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Comment by paulsutter | Hacker News Reader

There's a much more insidious way that Kickstarter hides failure: by calling a project "successful" merely because it has reached the funding goal and raised money. For anyone making a contribution, that's hardly a definition of success.

Do they even have a word for projects actually completed that fulfill their promises? (ie, the definition of successful project for the entire world outside of Kickstarter). Can this information be found on the site without reading the discussions for each project one by one?

EDIT: I love Kickstarter. I'm thrilled by it's success. Which is all the more reason I'm disappointed that they have a misleading use of the word "success".

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Come on... What is it about Kickstarter that bugs people so much?

Kickstarter handle the funding end of things. When a project is funded they did their bit. People contributing know they are getting promises that may not turn out. They're not buying stuff. They are getting enjoyment out of being a part of something. Celebrating when a project succeeds. Getting disappointed when it doesn't.

Maybe the hype will end and this'll all blow over. Maybe Kickstarter is here to stay. Either way, it's obviously not malicious.

I didn't say it was malicious, I said that it's misleading. And I suspect that their claims about the percentage of "successful" projects are misleading to many of the contributors. You can imagine some class action lawyer gleefully waiting for the right moment to strike.

I point this out because I want Kickstarter to succeed in the long term. If they don't create a way to discourage projects that ultimately fail, adverse selection could become a real problem.

It's not misleading at all. The goal of kickstarter is to fund projects, not make them successful. That's why they explicitly say "successfully funded" and not "successfully successful."

If an angel exits a deal they call it a success. Is that disingenuous?

insidious?

Or maybe people will just start expecting/demanding that, rather than Kickstarter projects pointing their "successful funding" drop-target at their own pockets, they'll target an agreed-upon escrow service, which will only release the funds on project delivery (and otherwise return the funds for Kickstarter to--if they have enough information to go through with it--"rewind" the pool back into its individual source accounts.)

Of course, this isn't unprecedented at all. At first, eBay was just a place where you put in a credit card and maybe got something delivered to you, or maybe it didn't. Then people started expecting sellers to accept this new thing called "PayPal."

But of course an escrow upon completion doesn't work if the project starter actually needs the funds to deliver the project... which is kind of the whole idea of kickstarter.

I think that limitation of scope is very intentional on their part. Tracking the actual progress of these projects could be a very intensive and diverse undertaking. I don't think Kickstarter calls a project successful, I think they call a fundraising successful.

That would be a better way to describe a funded project, but that isn't what Kickstarter does. They call a project successful when it is funded:

http://www.kickstarter.com/discover/successful

It's a mixed bag, on the each project page you clearly see "FUNDING SUCCESSFUL". On the search page you see "and the thousands of other successful projects!"

I believe this to be a mistake.

http://www.kickstarter.com/discover/successful http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pixr2/once-upon-a-paper

It isn't a mistake: the project is the fundraising itself, not the business/product that is being funded. People are making funding pledges that only turn into actual contributions if the fundraising project meets its target. If the target is not met, no funding happens, and the project is not successful.

The project is not the fundraising, the project is what's being funded. Just see Kickstarter's emails: "Projects we love: <project name>." They are not talking about the fundraising there.

Additionally, the fundraising status is orthogonal to the success, you can be funded and ultimately fail to complete the project, or not get funded but somehow manage to produce what you wanted to.

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