Personally I think that there's a big risk of Kickstarter acquiring a bad reputation here. Whilst a lot of the comments on this thread show that some people look at Kickstarter contributions as donations or investments, I don't think that that's the case for the large number of people putting money into some of the kickstarters that get funded via the site, in particular kickstarters focused on making a physical product, where the product features heavily in the reward tiers

I'd also say that the site itself doesn't make it that clear, that the money is an investment or gify. From the Kickstarter proposals I've read I don't see them heavily mentioning the idea that the backer won't received the reward at the tier that they donate to if the project doesn't succeed in creating the product.

If you look at some kickstarters that have big delays on their delivery (e.g. Zioneyes http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/zioneyez/eyeztm-by-zione... ) there seems to be a large percentage of backers who were expecting a product and aren't very happy not to be getting one after over 12 months)...

Definitely from a personal perspective I'm more careful now about what I back and specifically the track record of the project creators (i.e. have they done this before).