Lots of trolling and ranting. I mean seriously, kickstarter is an incubator. If you don't like it, don't participate. No need to whine about it loud. Instead of being really constructive in his critique, the author provides shallow critique.
What I get from the article is that this guys had an idea and 24 hours later they created the Kickstarter. This is partly wrong, what is totally wrong is people supporting them(please note this is just my opinion) because you can find everywhere cheap shirts, even good ones. There a huge market about it what would make you think that some random guy can do better? Just because they say so? If this would make any money companies would have already adopted this.
When approaching Kickstarter I think one(with an idea or a prototype) should make it clear what he wants to achieve without the "I will make the best at the lowest price" attitude. Remember the users that backing the project it's a donation with a possible gift and not a preorder. Also you should have thought about it more than 1 day. The day you realize that you can't maintain your promises your reputation might end up destroyed.
I think that it's important that we use Kickstarter the correct way because we risk ruining it, when too many people will realize that they will not get what they paid for people will not use it any more, resulting a bad reputation for kickstarter and therefore other projects that might be worth checking.
I'm not backing you on kickstarter because you're asking me to give you money in the hope of a reward later, instead of it being either a real purchase or a real investment.
Kickstarter croudsources the risk, and the upside is 'you get this thing we want to make', where you could instead just wait for that thing to be made and buy it.
I would rather have given Pebble $200 or $2000 for a (admittedly tiny) piece of the company. That's compelling.
The risk is way, way too high for the reward. But the price points are generally so low that it isn't a big deal. It's like playing the Super Lotto, but instead of an infinitesimal chance of winning $10m on a given date, you have a slightly less infinitesimal chance of getting the product you wanted at some nebulous point in the future.
All the downside of risk with none of the upside, where do I sign up?!