Dear Vocal pt. 2 (2024)

Hey there Vocal, you may not remember me. I first wrote this article.

You don't necessarily have to read it.

In summary I asked you guys to either make the following communities or make them tags: Asian dramas(k-drama, j-drama, c-drama etc), otakus(anime) and Sims lit(- stories made by simmers.)

• Simmers- gamers that play the sims 4/ and or any other sims game.

There is no concrete place to post sims lit, so I had the hopes that Vocal could become that place where every simmer gravitates to, to post their stories and get properly rewarded for its popularity. But sadly, those stories never got popular.

It's been a long time since then, and I no longer have the same views or requests about this, I can understand why this didn't become a thing, the community that liked these things were probably super small if not non-existent. Why I'm here today is for a different reason entirely.

(below is currently my article that has the most views 1,933- it may not be much to some but it is for me.)

As you can see, I am a simmer, I post Sims 4 related stories and articles about mods and custom content (cc) for the Sims 4, and was pleasantly surprised when I realized that people were reading a few of them.

Now I understand when writing stories, we authors also have a responsibility to try and promote our stories and articles to get more views. I don't specifically recall promoting the popular stories I currently have too heavily, so for me it was a miracle that some started to get a lot of views. However I couldn't help noticing that most of my other content barely get any attention, and they are not all that different. I thought others clicked on it because they were interested in the Sims but that didn't seem to be the case.

As I was trying to figure out what to do, I encountered something.

The search engine for Vocal... it doesn't work? It's very picky. Sometimes generating a few hits but mostly matching none.

I typed in "Sims 4" into the search bar of Vocal and only one sims 4 related thing came up, and it only had "Simmer" in its title. Compared to my titles which mostly have "sims 4" in it... I'm not going to lie it left me very confused.

How does Vocal actually work? How were my posts getting traction and still getting traction to this day if others can't even find it? I only have one subscriber, it is not like I am even popular for others to keep finding my content.

I am very grateful to vocal, I understand it's come a long way and it's still a new site but it isn't just with this. Even with my non-sims related content and poetry, I can't help but notice that even my super old posts never got any views at all (I'm talking absolute ZERO) which makes me wonder what exactly is the process here.

It left me with many questions:

1. When stories are published do they not get shown to the public at all? Are people simply not clicking on them? Are they even being featured in the community when published? - because it feels like whenever I check certain communities I also only see a popular story that has always been there.
2. How much do writers have to take it upon themselves to post their content to different platforms for it to get any attention?
3. Or does it simply just not reach a certain level of quality and never sees the light of day? (Because I will admit I do have a few articles with hiccups I still need to correct but haven't since I currently can't afford Vocal +.)
4. Do people click on it just because the thumbnail is pretty? I have some content with pretty thumbnails so why is it still 0?
5. Do popular posts keep getting shown and promoted over and over compared to new posts?

I'd really like an answer to this. I've seen others who manage to make a quite a lot on vocal, but as for me I feel like I haven't because I still have no clue as to how vocal traction works, and still haven't mastered how to promote my specific niche content to other platforms even among my sims 4 community, we can talk about sims all the time but getting someone to read a sims lit story or article is off.

Even though I said my previous article isn't related to this one, I still feel like Vocal needs to reconsider the necessity of adding more tags/keywords, to make it easier for others to search and find things on Vocal.