In June of 2013, I apparently filed a complaint with Kickstarter that voiced concerns about a specific project that was seeking funding, and was ultimately funded, on the service. I vaguely remember it, it was a while ago. It wouldn’t have come to mind at all…
…except that Kickstarter got back to me about it.
Today.
Seven years later.
I got a form letter response, from Kickstarter’s Trust and Safety division (which, let’s face it, probably has all the force and intelligence of a ‘bot), more than seven years after the fact. The form response indicated that the project did not violate their community standards nor their terms of service. The project is no longer visible on their site, however.
Safe to say I find no Trust nor Safety in Kickstarter as a result.
It’s entirely baffling to me. Especially when I looked it up and found that Kickstarter apologized for their mishandling at the time, though they did not end the Kickstarter and the author got his money at the time. The product is currently available from Amazon. He uses the fact that he broke Kickstarter as part of his sales pitch. It’s just grossness all the way down.
I mean, whatever. I’ve scarcely backed anything on the service since that time; doing a search for Kickstarter in my email folders spins for a long time and I’m just assuming that means it’s looking on a hard drive somewhere out there in the cloud. But ugh, if this is what passes for “Trust and Safety” at our tech companies, we are indeed in dire straits. Part of the reason I’ve been withdrawing from all of this stuff so much in the intervening seven years, I guess.
There’s probably some weird stray cosmic ray¹ thing going on here, because why else would this have happened. I did entertain a brief envisioning of a beleaguered solo reviewer at a functional desk taking the printed copy of this and stamping it and putting it in a box marked June 2013 and sighing, “That’s the last of those” before looking over at a pile of boxes marked July 2013. But anyway: Ugh. Gross.
¹This a term I use for a bug that is just kind of so weird that it’s almost not worth tracking down, though it makes me wonder how many people suddenly got an email all these years later reminding us why Kickstarter wasn’t really for us.