I wasted so much time on Vocal, Zulie. I might as well have been playing the slots in Vegas. My 50 stories made pennies. If you don’t win a challenge, and the odds are you won’t, you don’t make much of anything. I’ve basically broken even on my subscription, which I stupidly paid for 12 months up front.

Some of the winners, out of thousands, were not that great. My favorite is the fiction piece that begins, “The rain went pitter pat.” First place! Then there was the winning sonnet with 15 lines. I also don’t see how they can read all the entries in the time allowed, let alone give them careful consideration.

The other thing I dislike about Vocal is that only writers buy subscriptions. Readers don’t need to. So the content creators are solely responsible for paying themselves. Some challenges are sponsored, of course, but most of the earnings I imagine are based on subscriptions.

It was a disappointment to see Medium copying Vocal when Medium is a far superior platform for writers. Medium is a real community. Vocal is The Gong Show.