4 ms·
The bottom line with Kickstarter is that it's a great idea, but 1. It's vulnerable to gaming, and 2. There are financial rewards for gaming Kickstarter. I conj
by raganwald 13y ago
The bottom line with Kickstarter is that it's a great idea, but 1. It's vulnerable to gaming, and 2. There are financial rewards for gaming Kickstarter.
I conjecture that 3. It will become overrun with flim-flam projects if it does not change to correct 1 and/or 2. The stories are few and far between today, but inexorably there will be more and more scams. Why not? It's relatively cheap to put a scam project together, and the upside is tremendous.
We can argue about whether Kickstarter is or isn't a store until we've consumed all the oxygen in the room, but the real question is this: Are things going to get better? Stay about the same? Or get worse?
I say thing will get much, much worse unless they make changes of some kind.
- pyduan 13y agoI know Indiegogo is hard at work towards building automated scam/fraud detection systems. I work in this space (I build such systems for Eventbrite) and from my conversation with them it seems they're new to these problems but are making them a priority. Now Indiegogo has a slightly different model (campaigns can be created by anyone and are not curated) than Kickstarter that makes it more of a priority for them, but hopefully with the recent cases of fraud on Kickstarter they're putting more work into prevention as well. All in all, I don't think it's an inescapable problem. It is perfectly possible to build scam-detection systems (we do so at Eventbrite, to prevent people pretending to be selling tickets for an event they're not actually organizers of), and although it's not easy as these crowd-sourcing grow larger they'll hopefully have more resources to put behind it. [1] Like this guy: http://www.onthemedia.org/story/new-kind-kickstarter-scam-backer/ http://www.onthemedia.org/story/new-kind-kickstarter-scam-ba...