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Comment by jansho | Hacker News Reader

Not anti-crowdfunding for large companies, but consider this: what happens if these companies start flocking in Indiegogo and Kickstarter? The main ethos of crowdsourcing platforms is to give extra leg-up to lone inventors and small startups so that they have a chance to be competitive too, but if you have large companies with their big budgets and finely tuned marketing, would these platforms still provide fair ground for everyone?

As the author pointed out, Indiegogo is supposed to focus on the "underdogs":

"Our mission is to empower people to unite around ideas that matter to them and together make those ideas come to life... We know building something from scratch is hard, so we’ve got your back."

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The platforms have already been taken over by finely tuned marketing, no need for large companies to get involved.

In fact, large companies might bring some refreshing linguistic restraint into the game, as I would expect them to be much more cautious of claiming "best/first/only in the world" about products that are clearly not. I rarely see a product kickstarter that does not look like exactly how a highly polished parody of product kickstarters would. At least with a big company, you would know that they put more into the product than into the campaign.

What is currently ruining the platforms (well, at least ruining kickstarter) are campaigns were this is clearly reversed, e.g. campaigns trying to do a moneygrab with something as commoditized as USB power banks.

They won't just bring "refreshing linguistic restraint" though, if you have two campaigns doing the same product idea, but one has a slicker video and can promise bigger rewards, which would you back? For crowd-funding platforms that proclaim support for the "small people", I can understand if some people feel a bit cheated.

Personally, I like to go for the artsy projects because these can't be found elsewhere (except maybe Etsy) so I've learnt to filter out the "money-grabbing" spam. Inevitably you'll have noise in a system, like eBay's counterfeit problem, but I just don't think that you need large companies presence to deal with it.

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