Why Kickstarter got it right when it said it was wrong

You’re damned if you do, and you’re damned if you don’t.

Earlier this week, Casey Malone spotted a pretty ganky-looking Kickstarter campaign called “Above the Game”. You may have heard about it: it raised around $16,000 to produce pick-up guide, amid vociferous protests that it was encouraging sexual assault.

Now Kickstarter has come out and said “we were wrong” with a very clear apology for letting it onto the platform, an explanation of how it came to happen and a promise to reject pick-up guides in future.

Many of the responses to Kickstarter’s post are full of admiration, but a significant number are perplexed, confused or aggressive. They accuse Kickstarter of multiple sins: lying, cheating or being weak.

I think those people are flat out wrong. Here’s why.

What you saw on Kickstarter was not actually the problem.

I found the project pretty icky and tasteless and objectifying, but there’s plenty of crap in the world that’s icky and tasteless and objectifying. However, lots of those who are coming in fresh don’t seem to realise that the project page is not the reason people were kicking up a fuss. It wasn’t the pitch that was the problem: it was what will be in the book.

The project’s creator, Ken Hoinsky, said he was going to republish a lot of material he’d already left in various Reddit threads on seduction.

And some of it was pretty awful: talking about forcing yourself on women, and ignoring their protestations. An incitement to rape? Debatable, but very easy to see how the target audience might read it as such. But that you can understand why people were concerned that Kickstarter was lending its imprimatur to such material.

It would have been near-impossible for Kickstarter to have acted faster.

In the apology, Kickstarter says “We had only two hours from when we found out about the material to when the project was ending. We’ve never acted to remove a project that quickly.”

Quite a lot of people think that’s untrue, some of them citing another project that was pulled with just minutes left when it was discovered to be a fraud. If it could do that, why not the same for Above the Game?

First, it’s unlikely Kickstarter knew about the objectionable content that would be in Above the Game before Casey Malone’s post went live; and that happened when there were just a few hours to go on the project. It is totally reasonable that staff only became aware of the controversy when the clock was nearly run out.

Second, the fact that the fraudulent campaign was pulled just before it got funded has nothing to do with how long it had been watched. Those investigating the scam had spent several days gathering evidence. Pulling the plug at the last minute is different to discovering a problem at the last minute.

Kickstarter couldn’t pull back money after the project got funded.

Kickstarter’s own FAQs say there is a 14-day window after a project succeeds when money is collected. Lots of people have taken that to mean that there was a way for Kickstarter to prevent the money going to Ken Hoinsky. Not true.

What happens when a project gets funded is that most of the money gets drawn almost immediately from backers’ credit cards. Some of the payments happen a little while after that, but within a few hours — and certainly within a few days — the money’s nearly all there.

However, some of the payments fail, and Amazon (which processes Kickstarter payments) will try again later. That’s what the 14-day window is: after two weeks, it stops trying and draws a line under the money. Blocking that is almost impossible, unless it happens within microseconds of a project closing.

I don’t think it did everything right here. It could have suspended the project pending review, for example, and I’m a little surprised this issue wasn’t already being monitored or discussed before Casey’s post.

But what I do think is that Kickstarter has dealt with the explanation in the best possible way.

It’s not mealy-mouthed, it’s not a non-apology, and it outlines a set of clear, credible actions that should — hopefully — stop this from happening again. Kickstarter got it right when it said it was wrong.

Off the back of this, I’m going to make a pick for this week’s project in The Year of Giving Dangerously. And it’s going to a documentary called Kickstarted, which is by the guys who spotted the scam. They get $40 and my whole-hearted support for being the good guys.