Are Our Stories Still Being Moderated By Vocal?

Introduction

The reason I am writing this is that I believe that the Vocal Moderation Team have been let go, and then our stories are suddenly being published almost immediately after their submission. I am unaware of any official change in method or policy from Vocal and they have never acknowledged any question I have put to them in my fourteen months of Vocal but I am just one of seven million on the platform, although they recognise me as a Top Creator in Beat for some reason.

The Reason For The Change

There could be a few reasons for this:

The most worrying is that moderation has just stopped, maybe to stop the flow of Vocal Plus members drifting to Medium. Personally, I find Medium more about getting followers than actual writing, like Twitter, but that is solely my opinion and I know I lot of people love Medium and I have a presence there too.

Secondly, and this is the one that I really hope is the situation, they have a new team using AI to moderate posts and this is now working really well meaning that the Vocal people who are in charge of moderation can speed through the publication of stories almost automatically and much more quickly.

Since the new fast publications, I have not had a rejection for “broken links”, “story not meeting standards” or other reasons, and this in turn makes me a little more confident in my writing.

I recently had a story first rejected for “plagiarism” a week after submission. When I asked why I got no reply so I resubmitted it and another week later it was rejected for “broken links”, again I questioned Vocal, but no answer, so I resubmitted and a week later it was published. You can read it below.

It was obvious they were under enormous pressure due to challenges as well as day-to-day maintenance but it would be good to have a permanent “State of Play” on the Vocal front page, make it a Top Story permanently pinned to the front page and updated when needed, and this would be a great history of how Vocal is actually doing and display greater transparency to Vocal supporters.

Vocal Is Not Perfect, but it is Perfect For My Writing

Vocal still has lots of flaws, not least the stats reporting and I reported on the problems which will probably never be addressed, although I really wish they could sort them out (if I had access to their code I could fix a lot of them within the day) but check out the article below for my observations on the situation.

The thing is people complain that there are not enough challenges, there is not enough focus on fiction and there is too much poetry, but the point is Vocal focuses its members on the creation of content, and with the addition of post-story commenting allows users who are only connected via Vocal to interact with each other and I recently got a subscription via this method, so there are continual improvements in the system as well. This does not take away the fact that if you want an audience for your work you do have to grow it yourself.

Personally, I have been severely criticised for publishing too many stories, but my writing is mostly articles like this, poetry and music. My fiction is very limited although all my writing gets a great reaction and seriously, I could not expect anyone to read everything I write, and I am the same with other people, and I always will pick up on the good stuff and know that I will miss a lot of it too.

Conclusion

I really do hope a Vocal Moderator or Administrator sees this and clarifies things and puts any worries that the users and supporters have to rest.