Chris MacAskill So one big difference between Google+ and Cake is that G+ has been strongly organised around people and groups through Circles and Communities. Do you see taking Cake in that direction at all, and why or why not?
Thanks! Trey Ratcliff did a panel conversation at Cake with early Google+ users who LOVED the platform when it launched. Panels are something not many people are familiar with in group discussions, but this one gives you an idea of how they work. They give great signal-to-noise and protection from trolls.
Tessa Neill Hahaha, I saw a chart somewhere with all the choices. 🙂
We seem to be the sleeper but somehow we've ended up with what seems like a lot of Google+ refugees happily posting away.
Cake is a place where you can indulge your interests more deeply than you can on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, without interference from trolls and spammers.
On most social networks you follow people. On Cake you follow topics that fascinate you. When you follow your interests rather than your friends, you can have fascinating conversations about the things you care about without feeling like you’re boring someone.
One of the things most Google+ refugees comment on his how they like the beautiful design.
Chris MacAskill There's also a lot of questions about being able to import data from Google+ (posts, photographs), or to be able to post automatically from a blog or other source. Do you see Cake supporting either of these?
Or does auto-posting run against the notion of fostering community on the platform itself?
Edward Morbius , great question. This question gets asked often from people experienced on Google+, but I don't remember seeing it much for people coming from Reddit, forums or even Facebook Groups.
I think of it as your interest graph as opposed to your social graph. I think social graph companies like Facebook are good at keeping up with friends & family or following celebrities. Where social graph companies aren’t as strong is when you want to know more about photography or mountain biking. Interest-based sites like forums and Reddit tend to do better for indulging your interests.
One complaint we hear a lot about following people is you also get the things you're not interested in from them. Maybe it's politics.
We have talked about an idea to let you follow people sometime in the future. To keep it simple, the way it could work is to have their posts ride to the top where your interests overlap. If you follow a topic like Crohn's disease, and there's a doctor there who interests you, you'd see her posts in that topic and any others you overlap in — like, I don't know, surgery. But you wouldn't see her posts in the topic of homeschooling if that didn't interest you.
Of course that's hypothetical because we haven't finalized on a concept or committed to actually building it. The two reasons for why not are we're small and we want to improve what we do have already as much as we can. And also, we're watching closely how our refugees are adapting. After a week or two on the system it appears that most of them post that they've adapted to following interests and really like it. They end up syncing with each other about which interests to follow and see each other in them often. They seem to be reporting more signal less noise which is part of our mission, so we'll see.
Chris MacAskill Right. I've been on Google+ since it first went public, and Reddit for years. They have had two different approaches, though these have converged somewhat.
G+ started with Circles and early on ended up with a bunch of "you're holding it wrong" arguments from people to the profiles they were following for posting the "wrong" content into their Circles.
On Reddit, a forum ("subreddit") may be devoted to a specific topic, but as those get large and popular, the quality drops markedly.
G+ eventually came up with Collections, and though these are not uniformly named between people, you can at least choose to follow a person but exclude the content that's not of interest.
I've found that finding a good source and then limiting that to content of interest works ... reasonably well. It's a surprisingly hard problem to get right, and I've been looking a lot at the history of media and different aggregation and disaggregation models going back to the Greek poets and bards.
Magazines and blogs, with a strong editorial voice, a relatively constant stable of writers, and comments from both readers and the other writers, seems to be a surprisingly good model, and the two formats have a lot in common. It's fallen out of favour with the trend to social media, but I could see a comeback for it, possibly.
Chris MacAskill So another question is how Cake.co might (or might not) be a fit for photographers and photography communities. You've come from SmugMug which is specifically oriented toward that. How do you see Cake as a possible fit?
I think that sounds like a pretty smart idea. For me, following people unconditionally means getting a lot of things that might not interest you. And following just topics can lead to very low-quality content (see most programming communities here on G+, which are full of promotions for badly written computing 101 clickbait articles). G+ found some middle ground with Collections, where I could curate my topics by high quality authors. Your suggestion to float them to the front of the stream sounds very appealing as well.
Edward Morbius Importing would be very hard for us. At one time we talked about importing from other platforms but as we delved in to the details it seemed to be a hairball with so many edge cases. The type of content, the moderation policies at the time where it came from, the topics versus people following thing, UI elements, etc. It seemed like a great thing to do in concept but hard to execute without a big team of engineers.
How do you account for people who wish to see the whole community at large and not just small interest groups topic-oriented? I found people on G+ first through public posts of variety. Then I identified some groups/Communities second. I’ve no use for a website that locks me into small groups of like-minded people.
Carsten Reckord Thanks, Carsten. Honestly, it seems like a powerful concept to me but I'm trying to restrain myself so we don't unnecessarily complicate the UI or engineering.
The Google+ refugees we have are all speaking fondly of collections, far as I can tell. They tend to say our topics have some similarities because they can be very fine grained and you can create them yourself.
You're right about a downside of groups. You have to make them broad enough to get traction, and then when they get too many people, they get noisy. I have a huge motorcycle message forum I started long ago and we have to keep splitting the subforms to get them so they aren't impersonal. advrider.com - Adventure Rider
Maybe the topic photography gets to be too much of a firehose for you, so you start one on mushroom photography (some G+ people did that). It's great! Not too many people in there and we know them all.
Edward Morbius for photography, you're right, it's one of our passions. I was cofounder of SmugMug for 13.5 years and loved every second. So we tend to know the nuances of what photographers want and it seems like the majority of the photographers we have, also have SmugMug or Flickr accounts (SmugMug bought Flickr).
Edward Morbius I think I've spent hours stalking you on the net at Ello, here and Reddit. What you just wrote on collections and strong editorial voice completely resonates with me.
On my motorcycle forum, Adventure Rider, we've combined an editorial voice with real writers plus user-generated content in the forums. Many of our editorial articles are authored by the adventure motorcyclists in the forums, which gives them authenticity, but we help edit. Those articles help the forums and the forums help the articles.
We learned how to do it from Jon Stokes, the cofounder of arstechnica. But also I admired the AMAs at Reddit and I admire how The New York Times has real journalists moderating comments for their articles. They have editor's picks. Amazon has Amazon's choice for stuff to buy. On Cake we have featured discussions. One I featured I got the idea for from a discussion you started:
I don't think there is any way around facing up to the fact that we have a huge human curation responsibility not just to surface interesting content, but for moderation. We have to make human editorial judgements on what comments add to the conversation and what wreck it, no?
Tessa Neill Thanks. Very interesting. I'm hearing that a lot. For the last few years I've really only used Google+ on a mobile app (I like it) and only to go into collections and communities I like. This is my first time on the web interface for ages. I thought I needed to for the keyboard.
Chris MacAskill Thanks so much for your time. Stay as long as you'd like, I've got to tend to things here. If you can swing back in 8-12 hours for any late or follow-up questions, that would be great. Hugely appreciate you making yourself available to us.
Chris MacAskill I've had to deal with my fair share of them, that's for sure. If it costs you your peace, it's too expensive 😊. Thanks for lending your time to us, much appreciated.
Tessa Neill We've done our best to make it work really well with just a browser on any device. So you can go to Cake.co from desktop, tablet, phone, etc., and it should feel like a mobile app.
Having said that, we're getting fairly close with shipping an iPhone app because you're right, it's also nice to have an app. I have a couple of bits of bad news, however: we only had resources to write one app at a time and it just so happened we found iOS developers first. The other piece of bad news is for some reason, Google hasn't been able to get rich text editors to work on Android in either Firefox and Chrome. Strange, because they do on all apple and window and Chrome OS products, just not Android. A number of companies have filed a bug with them. So on Android, Cake works, but certain things like adding bold text to your posts don't yet. We don't have a status on what Google is doing about it. Sorry I don't have a better answer for you on that.
Chris MacAskill it did look really nice in the browser-I'm not concerned now. Do you know if it's only the latest Android version? I did notice that warning.
Chris MacAskill I haven't had a chance to try cake yet, but have heard good words. My question, is cake oriented towards pic sharing and story boarding like instagram and vero or more conversational like mewe and diaspora? What is cakes main focus and differentiation from other social activity networks? Thanks.
cobalt please great question. In your feed, you can bounce between for you, which gives you conversations for just the topics you follow, featured, which we think are great conversations, and all. All is the way you get the global view. And within those feeds, you can choose between new, interesting, and active.
I know, we as humans tend to congregate among people who share common points of view and that can be bad for filter bubbles. I admire your willingness to step out of them. I try to always do the same, even though it can be a struggle to understand why someone believes what they believe.
