stories for their favourites, as they say:

New stories you’ll love, handpicked for you by our team and updated daily.

But m0st have very little interaction until they are given the exposure, and I thought that was meant to be a major part of choosing a Top Story, so another instance of Vocal being economical with the truth.

This look is as transparent as a frosted window now, although it wasn't at the time.

Vocal's status page tells us there have been no issues since god knows when, but I have had outstanding unresolved issues since the 23rd of November.

Conclusion

Vocal can easily fix things. At the moment, their complete lack of transparency and engagement is causing me a lot of anguish. We used to have Creator Chats but there has not been one for two years:

They went to Discord, then stopped acknowledging questions there as well.

I still feel it is the best writing platform going, and I hope that the problems will be fixed but I am not holding my breath, but will keep writing.

The music is "Tell The Truth" by Derek and the Dominos

Thank you for reading this.