I have joined many kickstarters. I received all of the rewards promised to me, some with a lot of delay but no kickstarter I joined was ever cancelled.
People approach kickstarter with the wrong mindset. It is not an alibaba/aliexpress/taobao market where you can buy interesting things. When you're joining a campaign, you're investing on makers, helping them develop an idea. You are not buying stuff, ideas might not pan out, you're in essence an investor.
If you approach it like an investor and analyze each campaign with cold eyes, looking if the team behind it can actually deliver the goods, if it is worth the risk of investing and if you actually have a personal investment in the idea as in "I want this product to exist", then you will not be frustrated, even when things don't pan out.
I am somewhat tired of people approaching kickstarter with the idea of "I am buying stuff and they turn out to be vapor". This is not understanding what kickstarter is.
It's a more universal problem than that. The concept of a stock market was originally supposed to be very similar to Kickstarter, but with dividends rather than rewards. But average Joes were convinced that the stock market itself was a kind of store to buy future products in (with hucksters there to help them toward that conclusion), and tons of people lost their life-savings.
To avoid this, we have divided investors into "accredited" (usually, people whose job is investing) and "unaccredited" (the regular Joes); and companies into "private" (companies that actually need investment to become viable) and "public" (companies that would do just as well without anyone's help); and then we don't let the unaccredited investors invest in the private companies. Which was, y'know, the whole original point: to let people help companies get off the ground, in exchange for potential reward if the company does get off the ground.
> I am somewhat tired of people approaching kickstarter with the idea of "I am buying stuff and they turn out to be vapor". This is not understanding what kickstarter is.
You bet Kickstarter uses that confusion to its advantage.
Unfortunately(or fortunately) there is so much people you can scam out of there money multiple times...
Most people shouldn't even touch these platforms to begin with, we can all agree on that.
In fact they should be heavily regulated, just like any risky financial product. And they will be.
People approach kickstarter with the wrong mindset. It is not an alibaba/aliexpress/taobao market where you can buy interesting things. When you're joining a campaign, you're investing on makers, helping them develop an idea. You are not buying stuff, ideas might not pan out, you're in essence an investor.
If you approach it like an investor and analyze each campaign with cold eyes, looking if the team behind it can actually deliver the goods, if it is worth the risk of investing and if you actually have a personal investment in the idea as in "I want this product to exist", then you will not be frustrated, even when things don't pan out.
I am somewhat tired of people approaching kickstarter with the idea of "I am buying stuff and they turn out to be vapor". This is not understanding what kickstarter is.