Some Vocal Community Adjustments That Would Be Beneficial
Essentially Dropping The Word Limits On Some Communities
Introduction
A year ago, I wrote this about Vocal's "dead" communities, with suggestions for merging some of them
Recently, Wheel got a Top Story, which I was pleased to see, but I doubt Vocal would have the resources to merge the communities that I suggest.
This is prompted because often I write stories that should be in Communities which have a six hundred word minimum, but I cannot seriously stretch them out to six hundred words, and that is not because I am a bad writer, although I am quite laconic.
This story should have been in Petlife, but I ended up putting it in Critique. If you read it, you will see why.
These are the current zero limit communities:
So, Which Communities Should Have Their Minimum Word Count Set To Zero?
Horror
This is a subset of Fiction, and often we can write short horror pieces, but have to submit in Fiction, with a "Microfiction" and "Horror" tag.
Humor
Another subset of Fiction, and sometimes you can write short punny pieces, but they may have to be submitted to Poetry or Fiction, in the same way that I specified with Horror.
Petlife
For the reasons I specified in my recent Critique piece, that should really have been in this Community.
Beat
I do post a lot in this community, but my recent piece remembering Tom Lehrer ended up in Critique because I could not meet the requirement for the word count in the Beat community.
01 and FYI
Sometimes we have techniques and technical information that we want to share, but they don't need six hundred words to explain, although I did it with this really useful one for Windows users, which could have been explained in a hundred words or less.
Conclusion
These changes would be easy for Vocal to implement, and you may have other suggestions, so I would love to hear them in the comments.
I included Shack's "Comedy" because I love the song, I love the video, and one of the communities I mentioned is Humor.
Thank you so much for reading.
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Mike Singleton đź’ś Mikeydred
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Comments (7)
I once opened a ticket and suggested this. The response was that they had carefully decided word limits. I also suggested that they make Critique more clear because many items in there belong elsewhere. Seems that book and movie reviews should go here but that is not what their description says. Good points from you Mike!! I do agree with Dharr - so many times we have to add extra “stuff” just to meet the min.count. I think they also need more tags in the communities - some are missing ones that definitely should be there. I have not charted it out yet but it is aggravating when ready to publish and a good tag for the piece isn’t listed in the community. ❤️🙄
As always you bring up good points. The only disagreement you will get from me on this is the humor category. If it gets lowered to 0 word count I worry it will end up full of "laffy taffy" type jokes. Can you imagine the horror of AI and knock knock jokes? All joking aside, I love the passion you have for not only writing, but for improving Vocal. Every suggestion you make is proof you want to see Vocal thrive.
I want to suggest a way in which we are paid, too. We should be paid for the length of our stories as well as reads. Some people spend quite a long time drafting their stories before submitting them to Vocal's communities, and the pay does not do justice to those stories. Getting paid for reads is good, but we should be paid for our writing of the stories too.
Great job and ideas, Mike.
I think it would be better if there wasn't a 600 words minimum requirement for any community hehehe
Great suggestions!
Your suggestions are always useful and interesting for a humble scribbler like myself to consider, Mikeydred!