We have a subform on Adventure Rider, a big forum that's been my hobby for 17 years, called Church, State and Money. You can't get more polarizing than that and motorcyclists can be pretty edgy. But left and right are in there together and they even held an in-person meet up in Kansas with every stripe of political person to try and understand each other. I really respect how they've done it.
That's the thing, in interest-based networks I feel you can do that. It's much harder among friends and family on Facebook. Do you really want to get into it with your uncle? I think you follow him to keep up with the cousins and you probably feel like you wish you could unsee his political views.
Edward Morbius dividing the subforums is painful and we hate it. But we can tell when the traffic is too high and they're drinking from a firehouse and starting to fight with each other.
We used to have an off-topic forum and I split it into 4, such as Shiny Things and Church, State & Money. That wasn't regional but the split worked well because it was clear what went in there (shiny things is to talk about stuff like Apple Watches).
We do have regional forums and when they are too big, splitting is hard. We used to have an East regional. Florida got their own. That went okay, but what to do about the rest? We broke it down by the Mason-Dixon Line after a lot of debate and the poor guys who live close to the line have to bounce between the two forums to see all their friends and local rides. They don't like it but understand.
I don't really have a number for what's too big because I think it depends on how uniform the topic. Like Shiny Things is too big because it's so diverse and there's a group of clampers in there who don't care about watches. So we're going to pull the glampers into their own subform. But we have a sub for Old School (classic motorcycles) and most people in there pretty much love them all and don't want it split up because eye candy!
I spoke to an ex-Reddit employee who told me they had math for Subreddits and if they didn't get enough traction fast enough, they probably would never get off the ground. With splitting subs, we already know we have enough traffic.
Chris MacAskill Ah, i somehow missed the collapsed comments, so reading them answered part of my question - you are indeed oriented towards conversation, but are organized like a forum, right? But i'm still wondering how you would describe your overall focus and differentiation from others.
Bill Brayman Speaking as someone who has been using Cake since just after the Google+ closing down announcement, Cake is primarily about subjects not about people. It takes a little bit of getting used to Cake and I don't think everyone will like it. But, for those who preferred G+ over facebook due to the fact that G+ allowed one to meet more new people who shared common interests, Cake is more like that. If the only people that you want to hang with are those who are already in your circles then Cake is not for you.
I get that a lot of people use Facebook for keeping up with off-line friends and family, but I belong to a lot of special interest Groups there, and when they're well moderated they're brilliant. I don't think I've ever asked to be friends with someone just because I met them in a Facebook Group; I might have a common interest in upcycling rubbish to make art and craftwork, but chances are I'm not going to be interested in their other stuff. So you can just follow interests on Facebook already, if that's what you want to do. Most of my activity there is following the Groups I'm interested in.
Having said that, I don't know that it can function as a replacement for Google+ since there's nothing like the ability to post into G+ Collections or to follow other people's Collections.
I'm interested in Cake and will probably create an account; I particularly like the clean look of the pages, which seem to show off photos really well. But for me it's a drawback that you can only follow topics and not individuals. I like to follow photographers whose work I like. I also like to follow people whom I feel I've come to know well over the seven years that Google+ has existed.
Marysia Kurowski that’s exactly what I was posting here earlier. I follow the person first. If I follow a person I want to have access to all their public posts. If I don’t care for some, I just scroll past. It’s easier for me than trying to guess what Collection they are posting in.
If I object strongly to a person on topics they post frequently about, then it’s easier to just unfollow them. The Cake site is a bit in development it seems. I’m glad to get these questions and answers here.
Often we can’t just easily locate our friends we’ve known for years online here in G+. For example I have a friend named something silly like “no name Ned” and it’s fine that he calls me cobalt and I call him Ned. It doesn’t matter to either of us to know our actual IRL name. If he’s on Cake and so am I, we’ll not find each other unless each of us register on Cake with the name we use here in G+. After 7 years of talking weekly with him, I’m trying to figure out what name he’s now using or guess what topic he is following. And then I have to hope I’ve guess correctly one of his topics and hope I recognize him? This is only a problem for those of us who really want to follow people.
Chris MacAskill does Cake support a unmodified algorithm free reverse chronological feed?
I hate social media algorithms that try to tell us what we want to see. I'm totally fine having an option where I can use some algorithm to try to give me suggestions and things based on my interest, but there should be an option for me to just have an unmodified raw feed that is a simple reverse chronological feed of the the people I want to follow.
If I end up following 50,000 people and it's become unmanageable and I'll never see everything, that's my problem, don't force me to use an algorithm that filters things out that the algorithm thinks I may not be interested in.
With a simple unmodified feed you simply open it up and keep scrolling until you get to a post you've seen before and you know you are caught up.
cobalt please: In your shoes I'd send a private Google+ message to him, to ask him to let you know when he makes other social media account(s) and to give you the profile url(s). Perhaps that's already what you're planning on doing if you find he's jumped ship.
Marysia Kurowski I do plan to do this but actually it’s with about 50 people I just can’t bear to lose contact with. G+ has been my main social outlet for 7 years now. I’ve gotten deep friendships that are reciprocal and all of us are being pulled different directions. So far I have seen no less than 7 new sites they are splitting into. I’m extroverted so I have no problem joining multiple sites but I see most people only able and willing to try this social side of social media in maybe one or 2 places.
Sadly I’m guessing literally half my friends will just go back inside FB. Where I will never return.
Chris MacAskill I like the appearance of Cake and the interest-based networks. What I would like to know is: 1. What is the funding model? 2. Related to the above, what plans does cake have for charging for services (if any) 3. What are your growth plans? I noticed, for example, that the Photography category only has 442 followers. That's pretty small, and 'photography' is normally one of the most populous subjects in social media sites.
cobalt please With all its flaws (and whoo, boy, are there flaws) FB is my secondary social media presence outside of G+, and it's manageable if you're very selective about how you craft your "friends" list.
For photographers, Flickr (recently acquired by SmugMug) is a pretty good option.
Twitter is simply too short-form for real "social" interaction.
I can already feel the bleeding-away of my G+ friends as we all try to figure out what's next and some people leave here for other spaces. It sucks. I don't like any of the social-media-come-lately options people are discussing here, for reasons ranging from "underfunded/unlikely to last" to "havens of alt.right and other groups I do not wish to be even remotely associated with. And you're one of the people I'll really miss when this when the G+ lights go out ...
G+ has been my primary social network for several years. What I loved most was that I was interacting with people I didn't know but shared common interests. Learning that Google has decided to give-up on this platform has left a lot of us feeling like we're being evicted from our home. I believe that Cake has a lot of potential and perhaps may evolve organically. Especially if users are invited to have input in the evolution.
Are the posts made available through a google search like Twitter posts are or will they be viewable only as a signed in user?
I wish you the very best with your new social site.
I can see Cake with icing & a cherry-on-top! Now that would be delicious. :)
Regarding section 18 of the TOS: 18. Some of the Service may display advertisements and promotions. You hereby agree that Cake may place advertising and promotions on the Service or in conjunction with your Content. The manner, mode and extent of such advertising and promotions are subject to change without specific notice to you.
Can you please explain this? It looks to me as if my content is going to get used to enhance ads that I neither control nor get paid for.
Bill Pusztai we put a lot of care into designing Cake so we can provide high-fidelity and interest-based ads, with an optional subscription model..
I say interest-based because each conversation is categorized with topics, such as photography or hiking. Nikon may choose to run ads in photography but perhaps not hiking. Not only is interest-based advertising the most effective, it's understandable to regular people and doesn't require creepy surveillance capitalism.
In the case of Facebook, their problem is much harder to solve because it's tough to infer your interests from a like of your sister's party photo. So Facebook buys external data and merges it into your true identity to form a profile of you.
I mention high fidelity ads because good advertisers such as Nikon want a quality ad where it can be seen and respected. To us that means an occasional ad in a stream or conversation where you're looking, similar to how Instagram works (although the ads seem more than occasional there now). The more high fidelity you can make the ads, the fewer ads you have to run. It's a virtuous circle. If you have great content, you can get great advertisers and if you get great advertisers, you can get great content..
On my motorcycle forum, at YouTube, Flickr and Reddit, you can pay for an optional subscription where you don't have to see ads at all. I have a lot of experience with all of those and my impression is they work really well. None of them use a customer photo or text in their ads, but they do have to have permission from their customers to run a pre-roll ad before a YouTube video, for example.
That's what we were seeking with that clause. It's not to take your content and turn it into an ad, but to allow us to place an ad somewhere in a feed or conversation like the one we're having here.
