[Solved for me] The Bakery - I do not understand it...

You guys have taken everything I hate about social media and made it my daily experience. What is all the jibbering about reward points, and SERVICE GUARANTEES CITIZENSHIP!!!!!!!!! I can't believe it. Sound like something from an Orwell novel.
 
My signal can earn me rewards?? I have no signal, I'm a human being. Get the brain trust that put this together and give them all bonuses. And yes, the Sonar forum is a peer to peer support network regardless of has been previously said. I've asked for help and received it, I've been asked for help and given it. Fits the definition.

Yesterday I have started to write very offensive detailed post what I do not like in The Bakery...
But today I have found better solution for myself: I will never open it again. The problem is solved

Kamikaze
View by Popular ideas, contains eleven (popular) Staff View Requests.
 
View from the main page, scroll to the bottom and see 'Popular Tags', 'Staff View', just Triplets handling is tagged.
 
The ostrich approach continues.
 

I'd try not to read too much into what is very much a work in progress. We're just rolling out The Bakery in very early stages. We've been calling it a "soft lunch" (credit goes to Willy) internally because we know its in it's early stages. Quite a lot has not been implemented yet, and because there is so little content you may inadvertently draw conclusions from the content that is or isn't there. 
 
Popular Tags, for example, populate as people start tagging content (which has barely been done so far). There's no human at Cakewalk saying what is or isn't popular here... the users are saying what is and isn't popular. Right now you're just seeing a small sample case because there's only around 10 new threads where tags have been created. We haven't tagged the existing Ideas yet.
 
The Ideas section is seeded from us importing the top 100 threads from the Features & Ideas forum. We didn't hand-pick our favorites, an application did some math and imported what people have been voting on. Unfortunately we'll have to take a bit of time to add some relevant tags manually. Both Cakewalk-Staff and the original posters can add tags to the current threads.
 
The Bakery is designed to be more and more helpful as time goes on. As people tag content throughout time, we'll have easier ways of discovering more about tags and topics we care about. For example, maybe I don't care at all about SONAR-Platinum, but I care about The-Bakery. Here's a link for that: http://bakery.cakewalk.com/Tag/The-Bakery
 
Maybe I care about both [The-Bakery] and [SONAR-Home-Studio]? Here's a link for that: http://bakery.cakewalk.com/Search?query=%5BSONAR-Platinum%5D%5BSONAR-Home-Studio%5D&postType=All
 
Maybe I'm a SONAR developer and am finally getting around to all those pesky Staff View things. Here's a link for that: http://bakery.cakewalk.com/Tag/Staff-View . It's pretty bare at the moment because things haven't been tagged, but in time this will be an incredibly useful tool for someone spending their time doing staff view development and trying to get to the bottom of things without having to read hundreds/thousands of lengthy posts to gain insight.
 
Again - as content is seeded and tagged the usefulness of this will grow exponentially. The current forum software, on the other hand, doesn’t allow the user to quickly customize topics they care about based on the user’s interests. Instead you get lumped into a forum that someone decided is how it should be organized.
 
Maybe I'm a Product Manager and really want to learn about popular features users are voting on. Seeing votes on ideas, votes on feedback for ideas, and views is an incredibly useful tool and something our PMs have been requesting for years from us. This isn't very different from an abundance of other applications out there that do this same exact thing (see Ideascale, GetSatisfaction).
 
Maybe I'm a SONAR user and just want to cut to the chase and find an answer to my problem? I can search for similar problems and see the Accepted Answer to a similar question and whether or not it has received a lot of upvotes. Not all advice is good advice. (See StackExchange where this system works incredibly well)
 
Maybe I just want to participate in the discussion but am flamed for having a different opinion. We'd like a community that is better at self-moderation so that the folks doing moderator type work don't feel like targets. (See Reddit). We may tweak the signal and rewards in the future, but you have to start from somewhere and the underlying point of it is two-fold:

1. To prevent abuse. If someone just starts downvoting popular ideas to be a troll, they're abusing the system and are penalized for it. We can't simply have voting without having some type of enforcement on how the voting works.
2. To reward helpful members. There's more to be said about helping other users solve their problems or sharing brilliant ideas that benefit the community as a whole then just... having a lot of posts.

Maybe I'm trying to learn about Cakewalk customers but can't really gauge what the popular opinion actually is. For example, who is to say any of the opinions in this thread resonate with the majority of our users? I have no idea - all I can go off is what IS said versus what ISN’T. It's all subjective to the reader, which isn't always the best thing to go off. What we do know, however, is that the overwhelming vast majority of our customers do not ever post on the Cakewalk Forum so it's difficult to use as a proper metric… especially when there aren’t really any indicators as to what is or isn’t a good question, idea, or discussion for us to spend time on.
 
All-in-all, the reason we've been putting time into The Bakery is because there isn't an off-the-shelf solution that offers us all of these various things. The solutions we've looked into either cater really well to Q+A, Product Management, or Discussions. We haven't really found one that does all 3 of those, and also allows us to customize things to our users' and Cakewalk's needs. This forum software, as an example, is incredibly difficult to customize because we do not have access to the source code and any reverse engineering and customization we do is immediately broken by the next update. It's not a worthwhile effort for us. The Bakery, on the other hand, can become whatever we want it to become.
 
So The Bakery is new, and we're optimistic about it because we know we can grow it into a useful tool for both Cakewalk and customers to use. Right now it is an infant though, and it definitely has a lot of knowledge to gain and growing to do. I can definitely relate to anyone’s concerns because this forum does have a ton of knowledge and useful members. Nobody is trying to squash that. Please try to work with us so we can make it better.

Am I the only one who gets a bad feeling when it takes Ryan more paragraphs than I had time to read to explain the rationale? Am I the only one who feels that the rating system is uncomfortably redolent of Black Mirror's Nosedive?