Vocal is No Longer a Thing of the Past

According to my Vocal profile, I've been a Vocalite since 2019 (although I cannot remember creating my account in 2019). 2020, however, a.k.a the year of COVID and quarantine, was the year I actually began writing on Vocal. At the time, I was in my last year of college and I had lost my passion for writing. This was largely caused by the fact that my entire college career was spent writing academic essays for my peers in order to make money. I had a gift for writing, something that had been evident to me from my playground days, and I knew I could monetize my skills so I wouldn't have to obtain a regular job while trying to maintain my GPA at school.

I spent years writing about topics that barely interested me but made me a successful entrepreneur on campus. And soon enough, with having to pay bills, buy groceries, and just being an adult, writing became a job. Something that I did because I had to in order to survive, not the thing that had once brought me so much joy and freedom. But in 2020, I found an ad for Vocal and decided to give it a shot, thinking that I could replace the money I made writing papers with money from writing things I actually enjoyed. While I didn't make nearly as much on Vocal as I had writing papers, this new website rekindled my love for writing and I shut the door on my essay writing business for good.

In 2020-2021, which I consider the height of my Vocal days, the website was a different beast than it is today. And it's been interesting to see how much it has evolved from the time I first started til now.

The Top Creators

In my early days of Vocal, creators like Laquesha Bailey, RJ, and Kathryn Milewski ran the site. Their names frequented the top stories lists (or as they were once known as - "staff-picked stories"), they placed in challenges, and even had Vocal Spotlight pieces written about them. Now, these creators' profiles have largely gone abandoned and their spots have been replaced by names like Naomi Gold, C.H. Richard, and Judey Kalchik.

Fiction

2021, Vocal also made a pretty smart move and created the Fiction community. Prior to this change, there were fiction writers on Vocal, but they didn't have nearly as much notoriety as the Vocal Fiction writers of today. The Vocal staff even created a series of fiction challenges, which was definitely unheard of on the site at that time, and attracted a slew of new fiction writers. For someone like myself who had gained some popularity on the site for writing blog posts, listicles, playlists, and general nonfiction content, I'll be honest by saying that this change scared me. I tried my hand at entering the fiction challenges, with very little luck, and my fiction content proved to not be as popular as my nonfiction content. Despite ultimately wanting to write novels, delving into the fiction world was intimidating for me. But now, Fiction writers have definitely found their place on Vocal, with some of the more notable creators on the site being mainly fiction writers.

Poetry

Poetry has also made a big come up on the site. If you were a poet publishing your poems on Vocal pre-2022, you definitely had your work cut out for you in terms of gaining recognition. In one of my earliest stories on the site (which also happened to be my very first top story), I wrote about five ways to not be successful on Vocal. And one of them basically stated: be a poet. In that article, I wrote that the Poets community on Vocal is oversaturated and that if you want to post poetry on here, don't expect a whole lot of reads. That's definitely not true in 2023.

Poetry has become a permanent resident among top stories on this site and several challenges have been dedicated specifically to writing poetry. You would be hard pressed to go more than a day or two without seeing a poem make its way on the homepage and honestly, it's refreshing to see.

New Ways to Engage

The biggest change on Vocal though, has been the amount of engagement and community. Before Vocal had incorporated comments and subscribers, Vocalites had to get creative when it came to letting other creators know that we enjoyed their work. It spawned several Facebook groups and while those groups were great, for someone like myself who doesn't use Facebook often, the official Discord has been a blessing. It's also been so much easier to be able to comment directly on a creator's story rather than having to hunt down a link they posted in a Facebook group after reading.

And now Vocal creators seem to have a lot more say in what goes on on the site. From the Vocal Creator chats that allow us to ask questions and make suggestions and get actual feedback from the Vocal staff to being able to suggest new communities and challenges, Vocal is becoming a site that is by the people and for the people.

It's great to see how far the site has come and though my nostalgia sometimes causes me to miss the way things were (particularly the creators that have come and gone), the new Vocal is proving to be a thriving community for internet creators. And in the end, isn't that what it's all about?

__________________________

Follow me on Instagram to see more interesting content and if you liked this post, make sure to hit the follow button.

Thanks for reading!

-Chanté