Insights Into Vocal Insights

Introduction To Vocal Insights

Vocal Insights are a way of leaving your opinion on a Vocal story that you have read as well as the heart you may have left. You don’t have to leave insights and I was worried that they may affect the interaction and comments that we get from the Facebook Vocal Groups.

The Vocal piece on the benefits of Insights is below and you may wish to take a read of that before proceeding. While it is nice to get positive insights into your story I do think there are certain issues with the Vocal Insights which is essentially the point of this post.

Issues With Vocal Insights ( and Issues and Benefits in other Vocal Improvements)

In the past Vocal introduced Subscriptions which seemed a great way of seeing how popular you are with other Vocal Creators, but if even half of my two hundred and eighty seven Subscribers read my stories I would be making a decent amount of money from Vocal reads, but I believe virtually none of my reads come from subscriptions, and while I dip into my subscriptions and read some stories, I just use it to check out people I have not read via the Facebook groups recently. I find the Stories You Have Liked a far more useful tool.

Then there were Pledges which I never activated and said I would never actually pledge a recurring payment to my closest Creator friends. I think the Vocal Tips are far more useful because you can leave a dollar tip to show your appreciation. I usually do it for new Creators to make them feel appreciated and hopefully stimulate their creativity. I don’t if anyone uses Pledges at all.

Then there was pinning and story filtering with I find very useful to this day, this almost means I could dispense with my directories, but with 530 stories including 210 poems, I find the directory still more reliable for searching.

Then there are Vocal Insights.

My first problem is that you don’t know if any insights have been left on your story unless someone tells you either by a message or a Facebook comment, or you go into your story and scroll down. We could do with some way of knowing where a story has had insights added maybe an Indicator on the stats list as messaging may turn into spam for popular creators, though I wouldn’t have that problem.

Another nice touch would be the number of reads a story has had when the creator drops into the story from the profile page, the Stats page misses lots of stories where the number of reads is the same for many stories.

When you leave insights all are positive and predefined so you can’t leave an objective comment (that is a comment that says something about the story) and you cannot identify who has left insights unless they tell you.

I’m also not sure whether insights may influence whether something is a top story, though given that top stories are “hand-picked” maybe they don’t. It depends on whether reviewers can see the insights given to stories, but would that matter if the reviewer thought a story was worth a top spot?

And Now Comments

Vocal has added the ability to comment. You can choose whether to allow comments or not but the default is to allow comments. You can actually get email notifications of comments but hopefully that will be a summary each day, but you can switch them off.

One of the worries is negative and hateful commenting. I don't know if anything is in place to counteract it, and given the fact that the default is "comments on", this may be an issue for some people. You can see who posted the comment so any issues can be reported, although comments can be deleted.

While you can interact it is limited to that post and only people who visit that post can see it. Although I was worried this may seriously affect the Facebook Vocal groups, I don't think it will. It's a nice touch with limited benefits Vocal would be better fixing other issues like search problems and STAT listings.

Conclusion on Vocal Insights

I think that the idea of insights is a good idea but the fixed format feels a bit limited. But again on Medium, you can leave all sorts of feedback and I find that I get totally lost with that, and find Medium very messy whereas Vocal is generally very tidy. Everything to do with the story is kept in one place and that for me is a major plus even if it’s not perfect.

So essentially Insights I find OK but not sure if they are needed, but it is good to give people the option.

They don't really help to improve your writing but let you know that readers like certain aspects of your creations.