Maybe you have personal interest in that. It seems like you prefer people not being able to spend their own money in order to "protect" them. Venture Capital is called that way because they accept risk and most of the projects they invest in don't make it. People will make mistakes, but real investors make mistakes every single day. Kickstarters give normal people the capability to invest in -fund other people and that is amazing. That is why I think it is a weakness of the model, it doesn't surface the root causes of failure easily." "That creates an environment which is exceptionally prone to failure. That is why I think it is a weakness of the model, it doesn't surface the root causes of failure easily. Because people rarely blame themselves for not thinking about the problem correctly they will start blaming Kickstarter, or the teams, and some of those people will do great harm to the system that is helping people do stuff they couldn't do before. That creates an environment which is exceptionally prone to failure. The Kickstarter model opens up a source of funding for lots of new people, and it enables people who could not (or had not) previously invested in those people. ![]() Inexperienced investors invest in the idea.Įxperienced investors invest in the team. People who don't invest a lot, or are new at it, get caught up in the idea part of the pitch and imagine a world where that idea exists. The challenge is that people who often invest (either as Angels or VCs or even large charity donations) learn through experience that the team that is going to execute the plan is the 'high order bit' or most important part of the equation. Also, they wouldn't have helped breed distrust amongst the few people that are willing to fund this sort of thing. This would have happened the moment anybody competent launched the same project. They could have left that task to someone who was going to execute well, too. > Diaspora proved there was interest and tested a longshot idea. I would think twice about happily burning your biggest bridge if I were you. I also feel you'll quickly find out that without the "undiscriminating enthusiastic community" these projects will go mysteriously unfunded. You do realize that con artists use the exact same excuse, right? You live, you learn? It's a pretty terrible justification for mismanaging a project into the ground. > The undiscriminating enthusiastic community now knows better what to look for - it's learned a little the hard way, like any investor must. It makes me nervous, like the millions flying around for crowdsourced video games. > App.net just got funded for much more money.ĭo you honestly think we won't be here on HN a year from now, discussing the exact same story but with App.net in place of Diaspora? I don't see this as a positive either, handing unqualified people with no plan huge sums of money multiple times doesn't fill me with joy. If you don't believe me, consider how many gullible users distribute those "they're going to make us pay $5 a year for facebook spam this wallpost a million times to stop it!" things even now. ![]() It's like asking them to pay for a browser or a search engine, simply unheard of. Just because through the power of Kickstarter and heavy word of mouth on blogs they managed to scrape together enough people interested in the concept to hand their money over doesn't mean people in general have a ton of confidence in an idea like this.Ī small group of technical users had a lot of confidence in the concept or too much extra money. Find the 20 nearest people, ask them if they would pay for a social network. > It's not clear that people started with "little confidence" in the concept. ![]() I think they took (and we encouraged) all the support and money on Kickstarter to be an endorsement of them personally (look, 4 college dudes! it's the perfect movie sequel to "the social network"!) instead of an endorsement of the idea, and a charge to act wisely. ![]() Yes, true, perhaps behind the scenes they approached every other player in this space, and were privately rebuffed, but I don't think so. And burnt through a lot of money building 'yet another rails app' instead of using that money to build a community/protocol/standard on top of some of the work of the existing players. diaspora seemed to ignore these projects/people, even though technically many were ahead of what diaspora put out after several months (things like, most other projects didn't have fundamental security flaws that could be found in any webdev n00b book in 10 minutes).ĭiaspora go the hype via kickstarter - they got the drama - but they just tried to build another rails app. So have dozens of others with their own federated/distributed social network projects.
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