Introducing Cake: Great conversations about topics that fascinate you

17 years ago I started Adventure Rider, a forum for people who share a peculiar passion for riding rugged motorcycles to exciting places. To my surprise it has grown to almost 2 million monthly visitors despite being based on software from the 90s, in the age of Facebook, as a side hobby, with no promotion.

For all those years, we adventurers yearned for a better experience and for a place where we could have great conversations about other topics beyond adventure riding. But it became clear the cavalry wasn’t coming. If we wanted to see the service we dreamed of, we’d have to build it.

So four of us left jobs we loved, put our heads together, and created Cake.

Here’s how Cake is different:

• On most social networks you follow people. On Cake you follow topics that fascinate you. We love our friends and family, but they don’t all share the same interests. 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.

On most social networks you follow people. On Cake you follow topics that fascinate you.

• Cake’s mission is to enable great conversations, and that’s our success metric. It’s hard to ban bad actors when you measure your success by the number of active users. We’re not interested in being a platform for hate speech or harassment because those things are the opposite of great.
• Cake enables storytelling in ways that status updates on social networks don’t. Sometimes the best conversations unfold over days, weeks, or months as you travel to new countries or get your first tattoo. Cake makes it easy to create those stories for the world to follow.
• You own your experience on Cake. You can hide posts in your conversations that you feel detract from the discussion. You can ignore users whose posts and conversations you don’t want to see. You can mute users to prevent them from posting in conversations you start. And soon we’ll unveil even more powerful tools to help you have great conversations without needing to worry about trolls, mansplainers, and other nuisances.

Cake is in beta now and we’re inviting our first users. Come join us!