Dancing With Myself

Introduction

Vocal allows us to subscribe to ourselves and heart our own stories (it means that my stories get at least one heart 🌞🌝) so I do that. It is useful to see how prolific I am against other creators I subscribe to.

The music, appropriately, is "Dancing With Myself" by Fingerprintz

So What Else Do I Have An Issue With

If I were to put the pros and cons of Vocal on a scale (I am a Libra) the scale would come crashing down in favour of the pros, which means I am comfortable calling out Vocal on the cons, and they do need continually caling out on the cons, and I have done so many times in the past (though they never respond, apart from "we're working on it" or "it's on the roadmap" and we all know what that means).

Vocal never told us that the new Home Page was coming, it came and they gave themselves this Top Story to tell us (I wonder if Vocal gives themselves $5 for these stories, a bit of a cheat if they do)

Anyway, the Home Page was just Top Stories and the first time I went on the new Home Page I saw my latest story and thought "Wow, A Top Story after five minutes, that must be a record", then I realised that something was wrong. This was just my subscriptions, once again.

Then another Creator congratulated me on a Top Story, but it was just that it had appeared in the feed on their new Hom Page because they are subscribed to me. That made me think I had got a top Story, but then I realised what had happened so that brought me down, and the other Creator was surprised that the new Home Page had caused them to make a mistake.

I have five places I can see my subscriptions on the Home Page, but the reality is that I only need one, or two at most.

I still hate that the Home page is taken over by my subscriptions.

The Saved stories may be useful, but as yet mine is empty, because I read stories when I see them and they catch my eye. I can see it might be good, but I hope that saving a story does not count as an initial unpaid read, meaning that the Creator of the piece doesn't get their 0.6c when the reader comes back to give it a real read.

We will get used to it, we don't have any choice. Vocal has implemented it, and now they will hopefully turn their attention to fixing some faults, but it will probably be a new way of putting subscribed creators onto the Home Page (that is a joke).

I am still using my Subscription Feed, which is excellent, and I love the "Stories I Liked" feature which I use when I want to share stories in Vocal Social Society Features such as this one:

Conclusion

Vocal does have faults but it is the best platform to share our work and engage with other creators.

I love that the Challenges are more often, with smaller prizes. When you are hoping for a ten thousand dollar prize and you don't win, it can be soul-destroying, but if you miss out on a five hundred dollar prize it is nowhere near as upsetting. The Challenges provide me with prompts for stories and I am thankful for that.

So this is me signing off, trying to come to terms with the new Vocal Home Page.

Thank you so much for reading, I really appreciate it.