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Comment by pfarnsworth | Hacker News Reader

Exactly why I will never, ever, ever buy from Kickstarter. Until there's a shipping product, I won't buy it at all. The pre-order age is dead, and this is a perfect example of this. Even if these people are honest, manufacturing from China is a skillset that is expensive and requires a lot of experience and boots on the ground.

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But kickstarter is not a pre-order store! You are helping people to get started and in return may receive a version of the product you helped create.

That's what kickstarter's legal page may say to cover their ass. But that's not the reality, and it's definitely not the expectations of the "donors".

It's been my expectation. I've backed half a dozen small projects and two of them have failed to deliver.

This is directly due to the (in my opinion unethical) actions of established companies (like Pebble) treating it like a trendy preorder store. Kickstarter themselves have been clear on this since launch.

Eh. Kickstarter has happily, on multiple times, allowed, even promoted projects that are BLATANTLY against their terms of service:

- the infamous "Buy my child a laptop and send her to a coding camp" campaign (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5434721)

There's the TOS violations: "fund my life" - buying her daughter a laptop (camp provides IT resources" "fund tuition" - educational camp, pretty self-explanatory And then the rest of the tastelessness - I'm fairly certain a nine year old isn't at all involved in beer cozies saying "I drink like a girl, keep up!" etc.

- The Bike Index (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1073266317/the-bike-inde...)

1. It's a violation of "Kickstarter cannot be used to fund e-commerce, business, and social networking websites or apps." 2. This is a website, right? Then why: "Travel to the eleven biggest bike cities in the United States to meet with shop owners and give them the ability to register bikes for free (the cities: NYC, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Philadelphia, Madison, Tucson, Austin, Denver, D.C., and Minneapolis)." (Awesome, let's use Kickstarter to pay for me/us to take a trip through the US "to meet with bike shop owners and give them a chance to use the website"...) 3. "Offer region specific recommendations for reporting bike theft to the police." - so an extended goal of this site is to "recommend how to report to the police, customized for regions"?!? 4. Some stickers. 5. Oh, and you have to pay to register with the Index.

So yeah, let's not place too much stock in Kickstarter's "what we say, what we do, two different things, ignore that as we take our cut".

Worth noting that the HydraDock, after the Kickstarter run, did start taking pre-orders via their website, even as they hadn't fulfilled Kickstarter orders.

It's an investment. Crowd funding projects can fail. I know it doesn't feel that way, but that's the reality.

I've bought several CDs, comics and games off of various crowd funding sites (Kickstarter, Indigogo, et al) and I've been lucky to not have a failed project yet (although some have been over a year delayed).

Try to think of it as, "That's a nice thing to have. I'll help to see if I can make it possible," and realize it might not happen, or might happen late.

I usually forget about it and get surprised by a nice shiny book in the mail and am like, "Oh yea, I funded this!"

It's really really not an investment, it's a gamble.

An investment has the chance of paying off more if it's successful (e.g. I invest in a small company and if they turn out to be the next Oculus I would get a great return on my money).

With Kickstarter/indiegogo the best possible outcome is getting the product you wanted on time, the worst possible outcome is that you get nothing for your money and wait a load of time.

The problem (to me) is that both indiegogo and kickstarter have a financial incentive in downplaying the risks as they get their cut when the project finishes on their site (whether the product is delivered or not) so there's minimal incentive for them to push back on risky projects and/or make the project be very clear about the risks of their approach.

Personally I avoid hardware style kickstarters unless the creators have previous history of successful delivery.

I believe the problem here is that even though they hadn't fulfilled initial KS promises, they were taking pre-orders via their website.

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