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Comment by jtokoph | Hacker News Reader

Not that I'm accusing Dalton of doing this, but when croudfunding without using a platform like kickstarter, it might be too easy to fake backer numbers in order to meet the goal or inflate popularity.

What this means for the future: Companies will announce croudfunding and then fake amazing numbers in order to appear popular and gain lots of press.

I can see the headline now: "ACME Software raises $3 million in first 24 hours!" Actual funds raised: $250.

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A number of people have raised this point to Dalton and he has promised that he will do a third party verification of all funding promises.

For example, see this: https://twitter.com/daltonc/status/234698066245074945 and https://twitter.com/daltonc/status/234399350275571714

EDIT: Added a link to Twitter conversation showing more context.

Dalton also says this on app.net: https://alpha.app.net/dalton/post/32618

https://alpha.app.net/dalton/post/32618

"We are using Stripe, so it's easy to audit." - Dalton Caldwell

I'd like to audit it right now. How can I do so?

(The point is: it's not easy to audit. Not that I actually care one way or the other.)

Easy != accessible to everyone.

Easy == it wouldn't take a lot of work for him to allow someone to verify it.

It's rather unclear what Dalton means here. The interpretation that seems likeliest to me is that Dalton can easily provide independent evidence to a professional auditor (i.e., someone who can be given trusted access to sensitive data, and someone who isn't easily induced to lie on a client's behalf) that the tally is correct.

Unless it becomes routine to actually employ these auditors, that doesn't really answer jtokoph's worry.

Postscript - Indeed, that's what he meant: on http://daltoncaldwell.com/we-did-it he says "In the very near future I will ask an impartial 3rd party take a look at our data (while preserving all privacy of our backers) and publicly verify that the join.app.net was operated in an honest manner."

It's an interesting point, if you look at the video statistics it has only had 31,000 plays which means for every 4 people that watch the video at least 1 spends $50. However, Stripe has access to their payment info so it's possible to prove whether or not this is faked.

Actually, that's an interesting question: would it be fraud to fake the last $xxx,xxx of a crowd sourcing drive?

I backed the project without watching the video. The posts on sites like DaringFireball and Marco.org had already convinced me. I doubt I'm the only one.

Same here.

AFAIK Vimeo calculates only fully watched videos, so it's 30000 viewers who watched the video to the end.

See this: http://daltoncaldwell.com/we-did-it

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