Nominations For Top Stories

We've had comments added after being requested for years. We've had writers and readers noticed for their valiant efforts. Editing stories is under a paywall. I'm not sure if anyone has ever suggested it for this site, and I thought of something that would help make Vocal become more interactive: an option to nominate stories to be a top story. It may just be an extra $5, but that tip would mean a lot to that author and it all adds up in the end.

I think a lot of people would use the feature to nominate a story for a top story should it ever be introduced. On the site where people nominated reviews, I remember one writer saying that their top stories went down after they stopped saying they nominated.

It would also give me a lot of nostalgic memories of places where I used to write. I believe I've written about both websites on here in the past, but it's been a while. I believe one was called Dooyoo, and another was called Ciao. Back in college, I wrote on two sites that were both owned by the same company. They called themselves shopping platforms.

We wrote reviews on there, and other readers had to rate the reviews as helpful or not helpful and only good ratings counted towards payment. Neither site exist anymore. Perhaps a few of them have posted on Vocal, Medium and maybe Substack.

Both paid a small amount of money for writing, and we often cross-posted our content to the same sites to generate more income. I always remembered finding one website more fun than the other because there was a feature where you could nominate other people's work for top stories. I also think it would depend on what the story is about and whether it is relevant to the times. I think Vocal is a great site and has the potential to be more. It may be overshadowed by other writing websites, but this is where most of my writing income comes from now other than the ALC collections I get once or twice a year.

I don't think much of the stuff I wrote there survived, but I do remember saving all the reviews that were highly commended and posted them on Vocal. Sometimes it took me a few tries because back when Vocal started, cross-posting wasn't allowed, but it seems to be acceptable to share on other websites now. Sometimes it's best to make a comment saying that the story was previously posted elsewhere, especially if written under a different name. I rarely use different names online. My pen name and IGN tag tend to be the same everywhere.

I think Vocal would benefit from something like this. I bet there are a lot of people who have read a story and wondered why Vocal hasn't picked it as a top story. I wouldn't know how they would make it work, but I guess it's one way to deter AI slop from being selected to be a top story when there are plenty of written works still being crafted by the flow of the keyboard.

I think the option for readers to nominate a story to be a top story would be a real incentive to promote engagement. Readers can put a comment to say that they nominated the story, and it would make authors happy. More engagement = more motivation = more content.

As well as the story nominations. I believe in most caterories the permitted word count is 600-3000. Poetry used to be 100, but I think they got rid of that now. They might have changed that, but I think the minimum word count should be lowered to maybe 400 to prevent me from needlessly padding stories just to meet the word count. Some things are better left keep short and sweet.