Kickstarter is so much worse than that: it's startup capital at a brutal fee for people that can't write a business plan.

In a normal world, you'd have an idea. Then you'd figure out how to pay for it. Then you'd write that up as a business plan and shop it around to banks, to see who would give you the money. Being in the business of risking money on ideas, they accept or reject, ask for clarification, give you conditions and concessions, etc. You then get the money, line up vendors, line up distributors, and launch your product.

OR

You get your high school buddy with a useless film degree to help you shoot an infomercial.

Kickstarter takes their 5% and their 3% processing fee and wipes their hands of what happens next because it's the Internet. You are left to figure out... manufacturing. Distribution. Packaging. All that shit. Which is how three different choads have raised $250k each selling jellyfish tanks while if you ask any aquarium they'll tell you "yeah the ones you see here are always a week from dead because the rest of the lifecycle is uninteresting they last about ten days and then we cycle them through there's an entire jellyfish ecosystem not on display" because dollars to donuts? You never knew you needed a jellyfish tank until you saw some shit on Upworthy.

I have backed three kickstarters. None of them have been less than 24 months late. Two of them have launched businesses - I backed Robot Turtles, without which we wouldn't have Glowforge (turns out manufacturing a board game with no knowledge of papercraft teaches you a thing or two about the limitations of the marketplace). And I backed Sisyphus, which is now making tables. Of course, before that the guy who started Sisyphus had spent fifteen years making tables for museums so it was a pretty sure bet.

But the guys who figured they'd get the chinese to make them infinity mirrors? Yeah, their blog is one long rant of "we thought this would be easy, turns out it's hard, have no fear we're still making stuff".

It's fucking erosive, too. I have bailed on three friends who had projects that, instead of asking me to mix them, asked me to fund their kickstarter so that they could sit in their pajamas and learn to mix on someone else's dime. Kickstarter incentivizes coming into something with absolutely no expertise and leaning into every contact you have to see if you can shake them down. I used to call it "as seen on TV dot com" but it's so, so much worse.