I was a fairly early adopter of Kickstarter.com because I thought it seemed like a promising and pragmatic way to get small projects funded. I never had any illusion about it, fully understooding it's a corporation and not a community initiative. Since its beginning, the mission of Kickstarter.com itself hasn't changed much, but the way people use it and perceive it has definitely changed. Kickstarter.com can be a platform to collect donations for a project, but it can also be a platform for pre-orders and pre-sales, or a marketing tool, or a way to execute a fire sale, or just a good place to find people to scam. For every multi-million-dollar success story, there seems to be a project that fails to deliver. Especially in the tabletop gaming market, we see a lot of products appear on Kickstarter.com promising a lot, making a lot of money, and then discovering that most of what they'd promised costs more than anticipated. Kickstarter.com has the requisite warnings that you're funding a "dream" and not making a purchase, but the fact is that Kickstarter.com is not the singular donation platform it used to be, and its greatest problem is that Kickstarter.com isn't addressing that reality.
I firmly believer that reality dictates aspiration. It doesn't matter what you've designed a system to do, its actual function is whatever people are using it to do. You can react to this reality any way you want. You can ignore that people are abusing it, you can adapt to it, you can create rules around it, and so on. For example, the programmers of the open source vector drawing application Inkscape noticed that people were frequently using Inkscape as a layout tool. There are other tools for layout, like Scribus, but that didn't change that people were using Inkscape for layout. So the programmers added some layout tools (like pages, most notably) to Inkscape. They don't claim that Inkscape is a layout tool now, but they clearly understand that their user's interpretation of the application has evolved, and so they've helped the application evolve.
Similarly, the founders may have thought they'd built a system for donations but, now that people are using it as a sales tool, the reality is that Kickstarter.com is [also] a sales tool. I don't think that's a bad thing, but I do think it's bad for users for Kickstarter.com to ignore this reality. I think Kickstarter.com has an obligation to help its creators and their customers be successful. Here are some ways Kickstarter.com could start approaching the problems.
Nobody wants a Kickstarter project to fail. Kickstarter.com gets money from success, the creator gets a product funded, and the customers get rewards.
However, according to Kickstarter.com themselves, backer rewards are just a bonus. When you back a project, the rewards are not guaranteed. In fact, a "successful" project on Kickstarter.com is just a project that has met its funding goal, NOT one that actually gets completed. If I get money from a Kickstarter.com campaign to build a widget, and never build the widget, then I've still run a successful campaign.
In other words, there's a huge difference between a campaign that got all its money and a campaign that did what it promised, but Kickstarter.com seemingly has no awareness of this distinction. I think it's perfectly reasonable for a human to take "success" to include the stated goal of a campaign and not just funding, and it would be a service to its users for Kickstarter.com to provide clarity. To some degree, this ship has already sailed: People talk about Kickstarter.com campaigns as "successful" when they really mean "fully funded." But Kicktstarter.com owns the platform, so they can fix the problem and the language about campaigns will adapt.
Solution: Add visual trackers on the campaign page to display A) whether the campaign was fully funded and B) whether all backers (within a margin of error) have confirmed receipt of the promised rewards.
There's no requirement for honesty or good faith on Kickstarter.com. You can start a campaign with no intention of delivering on a promise, get funding, and then walk away. I don't think that happens often yet, but it's definitely possible.
Even if it never becomes a problem, there are no guardrails for incompetence. I remember how surprised I was when Catalyst started a Voltron RPG campaign even while they were actively failing at delivering on their previous BattleTech Mercenaries campaign, and how dismayed I was that the Voltron campaign got funding despite Catalyst's mismanagement. There just aren't any buttons to raise a red flag on Kickstarter.com. You can't warn people, you can't grade a creator, you just have to hope that people will investigate previous campaigns and use their own best judgment. Strictly speaking, that's fine. After all, we're all adults here. Fine isn't optimal, though. By providing no metric for measuring success, Kickstarter.com perpetuates the illusion that everybody on the platform is acting in good faith and are competent at what they do.
