The Muddy Truth About Kickstarter 'Staff Picks'

szczys writes: Crowd Funding is the wild-wild west of business financing, and it's not just the people starting campaigns that are playing without many rules. One of Kickstarter's sort algorithm triggers is the "Staff Pick." Research indicates being featured by Kickstarter staff is a huge predictor for success. But there is no published benchmark for how these are chosen. Oddly, Kickstarter only discourages users from falsely labeling their campaign as a Staff Pick. To protect backers and ensure the crowdfunding ecosystem isn't sullied by scammers, Kickstarter needs to boost their transparency starting with this Staff Pick conundrum.

Comments

a legal morass

[argStyopa]

I think the entire Kickstarter thing is a legal morass that will only be settled after a great deal of arguing, posturing, and lawyers making ridiculous sums of $.

I believe - if anything - the game Star Citizen (around $90 mill KS funding) will be the trigger.
Derek Smart has rightly raised a number of awkward questions about the scope, expanse, shifting goalposts, and (lack of any) due diligence on this project. I suspect that with $90 million in the pot, enough lawyers might find it interesting to pursue on a contingency-fee basis (meaning they may be seeing easily 8 figures).
Numbers that large may even make politicians take notice, and 2016 is an election year (not that any politicians would even understand the context or how it would work over them tubes).

DS is a colossal egotist, but that doesn't mean he's wrong. Let's not forget that the Reformation was also started by an astonishingly self-centered egotist too.