Make sense? Let me know if you have more questions. Thanks!
Angela Porisky thank you. All posts are discoverable via Google search. We've never viewed it as a walled garden.
I'm astonished at how fast Google manages to index new conversations. Yesterday a new user posted about bird feeders. I wanted to welcome them and our girls are interested in putting a hummingbird feeder in the back yard, So 32 minutes after he created the conversation, I searched Google for info on the kind of bird feeder he bought, and there was his post from Cake near the top of the search results. Google seems to be placing a big emphasis on recency now.
Pat Kight I'm the cofounder of SmugMug and the underfunded/may not last fears dogged us for perhaps a decade (we were formed in 2002). It was very understandable because we were bootstrapped and surrounded by giants like Kodak Gallery, AOL Pictures, Microsoft Photo Sharing, etc. I also bootstrapped Adventure Rider in 2001 and it has 2 million users/month now.
At Cake we have a team of just 2 designers and 4 engineers + me, and I am funding a considerable portion of it. It's counter-intuitive in an age where Yik Yak could raise $73 million and go bust, but I believe our small lean team increases the odds we'll build a lasting company while others burn through their cash.
As for stands on free speech, I think we've learned that you can grow really fast that way as an Internet company, but then a serious reckoning happens as we saw with Gab. We've avoided that like the plague, much more than Twitter and Facebook have.
Chris MacAskill I fear I may be misunderstanding you, so my apologies in advance if so. Where I am hesitant is the idea that, let's say I post a picture of Vancouver, and next to it, other people are served an ad for Tourism Vancouver, which would not only be using my image to enhance the ad (even if it's not explicitly part of the ad) but on some level create the impression that I endorse the product; and I get paid nothing (but if Getty sells my image to Tourism Vancouver I get paid royalties and my name is nowhere near the product). Of course that's a pretty benign example but what if it's a product I strongly disagree with and absolutely don't want to be associated with?
I'm not actually concerned about the ads served to me, your model sounds like I would find it quite agreeable as a reader, but I would pay to prevent ads being served to other people next to my content. Is that actually a thing, ever anywhere?
FYI the questions Bill Pusztai asks are very important to photographers. We, more than other members, are far more likely to find our images appropriated via intentional or even accidental use. As he knows, I was astonished to see a flower photo of his displayed on a wall-mounted big screen TV in a green clinic. It was "just" a Chromecast using popular photos on Google but still, it was both pleasant for me and also disconcerting.
Bill Pusztai Hmmm, that's an interesting scenario and an important question.
I may not have thought about this deeply enough but it seems plausible that this scenario could unfold:
You start a conversation about Vancouver and post some photos of the city. The key thing is you assign the topic "Vancouver" to the conversation. Perhaps other people add to the conversation with their own photos.
The Vancouver Tourism board has an ad they run tied to the topic Vancouver. It has their own photo that they licensed from Getty. It appears in the conversation but is labeled Promoted.
A second scenario is you start a conversation about cityscapes and post photos of Vancouver, Sydney and Prague. You want to show that the blue hour makes for great photos. You assign the topic cityscape to the conversation.
Sony fancies their cameras as good for cityscapes, so they place an ad in the conversation. It uses a photo they took of Hong Kong's skyline.
Do those scenarios make sense and do they threaten photographers? Unless I am misunderstanding, this is similar to Twitter and Instagram, no?
Chris MacAskill I don't use Twitter or Instagram precisely because. Here's a sore one. I did a portrait of a 62 y o gay guy. He posted it on FB. Soon his friends are being served his face next to a GOP attack ad and an adult diaper ad. As near as we can figure it's because he used the words "GOP" and "depends" in the text.
Bill Pusztai Oh my God that's awful. No wonder you're concerned.
I've had two shocking experiences with Facebook. One is I got invited to join a Group and the Group settings were set to auto join. I was busy, briefly checked out the group, didn't have the time to figure out how to unjoin, but no worries, it was a closed group. What could go wrong? I didn't realize that closed means open for all to see that you are a member and it turned out to be pretty embarrassing when people asked me why I was a member of that group.
Second, who knew that if you start a secret group, you as the admin can change it to public at any time if it has less than 5,000 members. Gay teens didn't know so they joined to talk to others about how to come to grips with their sexuality and how to come out. The admin made it public and that's how some parents found out their sons were gay, much to the horror of the sons.
In my opinion, that's what comes of a growth team driven by data, which Facebook famously has, and not by values. In contrast, I've known Stewart Butterfield (founder of Slack) for years because he was founder of Flickr. They decided not to let admins of private Slack channel make them public because values.
They also made the default at Slack no notifications from late evening to mid morning unless you specifically request to be notified. Big data said they get more engagement with the default being notifications working 24x7, but values.
We are hurting our growth in the beginning because we don't host outrage-fueled conspiracies, but values.
Kevyne Kicklighter we don't have dimensions because we size them to fit, but I think the max upload size is 20 mb. The avatar looks best with a photo that has a square aspect ratio, and the banner looks best if it can work at 2:1 and 3:1 ratios (to adapt to different devices).
Thanks for your comments earlier about uncluttered and clean. We have two designers and 4 engineers and they're all passionate about uncluttered and clean. We've constantly made tweaks for readability and clarity when we become aware of ways to improve, so it's nice to hear your feedback.
Tessa Neill unfortunately, it's not the browser that is causing the rich text editor problems but the virtual keyboard (GBoard) on Android devices. It simply doesn't send the keystrokes the browser needs to to the right thing. As far as I know, that's all rich text editors on Android, even with browsers like Firefox. Google knows about this problem because developers have been loud about it so we're holding our breath for a fix.
Chris MacAskill if you start a secret group, you as the admin can change it to public at any time if it has less than 5,000 members
Google has had its issues with information leakage, but I'll give them credit for setting one-way filters on going private. Private G+ groups or Collections cannot be made public, nor can a post made privately be re-shared publicly.
This is occasionally frustrating: I worked around the problem of not having a drafting feature by creating a "Drafts" Collection with only myself having access. I cannot assign those posts to a public (or possibly: any other) Collection, even though I am the sole author and reader. That's ... an abundance of caution, I suppose.
These are the sorts of problems that turn up again and again in network and community design, and for all it got mucked up, Google did a good job on many of its decisions. I've been mum on much praise for a while, the sunset is loosening my lips a bit.
There are lessons for those of us looking to create new platforms elsewhere, and I suspect many of those lessons will have to be learnt again.
The saving grace of teachers: we're all born ignorant. Some of us repeatedly.
David R Robinson great question about unmodified feeds. We offer three choices via a pulldown: Interesting, Recent and New. Whatever option you choose sticks until you change it.
Interesting uses an algorithm to bubble up the conversations that are getting a lot of traction lately, such as reactions and replies.
Recent are conversations that you follow that have new posts since. your last visit. If you post in a conversation, you automatically follow it, but you can choose to follow conversations you don't post in.
Apocryphal Chris good questions. When we started SmugMug I didn't think there was a way to get it funded because it was the fall of 2001 and investors thought the Internet was over. So I put my own money into it, didn't take a salary for 4 years, and HQ was my house all that time. Seemed scary at the time but it got us on solid enough footing we could eventually buy Flickr, which had been backed by VCs.
With Cake I've never taken a salary either and quite a lot of my savings has gone into it too. I used to work for Steve Jobs and he did that with Pixar and NeXT too, as Elon Musk has done with Tesla and SpaceX, and the Airbnb founders did.
You might think that puts the company at extra risk but I think it makes the best companies because it shows how committed the founders are. Also, venture capitalists want you to go big fast or go home and I think insane early growth of a community breaks it. There is a lot of tone setting and moderation to do, and a lot of tweaking to get the product right, which can take time.
As for 400-something followers of the photography topic, yes it's fairly small but we'll all look back on this as a golden time. Communities can be so great early. We had slightly more than 3x the posts in October as we had in September, so it feels more lively every week.
Bill Brayman I think about Facebook as being about keeping up with friends &. family, NextDoor about your neighborhood, LinkedIn about your career, Twitter about news, and Cake about your interests. It's a service where you can indulge your interests in photography, hiking, or electric cars by going deeper in the discussion with people who are really passionate about what you are.
In some ways it fills the need forums have filled over the years, but you don't have to join a different forum for each interest, and the interface is modern and clean.
I must admit that because you took care in answering questions here Chris MacAskill , I am definitely going to try Cake. I’ll be adding myself into the photography community if they will have me! Thank you very much.
Chris MacAskill re. 'no limit to storage space', unfortunately SmugMug decided to go back on Flickr's free 1TB policy. Are there any guarantees that the same thing won't happen on Cake once the platform has gained enough momentum?