In fact, Kickstarter.com makes the problem worse by allowing "stretch goals," which adds to the promises made by a campaign. The subtle suggestion is that a project creator wouldn't promise more stuff if the creator wasn't already confident in the project's ability to fulfill the baseline deliverables. It increases the chance for non-delivery by incorrectly correlating monetary success for an increase in the creator's capacity to accomplish a major project. It's no wonder so many Kickstarter creators actually produce their project before their campaign ever begins. It's a gamble because the project may not get fully funded, but if it does then at least you avoid failing thousands of paying customers.
Solution: Have creators provide a project plan to backers, with a clearly defined minimum viable product that can ship even if almost everything goes wrong. Correlate stretch goals to production benchmarks, not to funding milestones.
Many project creators use Kickstarter.com as a marketing and pre-sale platform. These creators have already done the product development, they just want to know how many units to manufacture. They've already invested the money, and they're using Kickstarter.com as the shopfront to sell to customers and to other businesses. That's not what Kickstarter.com claimed its platform was back when it launched, but it is a sensible hack. Why guess how many units you can sell in stores when you can get pledges from buyers on Kickstarter.com?
Kickstarter.com hasn't evolved since this use case emerged, and to the innocent backer all projects appear exactly the same. If you believe Kickstarter.com, all projects are by scrappy creators with a big idea who just needs a couple of donations to bring their dream to life. Kickstarter.com doesn't acknowledge that some of these scrappy creators are registered companies with thousands or millions of capital invested into product development, manufacturing, and distribution. Some of these companies survive almost exclusively from Kickstarter.com campaigns, starting a new project to pay off the previous campaign.
This unacknowledged difference in creator types causes a lot of confusion. When you fund a project by a registered company that's doing Kickstarter.com as its business model, you might receive your reward within just a few months. But when you fund a project by someone just trying to get a passion project made, you have to wait a year for development, a year while the creator learns about manufacturing, and another year while the creator discovers distribution. Having backed almost 200 projects at this point, I've seen mobs of backers accuse project creators of fraud within a few months of funding, because to some backers there's an expectation that Kickstarter.com is a pre-order service. I know Kickstarter.com has that note before you pledge that it's not, but it's not a "solution" when it's clearly not working.
Solution: Provide a standardised interface for creators to outline a project timeline for backers. Currently, the Campaign section of Kickstarter.com is a free-for-all. Creators can put whatever they want, and many hire out professional crowdfunding marketers to make the campaign seem as exciting and as passionate, but needy, as possible. I love a good marketing campaign as the next guy, but project creators also need to provide actual reports and plans. We're not looking at investments of under $100 any more. Kickstarter.com campaigns go into the millions, and the platform needs to treat potential backers as, essentially, investors.
Speaking of project timelines, it's a common trick now to declare a campaign goal that's far less than what's required to deliver, in the hope of raising many times that amount. When the funding goal is reached, the creator gets to advertise that it was funded in just a few hours, which implies that the campaign is really popular. If the funding stopped there, of course, it would never deliver. Instead, the marketing ramps up, with the private goal of reaching the actual cost of the campaign.
Solution: Provide creators with a standardised way of reporting on the project budget.
Project creators are often not professional project managers. They might be able to fulfill their goal, but they may not know how or when to communicate to backers. Kickstarter.com currently provides a section for project updates, comments, FAQs, and direct messages. That's too many places for comms to happen (what's the difference between updates and comments and FAQs, really?) and there's no schema for how those comms are delivered. A creator can post an update that promises shipping updates but ends up leaving off an entire continent, or forget to mention a date, or fail to provide a reason for a delay.
While creators ought to have the freedom to say whatever they want to express, there also needs to be a formal report so backers get useful information.
Solution: Help creators understand when to communicate (monthly is good). Provide a template or even a form for the different stages of a campaign (development updates, manufacturing updates, distribution updates, corrections, and so on.)
Those are some of the things Kickstarter.com needs to do to improve its platform. There are lots more things Kickstarter.com could do, and some improvements have already been adopted by alternative crowdfunding platforms like [Backerkit]() (which began its life as a provider of the CRM component missing from Kickstarter.com) and Gamefound and others. The tabletop industry is, I think, better off for Kickstarter.com and other crowdfunding platforms, but as crowdfunding continues to develop so must the platforms.