Servant, Morley, you make good points. I would normally agree with you. But it just feels like people clogging something with stuff they shouldn't results in the thing being useless for everyone else. Like a common pasture where everyone's sheep eat too much and ruin it, or how advertisers on the Internet have made it unusable in certain areas. I wouldn't go so far as to describe someone with a crummy kickstarter as equivalent to a programmer distributing viruses and making people's computers harder to use, it's the same type of activity: Person X wants to participate but he knows his participation will make everyone hate him and/or laugh at him.
And this isn't the introvert fear of rejection, that "everyone will laugh at me". It's someone showing up for their football match wearing a latex wedding gown with a 20-meter train. It's someone setting up in a farmer's market selling homemade farts-in-a-jar. It's an Etsy account that just resells mass-produced stuff from China for a 10,000% markup. It's a Craigslist post giving away a free dilapidated concrete driveway - but you have to break it up and haul it away yourself. It's yet another Youtube channel where a nerd says "um" a million times and gives a pointless opinion about a video game that came out six years ago. It's yet another poorly-implemented and buggy pay-to-win Korean WoW-clone. It's yet another blatant theft of someone else's website or app or whatever trying to cash in on people who get confused and accidentally click on the shitty one instead of the good one.
Perhaps one in every ten thousand of these users will improve and become something worthwhile. But is that worth 9,999 other producers of cruft? And in answer to that, the 10,000 should be improving in secret, refining their craft, finally revealing themselves as somebody worth paying attention to. If they fail, their failure can be private and need not clutter anyone else.
In a way, and you're right about this, the process of crowd funding such as KS does prevent people from coming in with zero skill and experience and get money from people. And I'm not saying there should be a selection process for which projects get published to the site. I'm saying the lame-ass creator of a dumb project should know better than to publish it.
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Topic: When Kickstarter Goes Wrong Part Doux (Read 3523 times)