Vocal Creator Chat: 04/16/2024
A place to connect and discuss all things Vocal.
Have questions about creating stories, growing your audience, and getting rewarded on Vocal? The Vocal community and team are here to help answer your questions and feedback together.
Monthly on Tuesday at 12 PM ET, we'll assemble the Vocal community, as well as our Creator Experience and Product teams, in a thread to respond to creator inquiries for one hour.
Please follow Vocal’s Community Guidelines and don’t spam your own profile or stories in the thread. We encourage the community to report users or comments that break these guidelines.
Some updates and reminders from the Vocal team:
- 🕒 We extend our sincerest apologies for the recent delays in addressing support tickets. We understand the frustration this has caused, and we're diligently working to catch up. Please note that inquiries will be answered in the order received.
- 🐘 We also want to address another elephant in the room: lack of new feature updates. Our priorities are shifting back towards product development, and we'd like to share some highlights from our roadmap. Your invaluable feedback has been instrumental in shaping these developments. Please see some of the coming updates below.
- Report AI-generated Content: We're introducing a drop-down reason for reporting stories and comments specifically for AI-generated content. Additionally, we're updating our oonboarding submission guidelines to include a clear claim about the disclosure of AI-generated content.
- AI-generated Content Label: A new feature will allow creators to label the top of their stories with a dedicated tag indicating their content's AI assistance. This label will be integrated into the submission process, ensuring transparency for readers. Distribution of AI-generated content on the site will be limited.
- Customized Notifications: You'll soon have the flexibility to customize notifications, including filtering between notifications related to your own stories and those about subscribers' new publications.
- Enhanced Stats : We're adding new stats capabilities, such as tracking recently read stories and read counts over time, empowering you to fine-tune your content strategy.
- New communities: We are planning to launch 4 new communities that will have special challenges to celebrate their kickoff. Please let us know which of these you would like to see in the next launch, or give us your best suggestion!
- About Me: Get to know your fellow creators. Share yourself with a community dedicated to celebrating individuality.
- Spirituality: Reflections on mindfulness, faith, and the pursuit of spiritual fulfillment.
- Science Fiction: Embark on thrilling adventures to distant galaxies and alternate realities.
- Fantasy Fiction: Step into enchanting realms filled with magic, mythical creatures, and epic quests.
- Reviews (Movies & TV): Discover insightful commentary and recommendations on the latest entertainment releases and classics.
- Collaborate: Collaborate with fellow creators on writing stories together.
- Micro (fiction): Dive into the art of storytelling distilled to its essence. Bite-sized narratives that pack a punch in just a few words.
- Prompts: Ignite your creativity with creator-submitted prompts and challenges.
*Final selection of this round of new communities will be chosen with the help of the Vocal Advisory Committee.
While we're excited about these developments, we acknowledge that addressing the backlog of support tickets remains a top priority. We're actively working to streamline the process and enhance our support infrastructure to ensure timely resolution of your queries.
Got questions about Vocal or feedback about what’s new? Leave a comment in this thread to join the Vocal Creator Chat.
Also, be sure to join our Raise Your Voice Threads biweekly on Thursdays at 12PM ET to champion inspiring stories and outstanding creators on Vocal. Save it to your calendar so you don’t miss it.
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📢 Raise Your Voice Thread: 04/25/2024
Our “Raise Your Voice Threads” are hosted every other Thursday at 12PM ET to offer creators more avenues to uncover exceptional stories on Vocal. As we are continuously searching for fresh creators and inspiring stories, this thread provides an opportunity to exchange and discuss the stories that have moved and motivated us on Vocal.
By Raise Your Voice by Vocal5 days ago in Resources
Comments (63)
Looking at the new communities and only Spirituality is something that obviously stands on its own, and I am not religious. All the fictions can be slotted undet FICTION with appropriate tags and we havee Fantasy, Sci-Fi and Micro there already. Ameer Bibi's idea for a short form non fiction community could work. Reviews are posted in GEEKs and the like, but its own community would make it easier to post. Prompts and Collaborate already happen, I have done several collaborations, but maybe the two could be combined into a single community. That will be four more that I will write in so I can still say I have posted in every Vocal community.
All updates are fintastic, even improvement in stats, looking more opportunities to grow on vocal. I want to add one option in writers is short form, ranging from 150-250. Because all short stories could not be fiction. There are some real stories events or thoughts. It should be included. Thanks and best regards
About me, spirituality, and prompts seem like good community ideas. The fiction ones can be tags in the fiction community. Glad to hear about these updates.
Information is key, thanks a lot
I'm excited to see these new updates! I love the idea of the About Me, Micro(fiction), and Prompts communities.
Permit me enthusiastically to vote for both Science Fiction and Fantasy Fiction, and to thank you for continuing to expand and refine this writerly community!
Glad to see new networks! My top decisions would be otherworldliness, miniature (fiction) which can include science fiction and dream, prompts and work together! Anticipating some news!
Hey I’ve got a question: Why aren’t the subtitles shown on the main website, instead being replaced with the first few lines of prose, but on the mobile app you show the subtitle?
I am honestly so stoked about all these improvements, especially the AI stuff. Top four picks are fantasy, sci-fi, micro, and prompts. New communities are always exciting! Such great updates!
I’d like to see all the new communities. I think out of all of them I love the spirituality.
Happy to see new communities! My top choices would be spirituality, micro (fiction) which can encompass sci-fi and fantasy, prompts and collaborate! Looking forward to some news!
