Introducing The New Vocal Leaderboard
Less Noise, More Story—Vocal’s New Weekly Highlight
It's been almost two years since we launched the Vocal Leaderboards. In that time we've been able to highlight a lot of incredible stories and creators that shape this platform. At the same time, we've also had to sort through more than our fair share of AI, spam and quite frankly garbage content to get there too.
So as we're making some changes to ensure Vocal remains a space for authentic creators to share their stories, hone their skills, and grow their craft, we figured now is a good time to reflect, address concerns, and share what’s next for the Weekly Bonus Leaderboards.
Some Categories Worked Better Than Others...
Some of you might remember that we retired the Most Read Stories category early on. While it naturally tends to favor SEO-driven content, we found ourselves having to curate it heavily. Stories about 'Top OnlyFans Creators' or true crime pieces with graphic images were consistently rising to the top. It’s not that we take issue with that kind of content, if it’s well-crafted and follows our community guidelines, it has a place. But it didn’t reflect the type of storytelling our core community values or enjoys creating.
Another category that we decided to sunset because of the massive amount of curation required was Emerging Creators. While this section of the Leaderboard was successful at spotlighting and supporting some new creators on the platform, it unfortunately was the category where we saw the most attempted manipulation.
Current Categories
We know some of you see the Most Supportive Commenters category as a bit of a mess... and honestly, you're not entirely wrong. We did put several safeguards in place, like character minimums and limits, filtering out comments with URLs, and factoring in various qualitative and sentiment-based metrics. But even with those, it’s been tricky to get it right and here we are curating another category.
When it comes to the Most Subscribed to Creators, this category definitely saw it's fair share of attempted manipulation, but mostly from fringe users creating fake accounts to subscribe to themselves—a tactic that was fairly easy to spot. We received a decent amount of backlash for awarding this category to creators accused of using AI in their work. From our perspective, the priority was verifying whether the subscribers were real, rather than analyzing the entire body of work of the creator being followed. In the end, this category simply requires too much oversight to remain sustainable.
And what can we really say about the Most Likes category? Sure we can put safeguards on it to ensure that only established creators are being counted, but at the end of the day its a low-effort engagement category with too much overlap with Most Discussed.
So where do we go from here?
Introducing the New and Improved Weekly Vocal Leaderboard
Let's simplify things a bit and make this more of a real leaderboard rather than a heavily curated list of stories and creators.
So here's what we're thinking....
One category: Most Discussed Stories
Here are the rules and some things to keep in mind:
The time period of data analyzed for each weekly Leaderboard is collected from 12:00am Wednesday - 11:59pm Tuesday ET each week. That means all stories published and comments created within that timeframe will count. Only top level comments and replies by Vocal+ creators will count, comments or replies by the story author will be excluded. You don’t need to be Vocal+ to appear on the leaderboard. You can appear on the Leaderboard once per week. If you appeared on the Leaderboard last week you can appear on the Leaderboard this week since it will be for a different story. This might be an obvious one but No AI generated content.
Bonus structure:
- 1st Place: $20
- 2nd Place: $15
- 3rd Place: $10
- 4th Place: $8
- 5th Place: $5
- Honorable Mentions (6th - 10th place): $3
We believe this will better reflect our core user base and the kind of storytelling they truly value. So, without further ado, here are this week’s winners.
✨ Most Discussed Stories this Week ✨
Here are the stories that have sparked the most comments with their engaged readers this week.
🏆 Winners
🥇 First Place ($20 Bonus): D.K. Shepard - Vocal Acrostic Challenge
🥈 Second Place ($15 Bonus): Mike Singleton 💜 Mikeydred - Emergency Backup Account - Should We Use Vocal Stories To Highlight Platform Issues?
🥉 Third Place ($10 Bonus): River and Celia in Underland - No Link in Bio
🏅 Forth Place ($10 Bonus): Lamar Wiggins - Security Blankets
🏅 Fifth Place ($8 Bonus): Heather Hubler - a glutton for more
🌟 Honorable Mentions
Raymond G. Taylor - Oh, Jeff: The book
Tiffany Gordon - Last Summer, An Elder I Became...✝️🧑🏾🦳👶🏾🧑🏾🦳👶🏾
Each winner will receive a well-deserved bonus in their Vocal Wallets within the next 72 hours.
Congratulations to all the winners! We love what you bring to the table at Vocal. Here's to another week of excellent writing and reads.
And stay tuned for an update on the Honorable Mentions category for upcoming Vocal Challenges... don't worry we haven't forgotton about that either.
About the Creator
Vocal Team
By creators, for creators.
Keep reading
More stories from Vocal Team and writers in Vocal and other communities.
