Crowd-funding works psychologically pretty cleanly for funding new product development, or artistic work. If it's a thing you want to exist and you think the would-be creator can do it, you fund it, the creator's idea is validated, the thing is (hopefully) made, and you get to enjoy it.
If you don't fund it, it sort of says "I don't feel a strong need for you (creator) to built that (thing) -- but doesn't pass a strong judgement on the creator, even if you know them.
With "crowd-fund your medical expenses", for example, I'm much less comfortable. Reading a plea, then choosing not to fund someone's treatment for a serious illness feels like saying "I don't care if you die", when that's not at all what I'm feeling.
I'm also uncomfortably, acutely aware of what people who post a crowd-funding effort to save my life or save my home etc. must feel like when the effort fails -- like the world at large, but even worse, the people who know and seemingly care for them, don't care enough to save them.
These projects have noble goals -- people need help with medical expenses; help them reach out to others for help! -- but it forces people to put a price on things we'd rather not, but with weird twists ("I really want to help you, but I'm pretty sure this alternative treatment you're trying to pay for is snake oil...").
Codefund isn't as bad, on this spectrum, but it still feels a bit dark to me. Negative feelings a campaign can invoke:
- you start a campaign, convinced your super-supportive friends and family will carry the day. It fails. Does this mean they don't care as much as you thought? Or that they don't think you can succeed?
- You are 6 months out of university, and stressing over how fast your salary disappears, halfway through each month. A not-yet-close friend who you have been trying to impress sends you a link: they're crowdfunding hacker school! How much do you have to contribute (with a credit card, gritting your teeth), to avoid alienating them?
If you think of crowdfund efforts as direct conversations (rather than "interactions enabled by the internet"), it becomes more obvious which ones are really uncomfortable. The level of discomfort is partly cultural -- maybe there are subsets of Americans who feel it's basically "okay" to ask for something you maybe shouldn't, and be told "no" (and be okay with that), but for many, many people this is not okay, people will feel obliged to say "yes" but resent you horribly, and so on.
A crowdfunding platform that basically enables painfully-uncomfortable conversations at internet scale isn't an unalloyed good -- I think there must be better solutions to these problems out there.
Sorry for the ramble; I'm not totally clear on where I stand, but curious to hear what other people think about it.
[Edit: minor tweaks to what I was saying about Americans vs. the world... didn't seem accurate.]