Kickstarter Lays Down New Rules For When a Project Fails

An anonymous reader writes "In a blog post, Kickstarter announced several updates to its terms of use for projects. From the article: "Kickstarter has iterated on its policies several times since it launched in 2009, with the most recent wave of revisions surrounding the site's transition from only posting projects cleared by the staff to clearing all projects that meet a basic set of criteria. Even still, some projects lack clear goals, encounter setbacks, or fail to deliver, like the myIDkey project that has burned through $3.5 million without yet to distributing a finished product. The most recent terms revision is timely: on Thursday, science fiction author Neal Stephenson announced that a game he Kickstarted in 2012 with $526,000 in funding was officially canceled."

Comments

Re:think globally

[DNS-and-BIND]

I love how the default attitude is spite. Blame America for doing something wrong, instead of the obvious choice - make your own version of kickstarter. With blackjack, and hookers. Then you don't have to listen to what the Americans say at all. Better yet, you can exclude Americans from participating. You can even go so far as to redirect any American IP address to a landing page where you let them know all the problems you have with the US federal government.

Kickstarter doesn't do deals outside the USA for well-known legal reasons. Maybe you can discover what these are when you start your own - but you won't, so the question is moot. Still, I wish someone would. I just don't see it happening, though.

Screening process

[MindPrison]

They should improve their screening process.

Also, it's important to consider that funding a kickstarter project, is kind of like investing money in the lottery or purchasing one of those scratch lottery tickets. You may or may not win, the likelihood of actually winning is bigger than the lottery, but in reality very small, it's like going to the casino and betting it all on one of 3 rows.
Kickstarter is a gold-mine right now for scammers as well. All you need, is a well thought out plan to CONvince a lot of people out there, and since most people aren't very technical...this isn't hard at all (thus, why we need a better screening process). Many of the funded projects gets WAY more than they asked for, and then GREED grabs them...they lack no skills when it comes to find a reason to use the extra money, and have you noticed how certain products doesn't get cheaper for the public even thought they receive MASSIVE support?

Money baby! It's the shit.

Re:Good. IndieGoGo should do it too

[Lumpy]

we have a winner! call me when this "glass" can last 2 winters in northern Michigan, Wisconsin, or Minnesota. The idea is flawed as all hell in regards to durability.

Then you have adhesion, until they prove that this glass has the same adhesion dry and wet as asphalt or cement it's a major fail. even highly textured glass is slippery compared to a smooth cement.

Lastly there are a TON of other factors that make the whole idea a failure that should not be funded.