Very good points.. As far as the hundreds of annoying investors, I never really thought of it.. But I guess that happens anyway whenever you take any customer

Very good points.. As far as the hundreds of annoying investors, I never really thought of it.. But I guess that happens anyway whenever you take any customer's money.. Except in the Diaspora case, they took the money in advance of development with an expectation that what they were building would satisfy each user which is an impossible scenario from the outset.. Plus the project was open source which I don't think is exactly the norm for a YC investment.. But I think in the end, Diaspora is a fluke.. Statistically and Culturally.. Statistically, it's outcome was not representative of a typical Kickstarter Funding process.. Culturally it was the result of some backlash against Facebook.. That means some of the backers were already pissed off and the open source focus means the some were likely quite vocal to begin with.. I think the combination of these factors and the fact that the funders came in before anything was built leads to the scenario you mention.. Our product was already quite built out before we came to kickstarter and users were pledging for Alpha access and other near future products.. Interestingly enough, we got a front page post on Sparkfun.com today and there were a few non-backers who had something to say about how we should build our project.. The fact that it IS already a project means that they can criticize without making the mistake of backing us and feeling swindled that we don't share their vision.. A few times, the complaint was that we should turn our web based product open source even when they criticized our design.. I think complainers will complain no matter what, and the question of ownership and control is very important as in the case of your investor..