Re: 0/0
"It doesn't help that some some crowd-funded projects and media reports on those give exactly that impression."
As represented by every single crowd-funded project and every single crowd-funding site (as soon as you're out of their obligatory disclaimer section) ever. NOT A SINGLE ONE OF EITHER ever admits to the fact that you're basically leaving money in a brown bag on a bench in a public park hoping for some inexplicable reason to find $Reward in another bag when you come back $Time later, the amount of which has usually just been pulled out of the ass of someone with zero previous experience in any sort of product design or fulfilment. In fact the incredibly complicated rosters of what exactly you become entitled to receive for how much money and in what possible combinations are sending the exact opposite message. It's a store except for the aisles and shelves. Blaming the backers solely, for taking it at face value, is extremely disingenuous.
Even campaigns / sites that mumble something about "not an actual preorder" "campaign might fail" and so on do absolutely everything to nevertheless represent the affair as a somewhat uncertain but otherwise straightforward "give us X money to receive Y merchandise in return" deal. Quite unsurprising to be honest, considering that crowd-funding would be dead and a thing of the past within 24 hours if everyone started saying the truthful "please make a donation to us, we might send you something back in the astonishingly unlikely event of not having squandered (or straight-up embezzled) all your money on irrelevant things in the near future". Nobody ever says "gimme as much as you can so if whatever I think about making ever actually becomes a reality, it arguably possibly maybe does so sooner than otherwise".
So as far as expectations, yeah, you _should_ have your eyes open. But as far as the actual promises go, hell no, it's NOT free money with zero strings attached in any sense according to the deal being peddled, even if in practice, legally, that's exactly what it ends up being. And that won't change until the very first paragraph on the page of every single project on every crowd-funding website does not read:
"what follows below is the declaration of an intent by the project owner to reward you with something in exchange for your voluntarily offered financial support. There are not and there cannot be any guarantees that the intent is practical, feasible, or even genuinely honest - quite often it will fail to be one or more of the above - and there will be no consequences whatsoever for the project owner if they never even talk to any of you again after you pay them. Proceed knowing that you're paying someone you don't know for something they don't have."
Biting the hand that feeds IT