Re. topic based content: Does Cake offer suggestions based on previously followed/posted content? If so, what happens if I decide I'm no longer interested in a topic? Will unfollowing reflect that in the suggestions, or will it still base it on previous content rather than currently followed topics?
What's Cake's take on Data Liberation/portability? Is there data export functionality in place already, and if so, in which format? Is that format publicly documented? Are there APIs available so people can integrate data into their own site, and/or create their own apps?
As for the discussion about following a Collection vs following a Person: both have their pros and cons. Following a Collection makes sure I only see the content I'm interested in, and not the kinda of (political) content that grinds my gears. However, it could also put me in a bit of a filter bubble, as I might not easily discover other content the person posts that I hadn't considered yet as of interest to me.
Filip H.F. Slagter Lots of good questions. The Flickr one is hard for me to answer because I wasn't part of the Flickr acquisition — I had left to start Cake before then. It must be a tough situation because 1 TB of free storage promised by a previous owner. I can imagine it tortured them to make the decision to go back on it.
We don't offer suggestions yet for similar topics mostly because we're fairly new and small, but also we haven't built up the data yet that would make the recommendations effective. I imagine both those things are pretty far in the future. Removing suggestions that no longer apply once you stop following a topic makes a ton of sense.
The story with the API is we started with one from the beginning that all our internal developers use, including mobile. We haven't made the API public because we're still changing it at our early pace of development. APIs take considerable resources to support, so we want to make sure we have that in place before exposing it. We really haven't thought about data export yet, at least I haven't. It's possible some of our engineers have some thoughts or plans, but I haven't tuned into them.
We're paying a lot of attention to what our Google+ refugees are saying about collections, following people, etc., to figure out what we may be able to improve in our scheme in the future. It's a fascinating problem to ponder.
I'm active on Reddit, but I hardly know anyone there. And I own a big motorcycle forum and I know tons of people there. They are both interest-based. I think the difference is on Reddit, I follow really big subs and they tend to become impersonal. On Cake, you do get to know the people in topics that are fairly tightly defined, like fungi photography on Cake, where I see Glenn Smith every day because we share that interest.
Chris MacAskill I'd be really interested in your (and others) perspectives on data costs and components; how much is the hosting itself, data bandwidth, backups/redundancy, cache / CDN, and monitoring for & responding to abuse.
Thanks for the explanation about the image dimensions. Great to get a direct answer on the matter (my poor image folders are too large because every site has specific image dimensions!).
Edward Morbius fascinating questions. They were live-or-die questions for us at SmugMug because photos take up so much storage since we didn't modify originals (Facebook and Instagram resampled and recompressed, which made all the difference for them.).
We thought storage costs would go the way of Moore's Law, and they did, but so did the pixel explosion and the number of photos taken per photographer. So for Flickr and SmugMug, storage costs are ginormous.
For Cake at our stage, all costs are immaterial except salaries. Engineers and designers are expensive and it takes a lot of them to build a service like ours in the modern era where consumer expectations are so high for hard things like infinite scroll. Consider that Google had a team of 500 and that was dwarfed by Facebook and Twitter.
It's interesting to think of whether you could build something like Cake via an open source project that could last as it scales. I'd like to believe you could, given the success of projects like Linux, but I don't see how you can solve the vast human problem of moderation at scale that way. Now that nation states have turned it into an arms race, I think even giants like Facebook are telling Wall Street that hmmm, moderation is expensive and they wish they had spent more on it before now.
I like this cake!! I spent the last two hours reading the comments found at the link of Edward and others. I think that with some improvement already suggested Cake can be a valid alternative to G + and not necessarily be the copy.. I like the division by subject and so far is the one that convinces me more than all the alternatives listed in the various posts.
Using Chrome I saw that the translator is automatic and this is a very interesting topic for those like me who use google then if to share with people from all over the world. I think we'll see you soon there! 🍰Chris MacAskill
Edward Morbius thank you so much for your support in this phase of loss.. 🤔🙃 I will continue to follow you with interest until the end 👍
Chris MacAskill I keep thinking that at some point the additional pixels become superfluous, though projects such as gigapixel images of Mount Everest suggest that there's a space for ultra-high-definition images. I think those will prove to be a niche though.
I'd have to check but I think digital is at or beyond the resolution of even low-speed film, at which point for most purposes there's a practical higher limit possible. Pixels might well become a pricing differentiator, which extends a discussion I'm having elsewhere on this stuff.
The moderation question gets to another element I've been exploring for a few years: what the specific mechanisms of technology are. Not sure if you've run across that yet in your stalking of me ;-). I've broken that down into roughly nine specific mechanisms: materials, fuels, power transmission and transformation, technical (process) knowledge, scientific (causal) knowledge, networks, systems, information (acquisition, parsing, storage, retrieval, processing, transmission), and for want of a better term: hygiene factors.
That last seems to be to be the ultimate technical discipline: how do you create healthy systems. Its own mechanisms are a recapitulation of the first eight, but they are revealed only with time -- call it emergence or the law of unintended consequences (Robert K. Merton, sociologist). It takes time to recognise these factors. It's also difficult to communicate and convince others of them: they're risks, indirect, often nonevident, and various human and institutional biases conspire against acceptance of them.
Hygiene is ultimately system health. Does the system itself perform at its capacity, at its potential, without premature degradation, without excess resource and potential wasting? The concept is almost purely evolutionary in the sense of fitness, though that raises a whole further set of concerns over endogenous versus exogenous selectors and governance, where I see endogenous selection (effectively: self-regulation, self-governance) as a frequent path to failure.
Content moderation follows along this line. There's been a lively discussion elsewhere with Nathan Weaver contributing both the source article and some excellent discussion. A key point of his is that moderation should focus principally on behaviour, which is a roundabout way of saying system health. The practices have an awful lot in common with public health and epidemiology, and I'd argue that this is because both are fundamentally engaged with the same question: systemic responses to internal information transmission (and external information introduction) and especially health-damaging consequences of those. The basic tools and lessons of epidemiology should apply here.
There's interesting history on this dating back to the 1960s, which I'm managing to forget off the top of my head now though I think I've addressed this on Mastodon.
(One of my current hopes: to draw my posts into a common archive at least I can search productively....)
Building out a set of phased-and-clustered-but-interconnected set of nodes and hubs should allow for both transmission of mostly-good-bits and the ability to limit the flow of mostly-bad-bits, without creating either a massively censored system or a complete cesspit.
New comments on this blog are moderated. If you do not have a Google identity, you are welcome to post anonymously. Your comments will appear here after they have been reviewed. Comments with vulgarity will be rejected.
Chris, welcome and no worries. I had to fish this out of the moderation queue as well, fortunately we're paying attention to things today.
ReplyDeleteFor a backgrounder on Cake, see:
https://www.cake.co/conversations/CTvLf2K/welcome-to-cake-google-refugees-here-s-how-to-get-started-using-cake/XG5bDgZ
cake.co - Welcome to Cake, Google+ refugees! Here’s how to get started using Cake.
What the heck is cake? There's another one to look at 😜?
ReplyDeleteChris MacAskill So one big difference between Google+ and Cake is that G+ has been strongly organised around people and groups through Circles and Communities. Do you see taking Cake in that direction at all, and why or why not?
ReplyDeleteThanks! Trey Ratcliff did a panel conversation at Cake with early Google+ users who LOVED the platform when it launched. Panels are something not many people are familiar with in group discussions, but this one gives you an idea of how they work. They give great signal-to-noise and protection from trolls.
ReplyDeletecake.co - Early Google+ influencers remember the network's early glory days, and what led to its eventual dem…
I'm all for protection from trolls!
ReplyDeleteHow much storage space are we allowed?
ReplyDeleteTessa Neill Hahaha, I saw a chart somewhere with all the choices. 🙂
ReplyDeleteWe seem to be the sleeper but somehow we've ended up with what seems like a lot of Google+ refugees happily posting away.
Cake is a place where you can indulge your interests more deeply than you can on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, without interference from trolls and spammers.
On most social networks you follow people. On Cake you follow topics that fascinate you. When you follow your interests rather than your friends, you can have fascinating conversations about the things you care about without feeling like you’re boring someone.
One of the things most Google+ refugees comment on his how they like the beautiful design.
Chris MacAskill I'm intrigued. I'm not seeing an app in the play store, however.
ReplyDeleteChris MacAskill What kinds of protections / defences against trolls and spammers do you have? User controls, admins (which would mostly be you)?
ReplyDeleteHow do you balance free speech vs. harassment and abuse considerations?
