FYI, There’s a new Community on Vocal!

Our prayers have been answered! Today, Vocal has introduced a brand-new community to post our stories called ‘FYI’, and we at People! Just Say Something! are honoured to say that the Vocal team decided to reach out to offer us a chance to be one of the first blogs to be posted in the community. We agreed, obviously! Before we begin with the review, a little backstory is needed.

Vocal began 2021 with a brand-new website layout that introduced new features to the platform. These included the phenomenal addition of the ‘top creators’ that does a great job of showcasing talent on the site; the number of posts in each community and its creators; a more functional layout to drive traffic to its users, and much more. As soon as the new design aired on the platform, I analysed each page in great detail and posted a review explaining each feature and its comparison to the old design. I am happy that the post is our most viewed blog to date, so thank you! If you have not read it before or are looking to learn about all the fantastic features Vocal has to offer; you can check out the post below!

One of the comments I made was that the layout change did not alter anything in its ‘community’ feature. The Vocal team decided not to add any new or remove any existing communities from the page. I understand now that the January release focused solely on the platform's design and helping its Vocalists (a name I use for bloggers on Vocal) gain traffic to their profiles, which was a great start to the year. However, I raised a concern that many topics simply do not fit into any of the existing communities, specifically the arts sector. Being an artist myself, having a community to share my work, progress, research and inspiration in one place can easily replace any professional online portfolio, especially when your research can reward you with an audience and passive income. A month later, the FYI community has been added. So, what is FYI all about?

Facts, Trivia and Quirky Knowledge

The community layout is the same as any other community on the site. We see a description explaining the type of blogs present in the community, the number of stories posted, the number of creators present, the top stories in the community chosen by the Vocal team, and the latest stories published. Overall, nothing out of the ordinary here. Things get interesting when we understand the type of blog the FYI community is here to serve.

On the community page, Vocal states that:

‘FYI is home to obscure knowledge and interesting facts. Fans of pub trivia, historical mysteries, and niche docuseries share their unusual expertise here.’

- Vocal

My initial thoughts on the community were extremely positive. It seems that we finally have a community for all the crazy facts and knowledge that we wish to share with the world. The concept of random knowledge and information was the premise that People! Just Say Something! was founded. My partner and I tend to have pretty quirky thoughts that we cannot help but share, and previously this has been difficult as the communities Vocal gave us did not fit the description of our blogs. They were too farfetched and had to be either edited to suit a community or be rejected altogether. With FYI, our randomness finally has a home! Also, to add the cherry on the cake, a new Vocal Challenge is open for all users to post our favourite (un)common knowledge! The challenge is a strategic move to gain traffic to the new community, which I am sure will be a great success. Expect FYI to be filled with our posts in the future as it has released the previous censorship communities presented.

I think that Vocal realised the style of blogging People! Just Say Something! like to post, and thus offered us to be a part of the release of the community. They said that the team is actively trying to change the communities to fit the blogs that don’t quite have a perfect home on the platform. Thank you Vocal, we are moving in the right direction! Everyone loves trivia, and now that the community will become an archive consisting of quirky facts and experiences, we can only imagine the inspiration that will fuel the whole platform.

We were so excited about the release that instead of writing just one blog, we decided to write one each and send in two!

The first blog is about my favourite Famous Last Words said by some of the most notable figures in history. So many people have said crazy things before passing away. Some are hilarious, while others are heart-breaking. I decided to find ten of my favourite last words said before death alongside a brief background of the figures discussed. Some of the most notable people on the planet, such as Karl Marx, Roald Dahl, and Anna Pavlova. If you wish to give it a read, check it out below!

The second blog is about that moment that we’ve all experienced at some point in life. We tried a slice of strange meat for the first time, and the initial thing that comes to your mind is ‘this tastes like chicken!’ But that meat definitely isn’t chicken… So why does it taste like chicken? Believe it or not, there are several reasons behind it! If you wish to find out why this declaration is said when describing the tastes of unusual meaty textures and why so many things taste like chicken, then this blog exactly what you are looking for!

Now… for the negatives…

The biggest problem I can see is that Vocal tried to throw too big of a net over an even bigger pile of fish. (The net is the community and the fish being blog topics if it wasn’t clear…) Yes, the FYI trivia community has opened the door for a flood of new, exciting blogs to be posted; that is not in question here. I am afraid that the community will not hold a sense of a ‘community’ that the other communities do. The ‘Beat’ community's creators share a love for music, while ‘Geeks’ can share their passion for Sc-Fi and everything nerdy. Yes, FYI will share the common interest of trivia and quirky knowledge, but there is nothing concrete to share. We all find various topics interesting and will tend to be driven to the issues we wish to explore. I may be wrong, but I am afraid that releasing just one new community does not fill the void that people with specific passions, hobbies and interests have. It is merely a community for words, not the people. This leads me to a new question that stems from the original website review:

Does Vocal need to introduce a separate community for artists?

The short answer is, yes, it does! I speak from experience when I say that artists stick together. The arts are an industry that many other sectors disregard as less essential and deem it as ‘not needed’ in modern society. They call us unskilled, lazy, childish, not fit for a functioning society. They could not be further away from the truth. All this hatred drives us into support groups where we network and form new contacts and connections, share work and inspiration, meet other like-minded people, form friendships that last lifetimes, and support each other’s work wherever possible. These communities are where I found my closest friends, my greatest passions, and the love of my life. This is the exact reasons why an arts community on Vocal would flourish so well and, unfortunately, what FYI will lack. If Vocal could mimic the atmosphere of the café culture in the 20th century, where artists would gather and share experiences and theories, then the platform would become a hub for aspiring artists that, like before in history, is left behind, unfunded and shone down upon by the other industries. As Vocal advertises itself as a way of making extra passive income, the community would become an invaluable tool for artists of all backgrounds. There is already the awkwardness of networking with new people in the artistic community, especially for younger artists. To bring these benefits to an online platform where we can see hundreds of unique research files, progress reports, theories and work, AND get paid for it… It is simply too good to be true. I could talk on this topic for hours, and I look forward to seeing what Vocal decides to do next, but for now, all we can do is continue to create the best work we can and look forward to what comes next.

To conclude, I would first like to thank Vocal for this fantastic opportunity. We are honoured to be part of Vocals continuous growth and hope to continue to help in the future. I am not the most experienced blogger out there (I only started around four months ago), but to see that Vocal are engaging directly with their audiences and continuously searching for new ways to improve their platform for us is phenomenal. I hope you are as excited for Vocal's future as I am, so I invite you to join me and help us get this platform we call home to become the best community of bloggers on the internet!

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