Thank you for taking the time to share your observations and perspectives as a new community member. It’s always useful to have a fresh set of eyes looking at the platform and I’ll make sure that the Cake team is made aware of your feedback.
I’m often accused of being flippant when I tell someone, Cake isn’t for everyone.
But it’s true. The focus and community norms of forums vary whether it’s The Well, Reddit, Mastodon, Facebook Groups, Pluspora, Twitter, 4chan, MeWe, or even Instagram.
Cake is a sister site of a much older platform called ADVRider. As a result, a lot of the early adopters were motorcycle enthusiasts. In addition, @Chris has ties to the photo sharing sites SmugMug and Flickr, so quite a few professional and amateur photographers have joined the site.
As more and more people join the site, the range of topics actively discussed continues to expand. However, the conversations that draw the most interest right now is fairly narrow. COVID-19 completely shutdown all other conversations for at least the first month of the pandemic, and it’s only been a few weeks now that I’ve started to see a much wider range of topics discussed.
If you’re actively looking to debate someone with diametrically opposed views, Cake is probably going to be a disappointment. There are a ton of political discussions that occur on Cake, however most of them are about gaining a better understanding of an issue rather than convincing someone of your position on it.
Here’s a link to the Politics conversations that have occurred, both recent and archive, to give you a better “read of the room.”
We also had two mega thread discussions on the Australian Wildfires that got into global warming, conspiracy theories and the Murdoch News Empire. The responses ranged from short replies to what I refer to, with no ill-will implied, as “essay length.”
Here’s an example from one of those threads where I and another user had a civil but spirited debate on whether arson was the cause of the fires.
Our responses were anything but short, but again the focus was on gaining an understanding of the truth rather than on proving the other person wrong.
Whether that’s “British” is open for interpretation.
What I do know is that if someone attacks a user’s writing, or makes them feel like it’s an attack, a Cake user is more likely to set you to “Ignore,” which removes your comments from their view, or to set you to “Mute,” which prevents you from replying to any of their conversations.
Again, there are different community norms of every platform and I know of some sub-reddits where you publish a post with the knowledge that multiple people will end up tearing apart your arguments.
You may find helpful, @IcyOtter, this guide I put together of conversations that tend to generate high engagement on Cake, as well as topics that haven’t yet gained sufficient interest.