Chris MacAskill There's also a lot of questions about being able to import data from Google+ (posts, photographs), or to be able to post automatically from a blog or other source. Do you see Cake supporting either of these?
ReplyDeleteOr does auto-posting run against the notion of fostering community on the platform itself?
Edward Morbius , great question. This question gets asked often from people experienced on Google+, but I don't remember seeing it much for people coming from Reddit, forums or even Facebook Groups.
ReplyDeleteI think of it as your interest graph as opposed to your social graph. I think social graph companies like Facebook are good at keeping up with friends & family or following celebrities. Where social graph companies aren’t as strong is when you want to know more about photography or mountain biking. Interest-based sites like forums and Reddit tend to do better for indulging your interests.
One complaint we hear a lot about following people is you also get the things you're not interested in from them. Maybe it's politics.
We have talked about an idea to let you follow people sometime in the future. To keep it simple, the way it could work is to have their posts ride to the top where your interests overlap. If you follow a topic like Crohn's disease, and there's a doctor there who interests you, you'd see her posts in that topic and any others you overlap in — like, I don't know, surgery. But you wouldn't see her posts in the topic of homeschooling if that didn't interest you.
Of course that's hypothetical because we haven't finalized on a concept or committed to actually building it. The two reasons for why not are we're small and we want to improve what we do have already as much as we can. And also, we're watching closely how our refugees are adapting. After a week or two on the system it appears that most of them post that they've adapted to following interests and really like it. They end up syncing with each other about which interests to follow and see each other in them often. They seem to be reporting more signal less noise which is part of our mission, so we'll see.
Chris MacAskill Right. I've been on Google+ since it first went public, and Reddit for years. They have had two different approaches, though these have converged somewhat.
ReplyDeleteG+ started with Circles and early on ended up with a bunch of "you're holding it wrong" arguments from people to the profiles they were following for posting the "wrong" content into their Circles.
On Reddit, a forum ("subreddit") may be devoted to a specific topic, but as those get large and popular, the quality drops markedly.
G+ eventually came up with Collections, and though these are not uniformly named between people, you can at least choose to follow a person but exclude the content that's not of interest.
I've found that finding a good source and then limiting that to content of interest works ... reasonably well. It's a surprisingly hard problem to get right, and I've been looking a lot at the history of media and different aggregation and disaggregation models going back to the Greek poets and bards.
Magazines and blogs, with a strong editorial voice, a relatively constant stable of writers, and comments from both readers and the other writers, seems to be a surprisingly good model, and the two formats have a lot in common. It's fallen out of favour with the trend to social media, but I could see a comeback for it, possibly.
Chris MacAskill So another question is how Cake.co might (or might not) be a fit for photographers and photography communities. You've come from SmugMug which is specifically oriented toward that. How do you see Cake as a possible fit?
ReplyDeleteI think that sounds like a pretty smart idea. For me, following people unconditionally means getting a lot of things that might not interest you. And following just topics can lead to very low-quality content (see most programming communities here on G+, which are full of promotions for badly written computing 101 clickbait articles). G+ found some middle ground with Collections, where I could curate my topics by high quality authors. Your suggestion to float them to the front of the stream sounds very appealing as well.
ReplyDeleteChris MacAskill topic based is how I use g+. With their collections and communities-it's really the only thing I cared to do in here.
ReplyDeleteEdward Morbius Importing would be very hard for us. At one time we talked about importing from other platforms but as we delved in to the details it seemed to be a hairball with so many edge cases. The type of content, the moderation policies at the time where it came from, the topics versus people following thing, UI elements, etc. It seemed like a great thing to do in concept but hard to execute without a big team of engineers.
ReplyDeleteHow do you account for people who wish to see the whole community at large and not just small interest groups topic-oriented? I found people on G+ first through public posts of variety. Then I identified some groups/Communities second. I’ve no use for a website that locks me into small groups of like-minded people.
ReplyDeleteChris MacAskill how much storage do we get, and is there an app?
ReplyDeleteCarsten Reckord Thanks, Carsten. Honestly, it seems like a powerful concept to me but I'm trying to restrain myself so we don't unnecessarily complicate the UI or engineering.
ReplyDeleteThe Google+ refugees we have are all speaking fondly of collections, far as I can tell. They tend to say our topics have some similarities because they can be very fine grained and you can create them yourself.
You're right about a downside of groups. You have to make them broad enough to get traction, and then when they get too many people, they get noisy. I have a huge motorcycle message forum I started long ago and we have to keep splitting the subforms to get them so they aren't impersonal. advrider.com - Adventure Rider
Maybe the topic photography gets to be too much of a firehose for you, so you start one on mushroom photography (some G+ people did that). It's great! Not too many people in there and we know them all.
Edward Morbius for photography, you're right, it's one of our passions. I was cofounder of SmugMug for 13.5 years and loved every second. So we tend to know the nuances of what photographers want and it seems like the majority of the photographers we have, also have SmugMug or Flickr accounts (SmugMug bought Flickr).
ReplyDeleteChris MacAskill What's your forum-splitting strategy? Do you subdivide by interest, region, or ???
ReplyDeleteWhat seems to be "too large" for an effective group in your experience?
Edward Morbius I think I've spent hours stalking you on the net at Ello, here and Reddit. What you just wrote on collections and strong editorial voice completely resonates with me.
ReplyDeleteOn my motorcycle forum, Adventure Rider, we've combined an editorial voice with real writers plus user-generated content in the forums. Many of our editorial articles are authored by the adventure motorcyclists in the forums, which gives them authenticity, but we help edit. Those articles help the forums and the forums help the articles.
We learned how to do it from Jon Stokes, the cofounder of arstechnica. But also I admired the AMAs at Reddit and I admire how The New York Times has real journalists moderating comments for their articles. They have editor's picks. Amazon has Amazon's choice for stuff to buy. On Cake we have featured discussions. One I featured I got the idea for from a discussion you started:
cake.co - "Social media giants have become tools for oppressive governments and trolls to harass and silence"
I don't think there is any way around facing up to the fact that we have a huge human curation responsibility not just to surface interesting content, but for moderation. We have to make human editorial judgements on what comments add to the conversation and what wreck it, no?
Tessa Neill Thanks. Very interesting. I'm hearing that a lot. For the last few years I've really only used Google+ on a mobile app (I like it) and only to go into collections and communities I like. This is my first time on the web interface for ages. I thought I needed to for the keyboard.
ReplyDeleteChris MacAskill Thanks so much for your time. Stay as long as you'd like, I've got to tend to things here. If you can swing back in 8-12 hours for any late or follow-up questions, that would be great. Hugely appreciate you making yourself available to us.
ReplyDeleteChris MacAskill so Cake has an app? And how much storage do you allow users freely?
ReplyDeleteTessa Neill There is no limit to storage space on Cake. But you're limited to zero trolling. 😁 I kid, I know you're not a troll.
ReplyDeleteChris MacAskill I've had to deal with my fair share of them, that's for sure. If it costs you your peace, it's too expensive 😊. Thanks for lending your time to us, much appreciated.
ReplyDeleteLove the unlimited storage! And I've made my profile on cake... We'll see how it goes. Sigh, another late night 😂
ReplyDeleteTessa Neill We've done our best to make it work really well with just a browser on any device. So you can go to Cake.co from desktop, tablet, phone, etc., and it should feel like a mobile app.
ReplyDeleteHaving said that, we're getting fairly close with shipping an iPhone app because you're right, it's also nice to have an app. I have a couple of bits of bad news, however: we only had resources to write one app at a time and it just so happened we found iOS developers first. The other piece of bad news is for some reason, Google hasn't been able to get rich text editors to work on Android in either Firefox and Chrome. Strange, because they do on all apple and window and Chrome OS products, just not Android. A number of companies have filed a bug with them. So on Android, Cake works, but certain things like adding bold text to your posts don't yet. We don't have a status on what Google is doing about it. Sorry I don't have a better answer for you on that.
Chris MacAskill it did look really nice in the browser-I'm not concerned now. Do you know if it's only the latest Android version? I did notice that warning.
ReplyDeleteI can always download a different browser if it's that much of an issue.
ReplyDeleteChris MacAskill I haven't had a chance to try cake yet, but have heard good words. My question, is cake oriented towards pic sharing and story boarding like instagram and vero or more conversational like mewe and diaspora? What is cakes main focus and differentiation from other social activity networks? Thanks.
ReplyDeletecobalt please great question. In your feed, you can bounce between for you, which gives you conversations for just the topics you follow, featured, which we think are great conversations, and all. All is the way you get the global view. And within those feeds, you can choose between new, interesting, and active.
