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    • Thank you, Walt. Great to see you here. 😁

      I have written a few long-form posts and surprisingly a few like this one got picked up and went to the top of Hacker News. I wrote it in kind of episode form:

    • [Robert]

      Cake has a mechanism to do that. The others don't, and I don't believe they ever will.


      I had to stop reading right there. I'll get back to it later, I think.

      Do you realize you just said you don't think this platform will ever be successful enough to get copied?

    • Trying her out. Like the clean look, so far. One concern I have, though, is reading that Cake is designed primarily for people to follow topics, not people. That's great, in theory, but I'm not sure I understand why both models aren't supported. I read the NYTimes because I trust it - and know it. I ready your (Robert's) comments because I know you, and trust your opinion. Seems like it's asking a lot of me to read content from complete strangers without some association with trusted or known sources - be them people or entities (papers, organizations, etc.).

      So, if I like drone photography (which I do) and I start reading and following content in that area - how do I filter out the content from people that I don't like or aren't delivering what I consider to be credible content?

      People certainly complain that Facebook sort of creates a siloed content environment where one tends to follow people who have similar likes, political beliefs, etc. and see those same filters applied to news feeds - a sort of content and idea homogenization. But, that's not always a bad thing.

      So, I'll give this a ride and peek around a bit.

    • I think I showed how. Assholes won't get invited into panel discussions. :-)

      If I behave like an asshole, whether that be bringing outrage, hate, troll behaviors, or, even, simple overly commercial or annoying pushing of my agenda, er, the future, well, then I won't get invited into many panel discussions. Which means the worst I could do is shake an emoji at you. :-)

    • Yeah, I would like more of a social network here too. I think the team is still building that and thinking it through and doesn't want to immediately look like Facebook or Twitter and wants to see what kinds of things evolve here first. I get that and think they focused first efforts on where they could differentiate then will fill in other stuff as people show up.

    • I don't think that means what you think that means.

      If you, as a tech influencer, are being paid to create panels based on "influencers" in your space all provided by the marketing agency behind whatever product you're shilling, the panel concept has the opposite effect: it keeps people from calling you out for being a paid shill.

    • I may not have as loud a voice as the other people in this conversation, but I too am excited about the future of Cake. For similar reasons as @Scobleizer, Chris as long as I have known you in my partnerships with SmugMug you have been a kind and thoughtful visionary. You have always taken the time to ask the little guy for their input, and taken the time to create a meaningful experience for everyone. Not all of the great ideas you've had got the chance to be realized, but I'm fortunate enough to have seen behind the curtain a bit to know the kind of company and community you want to build.

      What brought me to the Internet at a young age were the communities. It was being able to log into a forum in CompuServe on a topic knowing that's where my people were. Every single social media platform today has forced us to engage too much in the bigger, louder world. It's insisted that every person has an equally qualified voice on every subject, and as much as it's important to give people a platform to express themselves, sometimes we need to be a bit more deliberate in how we start a conversation. Panel conversations are exactly what we need right now.

      I've been on a bit of a hiatus from things for a while, but I am excited to be back and am ready to invest my time in Cake and see it grow and thrive. I know it will.

    • Thank you for a great insight about following topics and people, David!

      Fundamentally we built Cake to be all about following topics, but as the platform grows there'll be many people talking about the same topic at various levels of credibility. This will create a lot of noise. There are a few ways to solve this problem:

      1. Prioritize showing content from people you care about in a specific topic. This solves the problem of following people and seeing everything from them, rather than what you both share interest in.

      2. Panel conversations is another solution. These are public conversations that can be read and reacted to by any one, but only panelists can post. This cuts down the noise, prevents trolls and creates a safe space for the panelists to talk.

      Here is an example of a recent Panel:

      Hope to see more insights from you here on Cake.

    • I'm curious how Cake will solve THAT particular problem.

      Thanks, Chris. That problem is my second-worse nightmare. #1 is no traction at all. 😳

      I think all the big services were built by very young men in Silicon Valley around 15 years ago when we were all obsessed by free speech, no? On the upside, we've all been awestruck at the power the networks have to make things go viral.

      I heard Ev Williams say if they'd known about the rise of trolls back then, they would have architected Twitter differently. The question we asked was okay, we have the opportunity to learn from 15 years of history. How to make something that will scale?

      Once again I thought of Jeff Bezos, who said it's important to ask what will never change. In his case, it's selection, fast delivery, and low prices. They had to obsessively shoot for those without adding bad products, cluttering search so you couldn't find anything, and they had to design warehouses like no one had ever imagined before.

      With us it's signal-to-noise and content discovery, no? We have to obsess over those at scale. We've done a few things so far but we're early and the team is small. But focusing on those two things is really energizing.

      For example, we don't care about how many users have registered. But we do care about how we get great conversations that get lots of views. In that way we feel more like YouTube than the others, at least to me. One YouTube creator can create millions of views with epic content. Or you can make a great video on how to fix a certain model water heater that a small but devoted group of people love. And they do a really good job of surfacing interesting music and videos, it seems to me.


      Hey David, I think you're absolutely right and we've been thinking this through for awhile now. I think what you want is to follow topics like Tesla Model 3, and when you see someone posting in that topic who is really knowledgeable, you want to follow them in that topic. Am I right? Or possibly in all topics you follow, but not in politics, raising children, or thoughts on the keto diet, which you don't follow. Correct?

      It seems to me the problem of social graph companies is you get everything your uncle posts. You follow him to keep up with the cousins on Facebook, but he has extreme political views and you're having trouble unseeing them.

      If I have that right 👆 it's something we want to do but we're early and small and picking our battles, and wanting to make sure we really understand the problem.

    • This is what G+ was trying to do with Collections, and I'm fine with that. My hip hop channel on G+ was more than twice the size of any of my other collections. As long as someone can follow all of my technology posts, for instance, that functionality works for me.


      Hey David, we do have mute and ignore in place now.

    • Thomas, you are likely looking at the dropdown at the top level of a conversation, which only has "Flag" as an option. The owner of a conversation has more options there. However, right next to every post there is a dropdown that lets you "mute" or "ignore" a person. Muting will prevent that person from posting in your conversations, but it won't affect conversations you don't own. Ignoring a person will collapse their post in any conversation on Cake whether you own it or not.

    • I agree with you about the arc of social networks but I feel that the case of Google+ is a little different. Though more difficult to find, I think the organic conversations continued and may continue until the lights go off. I think that G+ ultimately failed because of lack of a cohesive - and simple - vision of what it should be.

      I don't want to move this conversation to the fate of G+ (there are other posts for that) but the cautionary tale of G+ is you need to two ingredients to make an interest-based network successful: Vision and love. That's the burden for Cake to deal with now.

    • Ah, ok, it might be useful to be able to mute/hide an entire thread. If I know for sure 100% that a thread is of no interest to me, every time I have to see it again on the site it becomes noise.

    • Thank you for the insight and honesty - the eight problems resonate. I must confess that, although I've been looking around here for a few days, I hadn't realized the full benefit/potential of panel discussions. Now that I do, I'm looking forward to sitting back and watching experts do their thing!

    • What makes you think that bad actors will not create Panel discussions which are filled with other bad actors? Anyone, as far as I know can create a panel discussion, so what is to prevent toxic panels?