I believe I know why Vocal does not allow writers to edit previously written articles.

In the past few days, I’ve read a few articles comparing the writing experience on Medium vs. Vocal.

Among other things, many people pointed out that writers on Vocal were unable to edit previously written articles. Really? Editing a previously written article was too basic a feature to leave out for a future version. It was strange, but I didn’t give it much thought then.

A few hours later, I was thinking about how difficult it must be for publication editors to scan through hundreds of article submissions. That’s when I suddenly got the answer.

You have to submit every Vocal article for approval. If they allowed writers to edit articles then there was a chance that writers would submit acceptable content for approval and then sneak in not-so-acceptable content in an edit.