ReplyDeleteI know, we as humans tend to congregate among people who share common points of view and that can be bad for filter bubbles. I admire your willingness to step out of them. I try to always do the same, even though it can be a struggle to understand why someone believes what they believe.
We have a subform on Adventure Rider, a big forum that's been my hobby for 17 years, called Church, State and Money. You can't get more polarizing than that and motorcyclists can be pretty edgy. But left and right are in there together and they even held an in-person meet up in Kansas with every stripe of political person to try and understand each other. I really respect how they've done it.
That's the thing, in interest-based networks I feel you can do that. It's much harder among friends and family on Facebook. Do you really want to get into it with your uncle? I think you follow him to keep up with the cousins and you probably feel like you wish you could unsee his political views.
Edward Morbius dividing the subforums is painful and we hate it. But we can tell when the traffic is too high and they're drinking from a firehouse and starting to fight with each other.
ReplyDeleteWe used to have an off-topic forum and I split it into 4, such as Shiny Things and Church, State & Money. That wasn't regional but the split worked well because it was clear what went in there (shiny things is to talk about stuff like Apple Watches).
We do have regional forums and when they are too big, splitting is hard. We used to have an East regional. Florida got their own. That went okay, but what to do about the rest? We broke it down by the Mason-Dixon Line after a lot of debate and the poor guys who live close to the line have to bounce between the two forums to see all their friends and local rides. They don't like it but understand.
I don't really have a number for what's too big because I think it depends on how uniform the topic. Like Shiny Things is too big because it's so diverse and there's a group of clampers in there who don't care about watches. So we're going to pull the glampers into their own subform. But we have a sub for Old School (classic motorcycles) and most people in there pretty much love them all and don't want it split up because eye candy!
I spoke to an ex-Reddit employee who told me they had math for Subreddits and if they didn't get enough traction fast enough, they probably would never get off the ground. With splitting subs, we already know we have enough traffic.
Edward Morbius thanks for having me! I will swing back for any late questions.
ReplyDeleteChris MacAskill Ah, i somehow missed the collapsed comments, so reading them answered part of my question - you are indeed oriented towards conversation, but are organized like a forum, right? But i'm still wondering how you would describe your overall focus and differentiation from others.
ReplyDeleteBill Brayman Speaking as someone who has been using Cake since just after the Google+ closing down announcement, Cake is primarily about subjects not about people. It takes a little bit of getting used to Cake and I don't think everyone will like it. But, for those who preferred G+ over facebook due to the fact that G+ allowed one to meet more new people who shared common interests, Cake is more like that. If the only people that you want to hang with are those who are already in your circles then Cake is not for you.
ReplyDeleteI get that a lot of people use Facebook for keeping up with off-line friends and family, but I belong to a lot of special interest Groups there, and when they're well moderated they're brilliant. I don't think I've ever asked to be friends with someone just because I met them in a Facebook Group; I might have a common interest in upcycling rubbish to make art and craftwork, but chances are I'm not going to be interested in their other stuff. So you can just follow interests on Facebook already, if that's what you want to do. Most of my activity there is following the Groups I'm interested in.
ReplyDeleteHaving said that, I don't know that it can function as a replacement for Google+ since there's nothing like the ability to post into G+ Collections or to follow other people's Collections.
I'm interested in Cake and will probably create an account; I particularly like the clean look of the pages, which seem to show off photos really well. But for me it's a drawback that you can only follow topics and not individuals. I like to follow photographers whose work I like. I also like to follow people whom I feel I've come to know well over the seven years that Google+ has existed.
Marysia Kurowski that’s exactly what I was posting here earlier. I follow the person first. If I follow a person I want to have access to all their public posts. If I don’t care for some, I just scroll past. It’s easier for me than trying to guess what Collection they are posting in.
ReplyDeleteIf I object strongly to a person on topics they post frequently about, then it’s easier to just unfollow them. The Cake site is a bit in development it seems. I’m glad to get these questions and answers here.
Often we can’t just easily locate our friends we’ve known for years online here in G+. For example I have a friend named something silly like “no name Ned” and it’s fine that he calls me cobalt and I call him Ned. It doesn’t matter to either of us to know our actual IRL name. If he’s on Cake and so am I, we’ll not find each other unless each of us register on Cake with the name we use here in G+. After 7 years of talking weekly with him, I’m trying to figure out what name he’s now using or guess what topic he is following. And then I have to hope I’ve guess correctly one of his topics and hope I recognize him? This is only a problem for those of us who really want to follow people.
Chris MacAskill does Cake support a unmodified algorithm free reverse chronological feed?
ReplyDeleteI hate social media algorithms that try to tell us what we want to see. I'm totally fine having an option where I can use some algorithm to try to give me suggestions and things based on my interest, but there should be an option for me to just have an unmodified raw feed that is a simple reverse chronological feed of the the people I want to follow.
If I end up following 50,000 people and it's become unmanageable and I'll never see everything, that's my problem, don't force me to use an algorithm that filters things out that the algorithm thinks I may not be interested in.
With a simple unmodified feed you simply open it up and keep scrolling until you get to a post you've seen before and you know you are caught up.
David R Robinson excellent points! I hope there is a response to your question.
ReplyDeletecobalt please: In your shoes I'd send a private Google+ message to him, to ask him to let you know when he makes other social media account(s) and to give you the profile url(s). Perhaps that's already what you're planning on doing if you find he's jumped ship.
ReplyDeleteMarysia Kurowski I do plan to do this but actually it’s with about 50 people I just can’t bear to lose contact with. G+ has been my main social outlet for 7 years now. I’ve gotten deep friendships that are reciprocal and all of us are being pulled different directions. So far I have seen no less than 7 new sites they are splitting into. I’m extroverted so I have no problem joining multiple sites but I see most people only able and willing to try this social side of social media in maybe one or 2 places.
ReplyDeleteSadly I’m guessing literally half my friends will just go back inside FB. Where I will never return.
LOL. I want to see certain people's photographs and to see my friends' posts. Deciding to change my mindset isn't exactly a suitable replacement :-D
ReplyDeleteEDIT Jan 1st 2019: This comment was in reply to a comment that has now been deleted.
Chris MacAskill I like the appearance of Cake and the interest-based networks. What I would like to know is:
ReplyDelete1. What is the funding model?
2. Related to the above, what plans does cake have for charging for services (if any)
3. What are your growth plans? I noticed, for example, that the Photography category only has 442 followers. That's pretty small, and 'photography' is normally one of the most populous subjects in social media sites.
Thanks!
cobalt please With all its flaws (and whoo, boy, are there flaws) FB is my secondary social media presence outside of G+, and it's manageable if you're very selective about how you craft your "friends" list.
ReplyDeleteFor photographers, Flickr (recently acquired by SmugMug) is a pretty good option.
Twitter is simply too short-form for real "social" interaction.
I can already feel the bleeding-away of my G+ friends as we all try to figure out what's next and some people leave here for other spaces. It sucks. I don't like any of the social-media-come-lately options people are discussing here, for reasons ranging from "underfunded/unlikely to last" to "havens of alt.right and other groups I do not wish to be even remotely associated with. And you're one of the people I'll really miss when this when the G+ lights go out ...
G+ has been my primary social network for several years. What I loved most was that I was interacting with people I didn't know but shared common interests. Learning that Google has decided to give-up on this platform has left a lot of us feeling like we're being evicted from our home. I believe that Cake has a lot of potential and perhaps may evolve organically. Especially if users are invited to have input in the evolution.
ReplyDeleteAre the posts made available through a google search like Twitter posts are or will they be viewable only as a signed in user?
I wish you the very best with your new social site.
I can see Cake with icing & a cherry-on-top! Now that would be delicious. :)
Regarding section 18 of the TOS:
ReplyDelete18. Some of the Service may display advertisements and promotions. You hereby agree that Cake may place advertising and promotions on the Service or in conjunction with your Content. The manner, mode and extent of such advertising and promotions are subject to change without specific notice to you.
Can you please explain this? It looks to me as if my content is going to get used to enhance ads that I neither control nor get paid for.
Bill Pusztai we put a lot of care into designing Cake so we can provide high-fidelity and interest-based ads, with an optional subscription model..
ReplyDeleteI say interest-based because each conversation is categorized with topics, such as photography or hiking. Nikon may choose to run ads in photography but perhaps not hiking. Not only is interest-based advertising the most effective, it's understandable to regular people and doesn't require creepy surveillance capitalism.