To be completely honest, I love these community ideas, but I'm worried that the real issue isn't the number of communities, it's how they work (or rather, don't). Hear me out! (this might get long, though, so apologies in advance...) The way I see it, we have far too many communities and the descriptions are not sufficient to properly categorize Creators' stories. I mean, if I write a blog article that covers a confession, life advice, stuff about my workplace, and my gender, that could go in four or five communities (Confessions, Motivation, Journal, Viva, Lifehack). Wouldn't broadening them be better than adding more specific and NEW ones? For example, Poets has over 170,000 stories currently. That's LEAGUES more than even Fiction, but it's almost 200 times more than Men has! Why? Well, I think it's because Poets is massively broad compared to Men. You can write nearly anything that doesn't have a proper story or the length of a bloggy article and call it a poem. But for Men community, most people won't choose it unless it's specifically about masculine topics of interest or men themselves. Plus, a poem about men is going in Poets, not Men. Do you see the issue? I find myself wanting to publish in more communities, but ultimately sticking to the broader categories, like Writers, Fiction, and Poets because it's more logical. I can hone my niches and still have variety in what I post. But my profile (and everyone else's) will become an absolute mess if we keep adding to the communities like this, spreading our topics too narrowly, and trying to categorize literally anything a writer could be interested in. We could group so many communities into a "Lifestyle Blog" community, a broad category that would include many points of interest, like Feast, Wander, Styled, Blush, Proof, Potent, and Lifehack. It could even include Petlife and Marriage, and I'm sure the argument could be made for Humans and even Journal. Then you have your Business & Tech category with 01, Gamers, Chain, Futurism, Trader, and possibly Journal. What about Sociopolitics? Swamp, Serve, Earth, and possibly a couple others. Education would include FYI, Education, History, Geeks, and Art (which should include Photography imo, but that could go under Tech or maybe a Hobbies community too along with Wheel and Geeks, perhaps). See what I mean? Broader means more people will write in those communities. Broader means most communities don't get routinely ignored for Top story. Broader means more READER interest (a big issue on Vocal, not enough pieces are being read outside the main, like, three communities (Fiction, Poets, and Humans) Broader topics means less niche topics and thus fewer turn offs for people who, say, hate alcohol and don't wanna read a story in the Proof community (etc). I don't see the benefit in adding more communities for Fiction. We don't do that for poetry, we just have tags. Everyone knows a poem when they see it. Same thing with a story. Just have sci fi and fantasy tags. Possibly a micro community would be fun for super short pieces, but then again, we already have the microfiction tag working wonders. Why complicate things? If anything, I'd like to see a Discussion community to incorporate Bookclub, Writers, Interview, Men, and Women (Viva's title makes no sense). This could also include About Me, but I see the benefit in having that be its own community, like a nice forum-like place for introductions and targeted blog-like posts. Granted, a Blog community (as mentioned above) would be nice too, and would absorb several existing communities. Spirituality would also fall under such a one. With Prompts and Collaborate, I think those could be good. I'd be happy with the former as a nice catch-all for the current unofficial challenges, but for the latter, I think it's superfluous. Maybe a tag in all applicable communities would be better? Or combine Critique and Collaborate into a flat-out Workshop community. THAT would be really cool. Overall, I think the communities need a LOT of work. Broader categories, longer and more descriptive summaries of each one (that we can all easily see and access), and fewer of them. I think Vocal as a community has been wanting to see more intentionality with the communities, and right now, I really don't see how adding these ones would fix the deeper issue. Am I totally off base, anyone who made it this far? Or is this something you'd like to see addressed in a different way?
My top 4 picks: Spirituality Micro-fiction Prompt About me ❣ ❣ ❣
This is really nice,will be thrilled having these new features rolled out especially Spirituality: Reflections on mindfulness, faith, and the pursuit of spiritual fulfillment and Reviews (Movies & TV): Discover insightful commentary and recommendations on the latest entertainment releases and classics. Really excited
A feature I would also like to see is one where we can arrange stories, hide, or delete if for whatever reason we wanted to remove something.
These are fantastic updates! Love this place so much. Excited to see it grow
Thank you.. About me And Reviews would be great… And also spirituality
I'm really happy to see the transparency from you guys! And I know I'm not the only one who greatly appreciates the care you all put into the site! I'm very much biased to see the fantasy fiction and sci-fi communities be added. I think both are greatly needed to help diversify and clarify pieces submitted to the fiction community. I'm also very keen on the prompts category, as I miss out on so many from fellow writers!! It would make it easier to have all of them in one place. c:
Here are my top four picks for the communities: About Me Spirituality Collaboration Prompts
This is so exciting!!! I especially think Spirituality, Prompts and Collaborate would be great additional communities, as well as sci-fi, fantasy and micro
Does the AI assistance you mentioned include Grammarly, ProWritingAid, and other writing tools? I use tools to catch my grammatical and punctuation errors, so I just want to be clear whether these services are among the AI assistance you're talking about.
Communities suggestion: prompts, microfiction, collaborate, and about me.
The categories I would like to see are: Sci-fi Fantasy Collaborate Micro Also, has the team considered using the vocal IG page to better support creators like it has in the past. I’ve noticed the staff used to post their favorite stories and spotlight creators. It’s such a good way to help creators gain more support in our endeavors as writers/authors etc.
Howdy, Vocal. Love, love, love the customized notifications plan. As for the new communities, my faves would be Micro, Prompts, and Collab. And anything you can do to reign in the AI accounts is a welcome addition. Also, can we have some new challenges that are not so long in between? Thank you. I trust you'll get right on that. 😁
Off your main topic and on a more personal one to my problem...I need help with my account and Stripe. If someone could contact me through my e-mail account so we could chat about the issue, that would be great.