If people want to make donations in support of a fun (or at least funky) idea, I /don't/ think they should be barred from doing so. Discouraging goodwill isn't exactly a great stance to assert. As it is, though, the bulk of the money's coming from people who are requesting the product itself - it won't be 20x better, but there'll be 20x more of it, and hopefully sufficient profit that an enhanced tooling line can be made to meet demand.
Which is not to say that your concerns don't have merit, but do note that the success of Diaspora and the ipod wristwatch projects seem very much to be outliers. Kickstarter claims that a little under half of all total projects /approved/ actually meet their funding goals, and from a glance of the site, it seems as if most successes are rather /modest/ successes - we really only notice the outliers.
The site also does warn project organizers that failing to deliver could potentially leave them legally vulnerable. Given the relatively low success rate, the human curating and the necessity of maintaining a public and accessible persona to drive up donations, I wouldn't call it a great platform to scam with.
Of course, given my limited experience with scams, I could be totally naive about this.
Which is not to say that your concerns don't have merit, but do note that the success of Diaspora and the ipod wristwatch projects seem very much to be outliers. Kickstarter claims that a little under half of all total projects /approved/ actually meet their funding goals, and from a glance of the site, it seems as if most successes are rather /modest/ successes - we really only notice the outliers.
The site also does warn project organizers that failing to deliver could potentially leave them legally vulnerable. Given the relatively low success rate, the human curating and the necessity of maintaining a public and accessible persona to drive up donations, I wouldn't call it a great platform to scam with.
Of course, given my limited experience with scams, I could be totally naive about this.