So, I just started wasting my free time on Kickstarter, the extremely popular crowdsourcing site. A friend of mine got a couple cool things off of it for funding projects, so I thought I’d check it out.
My problem is that, for obvious reasons, most of the projects are already fully funded. I’ve been poking around on their pages and don’t see any way to pledge (which I might want to do, for their various benefits to pledgers). Am I missing something? If not, why do they insist on spamming me with page after page of fully-funded projects that, for all intents and purposes, are pointless for me to look at? It’s frustrating!
If you go to the “Discover” link at the top of the page, the first section is staff picks and it’s all incompletely-funded projects. You can click through for more.
The rest of the projects on “Discover” are in fact funded, but that’s just the way that page works - other than Staff Picks they highlight “Popular” and “Recently Successfully Funded.” So you’re not going to find under-funded stuff there.
From the side nav on the “Discover” Page you can go to “Recently Launched” which is going to be all under-funded.
Otherwise, it looks like it’s a crapshoot as to what you get from clicking on the sidebar. Projects in categories featured on the sidebar (such as “zombies”) probably will be quickly accessible and quickly funded. And also popular. Something in a big city like New York will be quickly funded.
You might want to try browsing your city, or some random city (perfect example, Des Moines Iowa) or searching for a weird word to find some hidden gems.
Anyway the problem really is just that you are seeing stuff that is highlighted and highlighted stuff will be funded. Whoever programmed that layout has “Sell Kickstarter as a way to make money - show off the successful projects!” in mind and not “help everyone equally get funding” in mind.
Are you asking how to give money to a project that’s already fully funded? If the clock is still running on their funding time, just send them money via their Kickstarter page - pick a donor option and hit send. They’re still taking money. If the time period has elapsed, click through to their own personal webpage and see if they have options for sending more money via Paypal or something. (However, a lot of those donor incentives are limited time offerings to encourage people to drop a lot of funding within a short time period, so you may have missed out on those options.)
Are you asking why the main page has all 100%-funded projects? It doesn’t when I’m looking at it, but the majority are. It may be just that the popular ones hit the main page, it may be something to encourage people to create their own Kickstarters. For instance, clicking the link to show all Games projects, right now it’s showing me 73%, 47%, 4%, 115%, 225%, 45%, 20%, 15%, and 181%.
Thank you both! I guess my question was “Why am I being shown projects if I can’t fund them,” which ZipperJJ answered well. An ancillary question was “am I not seeing how to fund these fully-funded projects?,” which Ferret Herder answered. Excellent service, as always.
There’s also the secondary reason for Kickstarter, which is to laugh at all the horrendous projects from people who have no real talent, practical ideas, or really any damn clue what they’re doing, yet still think they deserve $10,000 to do it.
Or these people from IndieGoGo who have no idea how the FDA works. Also note that IndieGoGo has an option called “flexible funding,” which means even if a project doesn’t meet its goal in donations, it still gets everything donated.
Compare this to Kickstarter where you can ONLY get the money if you meet your goal.