In the case of Facebook, their problem is much harder to solve because it's tough to infer your interests from a like of your sister's party photo. So Facebook buys external data and merges it into your true identity to form a profile of you.
I mention high fidelity ads because good advertisers such as Nikon want a quality ad where it can be seen and respected. To us that means an occasional ad in a stream or conversation where you're looking, similar to how Instagram works (although the ads seem more than occasional there now). The more high fidelity you can make the ads, the fewer ads you have to run. It's a virtuous circle. If you have great content, you can get great advertisers and if you get great advertisers, you can get great content..
On my motorcycle forum, at YouTube, Flickr and Reddit, you can pay for an optional subscription where you don't have to see ads at all. I have a lot of experience with all of those and my impression is they work really well. None of them use a customer photo or text in their ads, but they do have to have permission from their customers to run a pre-roll ad before a YouTube video, for example.
That's what we were seeking with that clause. It's not to take your content and turn it into an ad, but to allow us to place an ad somewhere in a feed or conversation like the one we're having here.
Make sense? Let me know if you have more questions. Thanks!
Angela Porisky thank you. All posts are discoverable via Google search. We've never viewed it as a walled garden.
ReplyDeleteI'm astonished at how fast Google manages to index new conversations. Yesterday a new user posted about bird feeders. I wanted to welcome them and our girls are interested in putting a hummingbird feeder in the back yard, So 32 minutes after he created the conversation, I searched Google for info on the kind of bird feeder he bought, and there was his post from Cake near the top of the search results. Google seems to be placing a big emphasis on recency now.
Pat Kight I'm the cofounder of SmugMug and the underfunded/may not last fears dogged us for perhaps a decade (we were formed in 2002). It was very understandable because we were bootstrapped and surrounded by giants like Kodak Gallery, AOL Pictures, Microsoft Photo Sharing, etc. I also bootstrapped Adventure Rider in 2001 and it has 2 million users/month now.
ReplyDeleteAt Cake we have a team of just 2 designers and 4 engineers + me, and I am funding a considerable portion of it. It's counter-intuitive in an age where Yik Yak could raise $73 million and go bust, but I believe our small lean team increases the odds we'll build a lasting company while others burn through their cash.
As for stands on free speech, I think we've learned that you can grow really fast that way as an Internet company, but then a serious reckoning happens as we saw with Gab. We've avoided that like the plague, much more than Twitter and Facebook have.
Chris MacAskill I fear I may be misunderstanding you, so my apologies in advance if so. Where I am hesitant is the idea that, let's say I post a picture of Vancouver, and next to it, other people are served an ad for Tourism Vancouver, which would not only be using my image to enhance the ad (even if it's not explicitly part of the ad) but on some level create the impression that I endorse the product; and I get paid nothing (but if Getty sells my image to Tourism Vancouver I get paid royalties and my name is nowhere near the product). Of course that's a pretty benign example but what if it's a product I strongly disagree with and absolutely don't want to be associated with?
ReplyDeleteI'm not actually concerned about the ads served to me, your model sounds like I would find it quite agreeable as a reader, but I would pay to prevent ads being served to other people next to my content. Is that actually a thing, ever anywhere?
FYI the questions Bill Pusztai asks are very important to photographers. We, more than other members, are far more likely to find our images appropriated via intentional or even accidental use. As he knows, I was astonished to see a flower photo of his displayed on a wall-mounted big screen TV in a green clinic. It was "just" a Chromecast using popular photos on Google but still, it was both pleasant for me and also disconcerting.
ReplyDeleteBill Pusztai Hmmm, that's an interesting scenario and an important question.
ReplyDeleteI may not have thought about this deeply enough but it seems plausible that this scenario could unfold:
You start a conversation about Vancouver and post some photos of the city. The key thing is you assign the topic "Vancouver" to the conversation. Perhaps other people add to the conversation with their own photos.
The Vancouver Tourism board has an ad they run tied to the topic Vancouver. It has their own photo that they licensed from Getty. It appears in the conversation but is labeled Promoted.
A second scenario is you start a conversation about cityscapes and post photos of Vancouver, Sydney and Prague. You want to show that the blue hour makes for great photos. You assign the topic cityscape to the conversation.
Sony fancies their cameras as good for cityscapes, so they place an ad in the conversation. It uses a photo they took of Hong Kong's skyline.
Do those scenarios make sense and do they threaten photographers? Unless I am misunderstanding, this is similar to Twitter and Instagram, no?
Questions:
ReplyDelete1. Do you have image dimensions for banners and avatars?
2. Will there be a desktop friendly option? HD+ monitors have a lot of wasted white space otherwise.
Chris MacAskill I don't use Twitter or Instagram precisely because. Here's a sore one. I did a portrait of a 62 y o gay guy. He posted it on FB. Soon his friends are being served his face next to a GOP attack ad and an adult diaper ad. As near as we can figure it's because he used the words "GOP" and "depends" in the text.
ReplyDeleteBill Pusztai Oh my God that's awful. No wonder you're concerned.
ReplyDeleteI've had two shocking experiences with Facebook. One is I got invited to join a Group and the Group settings were set to auto join. I was busy, briefly checked out the group, didn't have the time to figure out how to unjoin, but no worries, it was a closed group. What could go wrong? I didn't realize that closed means open for all to see that you are a member and it turned out to be pretty embarrassing when people asked me why I was a member of that group.
Second, who knew that if you start a secret group, you as the admin can change it to public at any time if it has less than 5,000 members. Gay teens didn't know so they joined to talk to others about how to come to grips with their sexuality and how to come out. The admin made it public and that's how some parents found out their sons were gay, much to the horror of the sons.
In my opinion, that's what comes of a growth team driven by data, which Facebook famously has, and not by values. In contrast, I've known Stewart Butterfield (founder of Slack) for years because he was founder of Flickr. They decided not to let admins of private Slack channel make them public because values.
They also made the default at Slack no notifications from late evening to mid morning unless you specifically request to be notified. Big data said they get more engagement with the default being notifications working 24x7, but values.
We are hurting our growth in the beginning because we don't host outrage-fueled conspiracies, but values.
Kevyne Kicklighter we don't have dimensions because we size them to fit, but I think the max upload size is 20 mb. The avatar looks best with a photo that has a square aspect ratio, and the banner looks best if it can work at 2:1 and 3:1 ratios (to adapt to different devices).
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comments earlier about uncluttered and clean. We have two designers and 4 engineers and they're all passionate about uncluttered and clean. We've constantly made tweaks for readability and clarity when we become aware of ways to improve, so it's nice to hear your feedback.
Tessa Neill unfortunately, it's not the browser that is causing the rich text editor problems but the virtual keyboard (GBoard) on Android devices. It simply doesn't send the keystrokes the browser needs to to the right thing. As far as I know, that's all rich text editors on Android, even with browsers like Firefox. Google knows about this problem because developers have been loud about it so we're holding our breath for a fix.
ReplyDeleteChris MacAskill if you start a secret group, you as the admin can change it to public at any time if it has less than 5,000 members
ReplyDeleteGoogle has had its issues with information leakage, but I'll give them credit for setting one-way filters on going private. Private G+ groups or Collections cannot be made public, nor can a post made privately be re-shared publicly.
This is occasionally frustrating: I worked around the problem of not having a drafting feature by creating a "Drafts" Collection with only myself having access. I cannot assign those posts to a public (or possibly: any other) Collection, even though I am the sole author and reader. That's ... an abundance of caution, I suppose.
These are the sorts of problems that turn up again and again in network and community design, and for all it got mucked up, Google did a good job on many of its decisions. I've been mum on much praise for a while, the sunset is loosening my lips a bit.
There are lessons for those of us looking to create new platforms elsewhere, and I suspect many of those lessons will have to be learnt again.
The saving grace of teachers: we're all born ignorant. Some of us repeatedly.
David R Robinson great question about unmodified feeds. We offer three choices via a pulldown: Interesting, Recent and New. Whatever option you choose sticks until you change it.
ReplyDeleteInteresting uses an algorithm to bubble up the conversations that are getting a lot of traction lately, such as reactions and replies.
Recent are conversations that you follow that have new posts since. your last visit. If you post in a conversation, you automatically follow it, but you can choose to follow conversations you don't post in.
New is simply ordering by date, newest on top.
I hope this helps!
Chris
Chris MacAskill so I guess it doesn't matter I use a slide keyboard that came loaded on by device, because I got that rich text warning.
ReplyDeleteApocryphal Chris good questions. When we started SmugMug I didn't think there was a way to get it funded because it was the fall of 2001 and investors thought the Internet was over. So I put my own money into it, didn't take a salary for 4 years, and HQ was my house all that time. Seemed scary at the time but it got us on solid enough footing we could eventually buy Flickr, which had been backed by VCs.
