Introducing The New Vocal Leaderboard

It's been almost two years since we launched the Vocal Leaderboards. In that time we've been able to highlight a lot of incredible stories and creators that shape this platform. At the same time, we've also had to sort through more than our fair share of AI, spam and quite frankly garbage content to get there too.

So as we're making some changes to ensure Vocal remains a space for authentic creators to share their stories, hone their skills, and grow their craft, we figured now is a good time to reflect, address concerns, and share what’s next for the Weekly Bonus Leaderboards.

Some Categories Worked Better Than Others...

Some of you might remember that we retired the Most Read Stories category early on. While it naturally tends to favor SEO-driven content, we found ourselves having to curate it heavily. Stories about 'Top OnlyFans Creators' or true crime pieces with graphic images were consistently rising to the top. It’s not that we take issue with that kind of content, if it’s well-crafted and follows our community guidelines, it has a place. But it didn’t reflect the type of storytelling our core community values or enjoys creating.

Another category that we decided to sunset because of the massive amount of curation required was Emerging Creators. While this section of the Leaderboard was successful at spotlighting and supporting some new creators on the platform, it unfortunately was the category where we saw the most attempted manipulation.

Current Categories

We know some of you see the Most Supportive Commenters category as a bit of a mess... and honestly, you're not entirely wrong. We did put several safeguards in place, like character minimums and limits, filtering out comments with URLs, and factoring in various qualitative and sentiment-based metrics. But even with those, it’s been tricky to get it right and here we are curating another category.

When it comes to the Most Subscribed to Creators, this category definitely saw it's fair share of attempted manipulation, but mostly from fringe users creating fake accounts to subscribe to themselves—a tactic that was fairly easy to spot. We received a decent amount of backlash for awarding this category to creators accused of using AI in their work. From our perspective, the priority was verifying whether the subscribers were real, rather than analyzing the entire body of work of the creator being followed. In the end, this category simply requires too much oversight to remain sustainable.

And what can we really say about the Most Likes category? Sure we can put safeguards on it to ensure that only established creators are being counted, but at the end of the day its a low-effort engagement category with too much overlap with Most Discussed.

So where do we go from here?

Introducing the New and Improved Weekly Vocal Leaderboard

Let's simplify things a bit and make this more of a real leaderboard rather than a heavily curated list of stories and creators.

So here's what we're thinking....

One category: Most Discussed Stories

Here are the rules and some things to keep in mind:

The time period of data analyzed for each weekly Leaderboard is collected from 12:00am Wednesday - 11:59pm Tuesday ET each week. That means all stories published and comments created within that timeframe will count.

Only top level comments and replies by Vocal+ creators will count, comments or replies by the story author will be excluded.

You don’t need to be Vocal+ to appear on the leaderboard.

You can appear on the Leaderboard once per week.

If you appeared on the Leaderboard last week you can appear on the Leaderboard this week since it will be for a different story.

This might be an obvious one but No AI generated content.

Bonus structure:

• 1st Place: $20
• 2nd Place: $15
• 3rd Place: $10
• 4th Place: $8
• 5th Place: $5
• Honorable Mentions (6th - 10th place): $3

We believe this will better reflect our core user base and the kind of storytelling they truly value. So, without further ado, here are this week’s winners.

✨ Most Discussed Stories this Week ✨

Here are the stories that have sparked the most comments with their engaged readers this week.

🏆 Winners

🥇 First Place ($20 Bonus): D.K. Shepard - Vocal Acrostic Challenge

🥈 Second Place ($15 Bonus): Mike Singleton 💜 Mikeydred - Emergency Backup Account - Should We Use Vocal Stories To Highlight Platform Issues?

🥉 Third Place ($10 Bonus): River and Celia in Underland - No Link in Bio

🏅 Forth Place ($10 Bonus): Lamar Wiggins - Security Blankets

🏅 Fifth Place ($8 Bonus): Heather Hubler - a glutton for more

🌟 Honorable Mentions

Raymond G. Taylor - Oh, Jeff: The book

Tiffany Gordon - Last Summer, An Elder I Became...✝️🧑🏾‍🦳👶🏾🧑🏾‍🦳👶🏾

Rachel Deeming - Potion

Novel Allen - Locked in Vocal jail

Paul Stewart - Of Chaos and Consequence

Each winner will receive a well-deserved bonus in their Vocal Wallets within the next 72 hours.

Congratulations to all the winners! We love what you bring to the table at Vocal. Here's to another week of excellent writing and reads.

And stay tuned for an update on the Honorable Mentions category for upcoming Vocal Challenges... don't worry we haven't forgotton about that either.