Epitome Of The Algorithm

Has the hour of 'Algor' indeed finally been reached?

Is humanity beginning to see that our decisions, whether it involves writing or when it comes down to our very own choices, are now being, once-and-for-all, monitored and presided over by 'Deep Though' himself?

Hey hang on a parsec, don't go crucifying me for being sexist, I'm only saying 'he' because it was a male voice that played the voice of 'Deep Thought' in 'Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy.'

So as to set the record straight. It could have easily been a female voice too...

I am actually enjoying writing another article to follow up on the article that I have previously written, which can be read below:

This follow-up article comes from the fact that, yes, I'm keeping score!

Keeping a score inasmuch as I have now had four article submissions in a row, that I have submitted to vocal, that have since been approved & published in under a one-hour timescale.😲

So come on vocal, I am definitely not complaining here but, what's going on behind the scenes? There has been no notification made by the 'powers that be' to say that a drastic change in policy change has been made.

Or perhaps this sudden speed in accepting and publishing articles is more to do with vocal deciding that they love us, and don't want any of us to jump ship.

Who really knows what has occurred for this to have happened?

I do have to tell you all that leaving the vocal community was lingering on my mind for quite a period of time now. However, this sudden and unexpected elaborate 'about face' in terms of acceptance times, has put a stop to my decision now. I don't know about everyone else but, delays in publishing equate to 'no chance of earning money from reads' until the time comes that it is published.

For a writer that's a big thing.

Believe me.

I run a publication on medium entitled 'Creative Passions💖,' which can be accessed below.

What I like to tell every single one of my growing writers who submit their articles is that the publication prides itself on publishing every submission (as long as medium guidelines are met that is) within a twenty-four-hour period following each submission.

Because I too believe and understand the importance of 'getting those articles out there' quickly, in the interests of the writer, so they can begin to earn from each one as soon as practically possible.

So let's start to look behind the scenes and, in the absence of anything official coming our way from the vocal team, try to work out what has changed, which remarkably has speeded up this vital process for us writers.

Time to look at 'Algor the algorithm' once more...

So what is this almighty holy grail that controls what we writers write and determines what we get paid then?

Algorithms.

What is an algorithm then?

In basic terms, an algorithm is a set of well-defined steps or rules that you need to follow to obtain a pre-determined result. For instance, when we talk about algorithms in computer programming, we already have our input and we know the expected output. Now, an algorithm would be all the defined steps to follow on the input to get the desired output.

In the words of Donna Ferguson (23rd September 2017) "It doesn’t matter whether a book is published as literary fiction, romance, sci-fi, crime or any other genre, there are some latent features of bestseller-dom in manuscripts and these patterns are detectable by a computer algorithm." Together with Matthew Jockers, an expert on text mining, she has written an algorithm that can tell whether a manuscript will 'hit the New York Times bestseller list with 80% accuracy.'

Luckily for would-be authors, she and Jockers decided to share what they gleaned from their algorithm in their 2016 book The Bestseller Code. “It shows how literary style, as read by a computer, has a huge influence on how people are going to react,” Archer says.

The Guardian. 23rd September 2017.

You can see plainly from this that computer technology has advanced to a point where it is easy to work out that we mortals are heavily relying on this technology to enable writer's articles to be 'electronically reviewed' without the need for human oversight to be involved.

Perhaps this indeed, begins perhaps, to provide us with the answer we are all beginning to look for right now.

Maybe not.

But it's at least a poke in the right direction...

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