ReplyDeleteWith Cake I've never taken a salary either and quite a lot of my savings has gone into it too. I used to work for Steve Jobs and he did that with Pixar and NeXT too, as Elon Musk has done with Tesla and SpaceX, and the Airbnb founders did.
You might think that puts the company at extra risk but I think it makes the best companies because it shows how committed the founders are. Also, venture capitalists want you to go big fast or go home and I think insane early growth of a community breaks it. There is a lot of tone setting and moderation to do, and a lot of tweaking to get the product right, which can take time.
As for 400-something followers of the photography topic, yes it's fairly small but we'll all look back on this as a golden time. Communities can be so great early. We had slightly more than 3x the posts in October as we had in September, so it feels more lively every week.
Bill Brayman I think about Facebook as being about keeping up with friends &. family, NextDoor about your neighborhood, LinkedIn about your career, Twitter about news, and Cake about your interests. It's a service where you can indulge your interests in photography, hiking, or electric cars by going deeper in the discussion with people who are really passionate about what you are.
ReplyDeleteIn some ways it fills the need forums have filled over the years, but you don't have to join a different forum for each interest, and the interface is modern and clean.
Chris MacAskill thanks for taking the time to answer our questions!
ReplyDeleteChris MacAskill Yes, thanks so much.
ReplyDeleteFYI Al Tlön
ReplyDeleteI must admit that because you took care in answering questions here Chris MacAskill , I am definitely going to try Cake. I’ll be adding myself into the photography community if they will have me! Thank you very much.
ReplyDeleteChris MacAskill re. 'no limit to storage space', unfortunately SmugMug decided to go back on Flickr's free 1TB policy. Are there any guarantees that the same thing won't happen on Cake once the platform has gained enough momentum?
ReplyDeleteRe. topic based content:
Does Cake offer suggestions based on previously followed/posted content? If so, what happens if I decide I'm no longer interested in a topic? Will unfollowing reflect that in the suggestions, or will it still base it on previous content rather than currently followed topics?
What's Cake's take on Data Liberation/portability? Is there data export functionality in place already, and if so, in which format? Is that format publicly documented? Are there APIs available so people can integrate data into their own site, and/or create their own apps?
As for the discussion about following a Collection vs following a Person: both have their pros and cons. Following a Collection makes sure I only see the content I'm interested in, and not the kinda of (political) content that grinds my gears. However, it could also put me in a bit of a filter bubble, as I might not easily discover other content the person posts that I hadn't considered yet as of interest to me.
Chris MacAskill yes, sounds like New is what I was asking about. Thanks!
ReplyDeleteFilip H.F. Slagter Lots of good questions. The Flickr one is hard for me to answer because I wasn't part of the Flickr acquisition — I had left to start Cake before then. It must be a tough situation because 1 TB of free storage promised by a previous owner. I can imagine it tortured them to make the decision to go back on it.
ReplyDeleteWe don't offer suggestions yet for similar topics mostly because we're fairly new and small, but also we haven't built up the data yet that would make the recommendations effective. I imagine both those things are pretty far in the future. Removing suggestions that no longer apply once you stop following a topic makes a ton of sense.
The story with the API is we started with one from the beginning that all our internal developers use, including mobile. We haven't made the API public because we're still changing it at our early pace of development. APIs take considerable resources to support, so we want to make sure we have that in place before exposing it. We really haven't thought about data export yet, at least I haven't. It's possible some of our engineers have some thoughts or plans, but I haven't tuned into them.
We're paying a lot of attention to what our Google+ refugees are saying about collections, following people, etc., to figure out what we may be able to improve in our scheme in the future. It's a fascinating problem to ponder.
I'm active on Reddit, but I hardly know anyone there. And I own a big motorcycle forum and I know tons of people there. They are both interest-based. I think the difference is on Reddit, I follow really big subs and they tend to become impersonal. On Cake, you do get to know the people in topics that are fairly tightly defined, like fungi photography on Cake, where I see Glenn Smith every day because we share that interest.
Chris MacAskill I'd be really interested in your (and others) perspectives on data costs and components; how much is the hosting itself, data bandwidth, backups/redundancy, cache / CDN, and monitoring for & responding to abuse.
ReplyDeleteSome of that falls with time, some not.
Thanks for the explanation about the image dimensions. Great to get a direct answer on the matter (my poor image folders are too large because every site has specific image dimensions!).
ReplyDeleteEdward Morbius fascinating questions. They were live-or-die questions for us at SmugMug because photos take up so much storage since we didn't modify originals (Facebook and Instagram resampled and recompressed, which made all the difference for them.).
ReplyDeleteWe thought storage costs would go the way of Moore's Law, and they did, but so did the pixel explosion and the number of photos taken per photographer. So for Flickr and SmugMug, storage costs are ginormous.
For Cake at our stage, all costs are immaterial except salaries. Engineers and designers are expensive and it takes a lot of them to build a service like ours in the modern era where consumer expectations are so high for hard things like infinite scroll. Consider that Google had a team of 500 and that was dwarfed by Facebook and Twitter.
It's interesting to think of whether you could build something like Cake via an open source project that could last as it scales. I'd like to believe you could, given the success of projects like Linux, but I don't see how you can solve the vast human problem of moderation at scale that way. Now that nation states have turned it into an arms race, I think even giants like Facebook are telling Wall Street that hmmm, moderation is expensive and they wish they had spent more on it before now.
I like this cake!! I spent the last two hours reading the comments found at the link of Edward and others. I think that with some improvement already suggested Cake can be a valid alternative to G + and not necessarily be the copy.. I like the division by subject and so far is the one that convinces me more than all the alternatives listed in the various posts.
ReplyDeleteUsing Chrome I saw that the translator is automatic and this is a very interesting topic for those like me who use google then if to share with people from all over the world. I think we'll see you soon there! 🍰Chris MacAskill
Edward Morbius thank you so much for your support in this phase of loss.. 🤔🙃 I will continue to follow you with interest until the end 👍
Chris MacAskill I keep thinking that at some point the additional pixels become superfluous, though projects such as gigapixel images of Mount Everest suggest that there's a space for ultra-high-definition images. I think those will prove to be a niche though.
ReplyDeleteI'd have to check but I think digital is at or beyond the resolution of even low-speed film, at which point for most purposes there's a practical higher limit possible. Pixels might well become a pricing differentiator, which extends a discussion I'm having elsewhere on this stuff.
The moderation question gets to another element I've been exploring for a few years: what the specific mechanisms of technology are. Not sure if you've run across that yet in your stalking of me ;-). I've broken that down into roughly nine specific mechanisms: materials, fuels, power transmission and transformation, technical (process) knowledge, scientific (causal) knowledge, networks, systems, information (acquisition, parsing, storage, retrieval, processing, transmission), and for want of a better term: hygiene factors.
That last seems to be to be the ultimate technical discipline: how do you create healthy systems. Its own mechanisms are a recapitulation of the first eight, but they are revealed only with time -- call it emergence or the law of unintended consequences (Robert K. Merton, sociologist). It takes time to recognise these factors. It's also difficult to communicate and convince others of them: they're risks, indirect, often nonevident, and various human and institutional biases conspire against acceptance of them.
Hygiene is ultimately system health. Does the system itself perform at its capacity, at its potential, without premature degradation, without excess resource and potential wasting? The concept is almost purely evolutionary in the sense of fitness, though that raises a whole further set of concerns over endogenous versus exogenous selectors and governance, where I see endogenous selection (effectively: self-regulation, self-governance) as a frequent path to failure.
Content moderation follows along this line. There's been a lively discussion elsewhere with Nathan Weaver contributing both the source article and some excellent discussion. A key point of his is that moderation should focus principally on behaviour, which is a roundabout way of saying system health. The practices have an awful lot in common with public health and epidemiology, and I'd argue that this is because both are fundamentally engaged with the same question: systemic responses to internal information transmission (and external information introduction) and especially health-damaging consequences of those. The basic tools and lessons of epidemiology should apply here.
There's interesting history on this dating back to the 1960s, which I'm managing to forget off the top of my head now though I think I've addressed this on Mastodon.
(One of my current hopes: to draw my posts into a common archive at least I can search productively....)
Building out a set of phased-and-clustered-but-interconnected set of nodes and hubs should allow for both transmission of mostly-good-bits and the ability to limit the flow of mostly-bad-bits, without creating either a massively censored system or a complete cesspit.
I hope.
I really, really, really hope.