Community Creator Chat 10/9/24
My attempt to strike up the conversation again.
As of posting this, it’s been five months since the last Vocal Creator Chat. So… I doubt I’m the only one who has missed its regularity. Regardless of that regularity changing over time, it had become expected. Even predictable, to some extent. Now, it seems to have plateaued or paused or perhaps memory-holed…
My intention isn’t to complain, though. I want to offer this article as a space for anyone who wants to ask questions, express concerns or frustrations, or compliment the team. Consider this a town square, since ours has been changed or deleted quietly, or something.
With my luck, the normal chat will be reinstated the day after I publish this. 🫠 But whatever happens, it will be good for us to either dry run the real thing, or just talk to each other.
To be clear, I hold absolutely no power to get things changed. If you're hoping that by posting issues here, that somehow I can do anything...well, I can't. This is for us to talk to each other, to have something solid to refer to, to clear our minds. If you all want me to, I can email a copy of the comments to Support. That's the most I can do, though.
I hope it goes without saying, but please be kind, even to the Vocal leaders and crew. I say that because I know we all have some frustrations, and I don't think it's helpful to be mean or unkind in that.
So what’s eating at you? Who or what do you want to bring attention to? Any predictions or hopes (or dreads) about the future of Vocal? Any confusion, admiration, venting to be expressed about writing life, this platform, etc.?
***
I’ll start.
I’m dying to know if the Vocal Writing Awards will continue but I haven’t heard anything official. I know I’m not alone in my desire. In fact, wasn't October the month for the submissions last year? I asked about this five months ago, but has anyone else gotten an answer, one way or another?
Also, how are we feeling about our new ability to revert stories to draft and change communities? And to turn off comments on individual pieces? I, personally, and loving them. I just wish that non-V+ creators could edit their stories. Speaking of, can V+ peeps also edit the title/subtitle/image now? That would be awesome if true.
My only suggestion at this point is for the copy/paste function to work in Vocal's editor. I hate having to split screen with Google Docs to match formatting differences after I've pasted my story.
***
Let the conversation commence! ;D
About the Creator
Mackenzie Davis
“When you are describing a shape, or sound, or tint, don’t state the matter plainly, but put it in a hint. And learn to look at all things with a sort of mental squint.” Lewis Carroll
Boycott AI!
Copyright Mackenzie Davis.
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Comments (19)
Great idea Mackenzie! You are so good at community stuff 🤗
Great article! Congrats!!
⚡♥️⚡
lovely piece
Congratulations on placing first on this week's leaderboard for Most Discussed Stories!
Guess you're locked into this now 😉 Riding our collective angst to the top of the Leaderboard weekly is a master stroke, now that I think about it.
I wasn't aware you had done this until today. Kudos on taking the initiative and congratulations on the leaderboard win!
Yay Mackenzie!!!!! Back to say congrats on Most discussed story this week!! 🎉
well done
Mackenzie, I love that you're holding space for us to have these discussions and connect about writing adjacent things!! I appreciate that above all else!! 💚
You CAN infact edit the title and the image and sub title now. I was STOKED when this feature rolled out the day after I realized I made a big mistake in one of my exclusive stories titles. lol. So wait? I was LITERALLY just contemplating joining the discord right before I clicked on this article. So whats happening with the discord? Should I bother?
This is such a great idea, Mackenzie! Thank you so much for doing this. ❤️ I am so thrilled about this recent editing upgrade - being able to delete and revert our own pieces is something that's been needed for so long. I've noticed that Vocal has stopped promoting Top Stories on their facebook page. They stopped only a couple weeks or so after saying they would start promoting them across more platforms to help us get more reads (if I remember correctly). Also, I was pretty bummed because I had a Top Story during that short timespan and they skipped right over it! It never got promoted :( I was so sad. Anyway, I'm just wondering what their plan with this is. Admittedly, I haven't been on Instagram in a hot minute, and I'm not sure what promoting they might be doing over there. I've heard, though, it's similar to what they're doing on Facebook. Maybe I just need to crack back into more of my socials. I also wish Vocal would publish a more up-to-date bio of their judges. I know there is one from several years ago, but we have no way to know if those are stil the same judges that are reading our work. While the mystery of Vocal is addictive to me (lol), I often wish for more transparency. I just think it would generate more trust.
Hi Mackenzie, It does seem difficult to communicate with people here on Vocal. Sometimes if I want to know more about what is going on, I check out Justin @ Vocal page. He is a founding member, so some of the updates going on come out in articles on his page. The last update was one or two months ago though. I have read that you can edit titles now. I haven't tried it, but once or twice when I first started, I needed to contact the staff to correct a typo, so I'll be glad if I can just fix it in the future. Natalie
Awww, this was honestly so nice of you to do Mackenzie! I love all the new changes but I have two things that are rubbing me the wrong way: 1. The amount of spam being published. Like okay, I know AI is here to stay but it annoys me so much to see stuff posted in the wrong communities. 2. I would love for Top Stories to be back on top. It kinda defeats it's purpose to be called that but pushed to the bottom
Missing the Creator Chat! 👋🏽 Maybe they’ve put it on pause while they’re rolling out the updates? Great idea to see what people are thinking 💭 Be interested to know who (if anyone?) is using Exclusive Stories, and seeing any uptake in that? I think it was well-intentioned, but not sure it’ll hit. The Writing Awards coming back would be cool, as I didn’t get involved last year! Sidenote- I commented recently on your Pivot piece (so it’s probably been lost in the comment stream haha) as I’m curious about how that’s going, and where you’re pitching things to🤗
Likes: they dropped a whole bunch of challenges, all of which are right up my alley. Disliked: they all came at the same time when I’m trying to focus on other WIPs lol
This was on my mind this week already as I went down a rabbit hole in the Resource tab, lol! Great idea, Mackenzie :) I will add here (like I did in the comments for the recent updates) that a revamp of the stats page is desperately needed. There needs to be a search option for sure. When you have pages of stories, it's stupid to go through every one trying to find a specific story to see how it's doing. Justin did respond and say an update to the stats page was coming soon, so maybe if anyone else has features they'd like to see for that next update? Thanks again for doing this!! Hope you're all well :)
This is a great idea to do this, I completely forgot about the Vocal Creators Chat😅 I bet they will start it up again now coz this story will get so much discussion😂 And yes, Vocal+ people can edit titles, subtitles and images! So exciting🥰 I really really want to be able to organise our profiles, like have albums (idk what it’d be called) or some way to group different stories. Also I just want more challenges in general😭
I personally just want to celebrate that the big Editing update introduced a bug with our profile chronologies that, a week later, has now been fixed 😁 Of course, it would have been nice if it hadn’t been introduced in the first place, but I’m not used to this level of responsiveness and it’s awesome. Also, two major feature releases in what, two months? After a year of stagnation, that’s pretty impressive. And finally, I feel like they haven’t called out this, but I noticed the Settings page got some updates. Specially, you can now turn off notifications for comments. Don’t know how often that will be used, but some creators love to bit— er, mention how many notifications they get, and that’s a promising sign that other notification toggles/filters are on the horizon.