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    • I've tried, really tried, to like Panels. And knowing that @Victoria is setting them up has improved my perception of them, but it doesn't really solve the core problem for me:

      AMA's are interactive with the crowd. Panels are a magazine interview.

      One of the best things about AMA's was how the crowd would hold a guest to task if they were insincere or inauthentic. And god help you if you let a publicist answer your questions instead of answering them directly. But enough about me, let's just focus on the film, people.

      For those of you monitoring internal numbers (@Chris @yaypie ), how do panels compare to featured posts open to everyone in terms of engagement and views?

    • Hi Chris! Appreciate the support, and rest assured this is something I've been asking for too. We're working on building out some new features for Panels so they can be truly interactive with the audience while at the same time keeping the same streamlined design. While the team is hard at work so we can get them to you as soon as possible, appreciate your patience with the format while we "make it work" in the meantime!

    • Thanks, Chris. It's an incredibly important question that I think about pretty much every minute of every day.

      The first question for me is what role does scale play? For example, last week Kara Swisher tried to interview Jack Dorsey on Twitter and she wrote this after:

      @louisgray tweeted that the interview would have been wonderful on Cake. I added a tweet or two, and both Kara and Walt Mossberg liked them.

      Imagine Elon Musk and Neil deGrasse Tyson having a debate about colonizing Mars. We would all love to see it and if they could take some good questions from the audience it would be amazing. Imagine the thrill of getting your question chosen by one of them for a million readers to see.

      Yesterday we semi-finalized a design for audience questions during a panel (there's still a lot of code to write and some refinements for the design). When we're at small scale like we are now, I imagine panelists answering most questions they receive. At scale, it's our hypothesis that the audience won't want to see thousands of questions directed at Musk and Tyson about some of the bad things they do when the topic of the panel is colonization of Mars. And a Michelle Obama would be happy to answer questions if they weren't from angry right-wing trolls, no?

      My personal opinion is we're designing Cake for scale but until we get there the benefits don't become clear. Am I wrong about that?

    • I think a questions sidebar similar to Twitch which is not visible to panelists, but only visible to moderators, get you to the right place. Moderators approve questions to be shown to panelists.

    • I don't think you'll be disappointed. 😉

      One thing about panels that's pretty cool, but that for some reason hasn't caught on much yet, is that anyone can start a panel. Cake is best when people are talking about things that fascinate them, and that's true for panels too. The more the merrier!

      We've learned that there are really two different kinds of panels people want to see: there are discussions between people (which is what we have now), and there are Q&A sessions where notable or interesting people answer questions from an audience.

      Audience Q&A is something we don't do well yet, but we've got a good plan for it that we're working hard on now. From the day she joined us @Victoria has been guiding and energizing that effort, and I think it'll be really great. 😄

    • My dream panel is Michelle Obama hosting 8 teen girls from around the world on Women's Day, letting them ask questions about what it means to be a woman as the world looks on. It would be the thrill of a lifetime for those girls and I imagine millions of people would follow along and be fascinated, depending on how good the girls' questions are.

      I spoke to Richard Saul Wurman, the founder of TED, who said the magic formula back in the day was to get a conversation between two people you'd love to see talk to each other — like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. The magic wasn't in seeing their answers to the questions Walt Mossberg answered, but to see them debate each other. I hope we can get that going on Cake.

    • Ryan, is this still a valid use of panels?  

      From here:

      Panels, which we initially called "trusted conversations", were one of the ideas we started throwing around while thinking about whether there was a way we could let people talk about things publicly with other people they trust, but without any danger of the conversation being hijacked by trolls or harassers.

      The thing that appealed most to me was the idea that we could give women, people of color, and other people who are often targets of abuse or harassment a safe way to have meaningful conversations with each other online without having to resort to fully private means of communication in order to keep out the trolls.

      On Twitter, Facebook, and other public sites, many people don't feel safe discussing things because it's too easy for them to become targets or for trolls to derail those discussions. But when these discussions get pushed into private venues, the rest of the world can't learn or benefit from their valuable points of view.

    • Of course! I’d love to see more panels like what I was describing there.

      Personally, that’s still my favorite thing about panels, although the world doesn’t seem to have noticed it yet. We’re in an awkward phase right now where we’ve built this thing that has tons of potential, but building it is only half the battle. Now we need people to find it and use it.