It's mental violence. You're exploiting human nature to impact their free will. Perhaps part of "being an adult" is shouldering the responsibility of propping up your own illusory free will, I can't say.
For this reason, I try to avoid ads and marketing as much as possible, although it seems almost impossible. Although any individual advertisement is trivial to dismiss, I don't trust myself to resist the ubiquitity of these messages.
"we can only consume a few dozens of bytes per second, and so any error is obvious."
That's not the point at all. The English language itself is already heavily compressed, by which I mean the space of all possible words is already densely packed. This is why we can both understand misspelled words with no particularly close neighbors, but are nonetheless sensitive to misspellings in general.
The act of writing something down in language compresses it, significantly changing properties of the space such as comparability of neighbors
I think if you fully commit to that idea we sacrifice the creatives to the engineers. I'd prefer a strict but short term of copyright, giving the creatives the incentives to innovate in the short and engineers the freedom to optimize over the rest of time.
While the idea sounds appealing, look what it's done to the medical industry. I'd hate for gaming to get into such a slog of expensive/long/only big company's can play industry.
I wish that we could rely on the companies that are increasingly controlling semi-public commons like social networks and software repositories to have some integrity and respect for the roles that they are playing in this regard.
This article isn't directed at you then, it's directed at people considering starting Kickstarter projects of their own. I believe the author's thesis is that the current Kickstarter policy of hiding failed fundraising efforts is detrimental to the capacity of future Kickstarters to run successful fundraisers.
Considering that Kickstarter only makes money if a project is successfully funded[1] I have a hard time seeing how it is in their interests to deliberately undermine future Kickstarters.
Also, of tangential interest on that same page Kickstarter states that the number of successfully funded projects is 'a little less than half'.
"current Kickstarter policy of hiding failed fundraising efforts is detrimental to the capacity of future Kickstarters to run successful fundraisers."
Agree. No question there is something to be learned from projects that have failed by reverse engineering or seeing and analyzing patterns of what didn't work.
This is a problem also with the business press. Sure, you hear about spectacular failures (if it bleeds it leads as they say in the news business) but you don't hear about less than spectacular failures and therefore you can't learn from the mistakes of others.
The raw numbers of success and failures are helpful, but I'd additionally like to dig into the specifics.
More transparency also gives more data points into gaming Kickstarter. Although not 100% effective, obfuscation is a first step to prevent gaming the system and ruining the whole experience.
If you are starting a new Kickstarter campaign http://www.kicktraq.com/ may be a useful research tool. They're fairly new so their data doesn't go back too far but what's there is a good resource.
But that depends on who you think Kickstarter is ultimately serving. I'm pretty sure Kickstarter cares more about the funders than the products that get displayed. This seems patently true, though obviously they need some people to post projects. But the number of people looking for money is always going to be non-trivial.
This might very well be true, however, if failed tactics/strategies are obscured it is possible that said tactics/strategies will continue to be employed.
Furthermore, even if we do learn more from success than failure, both are necessary lessons for individual success.
I think that limitation of scope is very intentional on their part. Tracking the actual progress of these projects could be a very intensive and diverse undertaking. I don't think Kickstarter calls a project successful, I think they call a fundraising successful.
It's a mixed bag, on the each project page you clearly see "FUNDING SUCCESSFUL". On the search page you see "and the thousands of other successful projects!"
It isn't a mistake: the project is the fundraising itself, not the business/product that is being funded. People are making funding pledges that only turn into actual contributions if the fundraising project meets its target. If the target is not met, no funding happens, and the project is not successful.
The project is not the fundraising, the project is what's being funded. Just see Kickstarter's emails: "Projects we love: <project name>." They are not talking about the fundraising there.
Additionally, the fundraising status is orthogonal to the success, you can be funded and ultimately fail to complete the project, or not get funded but somehow manage to produce what you wanted to.
I would agree if there were a way to find these failed cases if you looked hard enough. Other than acquiring the link before the end date of the project there doesn't seem to be a way. This may be a good way to check what happened to project X, but not to answer the question:
"How have other projects in field foobar done, which ones have failed or succeeded, and what does each group have in common?"
That sounds like an interesting project.
Create a spider that crawls funding sites (more and more each day it seems) and collects statistics and timelines.
It could even search for references to individual projects on the popular search engines, to gather data on what sources for attention have what kinds of impact on which kinds of projects, etc.
