Why is Kickstarter letting a hologram "scam" raise $250k?

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Wouldn’t the usual Boing Boing pattern be for one of you to have breathlessly endorsed this a few days earlier?

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I hope the backers start a class action lawsuit.

Because of their 5% cut?

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Just a little heads up: there’s an “up” missing in the last sentence of the article.

But more importantly: this project is shady as hell and makes me feel worse about Kickstarter as a company.

What I find amazing is that there’s no such thing as an official “Kickstarter staff pick” badge. That’s just something that some people create on their own and throw campaigns. And yet Kickstarter seems to have no problem with that. I mean, I guess they get their cut, right?

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From the picture, clearly it must work on pyramid power.

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Ancient Goa’uld secret. :wink:

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Just reinforces my crowd-funding strategy. Only crowd-fund from projects that meet at least one (but hopefully many) of the following criteria:

  1. The creator has a history of being able to release products in an indie way (JoCo, I Fight Dragons, etc)
  2. The creator is well-known and has a reputation that could suffer and cost him/her their livelihood (Greg Pak)
  3. This is not their first Kickstarter/IndieGogo/etc and last time was a success
  4. The product is done, but just needs money to make a physical copy (Web Comics producing a book, Creating a compilation book like Gareth’s Borg Like Me, Band that needs to pay someone to master their already recorded tracks, band needs to finance a tour that’s coming to my town)
  5. Mostly stay away from hardware and video games.

So far I’ve done somewhere between 6 and 10 crowdfunding projects and not one has failed to deliver. (Although many have been late for various reasons - USUALLY related to manufacturing being harder/more complicated than digital - eg record pressing plant was overbooked, printer didn’t print the proofs on time, books didn’t get back in time for signings, etc)

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Yes. <a href=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ>Here’s the link. Really quite an endorsement!

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Mebbe scam mebbe no.

Hard to see (ha) what all the excitement is about… looks like eyestrain to me. The video seems to be trying to sell people interacting with one another instead of devices… for that Holus is like the goggles!, they do nuthing!

Srsly, when are people going to get that?

(It’s sad the way people only interact with their devices these days…)
?
(You know what might help…)
?
(…this device…)

Perhaps the majority of Kickstarter offerings are scams. It’s not clear to me why this should be a surprise to anyone.

I assume all kick starters are scams, and just wait for a product to hit the shelves later. If the idea is legit, it’ll hit the market one way or another. (Unless the inventor is John Galt, ha ha)

How else are they gonna collect all them orgones?

Gotta bust 'em all!

Money. The answer, as always, is money.

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That video plays like a straight-faced parody.

Didn’t Kickstarter allow the ridiculous Solar Roadway? Or was that something else?

That was Indiegogo

Isn’t that like this solar bike path in the Netherlands? Seems to be working so far.

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No the roadways one is the people suggesting we drive on the panels with our cars not ride under them with our bikes.

I like the Netherlands one.

edit - clicked link, oh no that’s yet another one. Where is the divided highway with elevated solar panels sheltering a long-distance bikeway? Russia? Now I have to find it.

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