Vocal : Constructive Criticism

I’ll admit, I joined Vocal on a whim, to chase a fleeting illusion of potentially making some money off a challenge. Nobody even read my story. I have no audience of my own, not yet anyways, so I wasn’t expecting 2 million reads a day, but it would have been nice if someone actually took a minute and read my blurb.

The contest ended, and alas I was not a finalist. Let’s be fair, I have been writing stuff down my whole life but I’ve never submitted a story here or anywhere else… I’ve never considered the idea that someone might like what I wrote, until someone read one of my stories by accident. That person convinced me to try my luck here, since my story fit with the current challenge guidelines.

My problem is not that I did not win. My problem is that the winner was not even really relevant to the guidelines at all. The winning story was not about the subject at hand, or at least not in my opinion but I guess that could be debatable. If you ask your creatives to write a story about space travel and exploration yet the winning entry is about how a virus from outer space infected humanity and turned everyone into zombies… well, it’s a little off topic if you ask me.

I was also under the impression that you had to be a vocal+ member to be eligible for challenges but the second and third place winners were NOT vocal+ members. They were both multi-published professional writers with over 50 years of professional writing experience between them.

Then there’s the lack of curators on this platform. I am fully aware that Vocal made the decision to be a non-curated community but I have to cry foul when a man (not a non-binary person of any sort) writes an article about how / why women lose their orgasm mid-coitus and it’s entirely written from a woman's perspective.

Quote “us women like the rhythm, you have to build it up, and most women like myself will actually lose our orgasm mid-way because you’re trying too hard. Increasing the pace actually does the opposite for us women.” written by “Johnny Johnson” and as mentioned before, no mention of pronouns or non-binary in his profile. The coup-de-grace is when you read almost any other story he’s submitted, they’re all written from a cis-man’s perspective...

I don’t mean to be petty, but this seems like pure plagiarism to me. This ‘dude’ clearly went online and found some woman's article, copy / paste and now he’s getting paid from his reads? Come on Vocal, you can do better than that.

Is there even a way to report or flag stories? If there is, I haven’t found it. Sure, I could just write to support about it, but it seems like a long road for something which should be a short walk.

There’s plenty of things about Vocal that I do like, and I’ve read many many stories that were brilliant and original. Unfortunately, you really have to dig deep it seems.

I don’t want to write a long diatribe against Vocal. So I’ll just get right to the point…

If this continues, it’ll destroy this community. You can’t let people write nonsense or plagiarise other peoples work without it eventually blowing up in your face. You can’t cherry pick your challenge winners based on how many of their own fans visit your website, instead of picking stories that meet the guidelines and actually have some merit.

I sure hope SOMEBODY notices this and tries to do better in the future. I won’t hold my breath however, I’m not much of an optimist.