📢 Raise Your Voice Thread: 01/08/2026
Our “Raise Your Voice Threads” are hosted most alternating Thursdays at 12PM ET to offer creators more avenues to uncover exceptional stories on Vocal. As we are continuously searching for fresh creators and inspiring stories, this thread provides an opportunity to exchange and discuss the stories that have moved and motivated us on Vocal.
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By John Oliver Smitha day ago in Humor
Comments (59)
Oh gosh! I've never made a leaderboard before! Wow! Thank you - Honored to be mentioned and so grateful to be a part of this platform.
Awesome love the new leader board ♥︎
Hear hear Vocal. And well done all the winners this week!
I have been so thrown off by the happenings lately...so hard to keep up...but guys congrats...Vocal, keep the faith...prayers... and lots of 🤗🤗🤗🤗🤗🤗 for everyone working hard to cope. Be blessed, and thanks for the honorable title.
I haven't really given thought to all the sub categories that might be on here. I don't even know half the time if I am writing in the right category.
congrat
Congratulations to Everyone!🎉🎉🎉
is it for only vocal+ members?
I like it! Definitely more fair and reflective of the values the platform aspires to in my eyes: sincerity, community, creatively human and quality over quantity. It's good to see a return to those after so much spamming got in the way. Nicely done! And congrats all. I like the idea of linking Vocal+ into it as well. I don't mind paying for a platform that can act as a professional showcase (how I saw it in 2021). And I find it a fsir price for entering unlimited contests. So long as it never charges my readers. That crosses over to Medium and isn't the right fit for my audience (imo). I unpublished a lot of my best work to keep it safe after I read about the scraping. I'd like to put it back up.
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Excellent progress, it is sad that because of the few who choose to cheat in life the platform and energy in which it takes to maintain had to change drastically. I do however support the transition.
Congratulations to all!
Congratulations
Well done to all the winners… also great job Vocal on reviewing the Leaderboard.
I'm a bit sad to see that, this way, we will keep awarding those who already made a name for themselves on this platform, but I understand that we are all trying our best to keep AI and bots out of our community. Hope this will continue to bring out our needed change and that we can all support and interact and uplift everyone who is writing their hearts out! 🌟💝🥳 congratulations to the winners, and I'm sending sunshine and hugs to all of you!
Congratulations!!🎉🎉🎉
Really much better for us all now. Congratulations to everyone on the leader board you deserve to be there 🍀🍀🍀
Yayayaya sounds good!! Congratulations to all leaderboard winners! 🌟💝🥳🎉🥳🎉🥳🎉
Congratulations to all leaderboard winners this week and thanks so much for the HM which is much appreciated. Good to see the categories reviewed and it would be good to keep them under review in view of comments and ideas from creators. I think it is a shame to lose the most supportive category but can understand why it has been dropped. I wonder if there is anything or any methodology that could replace it. If I come up with anything I will comment again, if you are open to ideas. Otherwise, one category makes sense and good to honor 10 creators each week. And I imagine it is easy to spot comments that are not genuine. On the question of AI-generated content, quite right to exclude it but please don't dismiss AI outright. Generative AI can be used creatively and in a way that does not subvert genuine writing. It can also be used with commentary (as I have done in several articles) as a means of understanding capability and the rapid development of the technology. All of which takes some effort on the part of creators, to get the input text right, and then to try to make sense of the outcomes. Many of us also use generative AI to illustrate our articles which is even more of a creative skill. Writing off AI is not only a symptom of techno-fear (understandably in our case) it undermines the creative efforts of those of us who are doing what we can to understand whether and how to integrate generative AI in our work. I realise many think AI is evil and should be opposed at all costs and some choose not to use it at all, which is their choice. Some of us choose to use it in our creative endeavours and to learn more about the technology. To me, this is the same as when I first came across such other new technologies as the Internet, word processing (including spelling and grammar checks) desk top publishing, digital cameras and mobile (cell phone) telephony. For more details, please see some of the many articles I have written about AI, and using AI (clearly labelled as such) with appropriate commentary. Thanks for reading. R
The Vocal Leaderboards have been through a lot in two years. Retiring categories like Most Read Stories and Emerging Creators makes sense. The Most Supportive Commenters category sounds like a headache. I wonder how you'll finally get it right. And with the Most Subscribed to Creators, it's clear manipulation has been an issue. How do you plan to stop that without over - curating? It's good you're making changes to keep the platform authentic. But it seems like a never - ending battle against spam and bad behavior. Maybe you could involve the community more in policing these categories? That might lighten the load on you guys.
This is good and fantastic
yay!!!
Congratulation. I am new to here . Please support and me .
Congratulations everyone - and I like the change Vocal Team, makes it very straightforward and fair for all!
Congratulations everyone!