Being or Not Being Vocal
A silent presence — on a social media dead-end
It was right after I had started writing on Medium — I read an article there, telling that everybody on Medium should also also get a Vocal account and publish a copy of their Medium articles there.
The benefit should be to get twice as much out of it — publicity, money, growth.
So, I tried. Set up an account, a free one for a start, as I wanted to see what it all was. I started following a couple of other accounts there, read some of the other member’s articles and stories, and put one of my own stories there.
Vocal has a front page where it is possible to find articles, and there are recommended articles as well. My expectation was that somehow my article would also appear there, even though I saw no mention anywhere on how the mechanism was supposed to work. An algorithm, like other social media, perhaps?
Fast-forward to today: Still, nobody ever read that article on Vocal. And I didn’t put anything more there, because I didn’t know how to make it active. Publishing wasn’t enough, apparently, but what then?
Also, none of the comments I made, or the likes, led to any response. A longer comment on a short story did, eventually, lead to a somewhat harsh comment back from the writer, who clearly would have preferred that I hadn’t written anything.
In other words, I didn’t experience Vocal as a friendly place. Rather, I felt like a gate-crasher entering a closed party and having everybody there looking annoyed at me. Clearly not my party.
Ever since, I have wondered what the idea was, how I was supposed to get going with that platform. If at all? Maybe it really was a closed party. Maybe I really was gate-crashing.
My account still exists, and it still has that article on it, which nobody ever saw.
There are several, if not many, such social media platforms that I have made an account on but never really felt at home at. I don’t even remember all of them, and some have probably closed, others merged. Who knows what happened to all my login information…? Probably it is now goodies being traded on the dark web.
I believe that many people have an idea of only a few social media being there, those we hear about all the time: Facebook, X, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, etc., and some of us then also know about Medium, Substack and other dedicated writing platforms.
It doesn’t look like anyone knows how many platforms exist — many articles are talking about top 10, top 50 or something like that, but I haven’t seen an attempt to map them all since my diploma in social media management, several years ago.
I am curious, however — what platforms do you use? And have you, like me, made accounts more or less everywhere without remembering all the places?