The users of Vocal and Vocal + love the platform and are invested in it, not just monetarily but on a personal and professional level.  There have been issues that are not just discouraging but have lead to disgruntled feelings about the contests being fair.  The platform is a great start but it is not without flaws and issues that need to be addressed and addressed in a more transparent manner.  

The lack of information when there are issues was most notable when the stats failed to update for a week this spring.  Vocal +/Creatd is a company centered around the online community.  Yet, as there were dozens of requests being sent in, requesting information about the stats issue and the platform not performing correctly, Vocal failed to respond in a transparent manner.  There could have been a simple announcement by the company, on the home page, that could easily have shared information.  

The recent announcement of the Old Barn winners has been questioned because your rules for eligibility have stated between 600 and 2000 words.  This brought up the question of the second-place winner using almost 900 words over the allotted space given in the instructions.  As an entrant, this was especially displeasing to hear because people put a lot of effort into their pieces, and contained their creativity to the limit that was put out to the users and paid members.  

The list of communities is particularly of interest to people that write on Vocal.  Many of the communities are gender-based.  Which is alright.  But some of the users would enjoy their voices being heard.  There are many men that write on Vocal and would enjoy a community for men and for the issues that they are dealing with, their hobbies, and their perspectives about the world.  Viva is obviously, as it states in the description, what it means to be a woman, aimed specifically at women.  It's perhaps time that Vocal opens a community for men and completely be inclusive with regards to gender.  

It would be in your, the companys', best interest to maintain better dialogs with the paid users and you should give serious consideration to a section of creators you love to hear from.  Make them public and known, rotate them around, and regularly send an email out to 5 to 10 of them a week, so that you as a company can keep up better on what people really are thinking and feeling about their experience on your platform.

There are many changes and things that could make this platform the absolute best there is on the internet.  It's up to Vocal to do these things and start listening to their paid members and prospective members.  Thus, the members of the Vocal community are petitioning Vocal to do so and do it with the greatest amount of transparency it can in the interest of its' paying platform users.