1055: Kickstarter

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
Revision as of 19:17, 15 August 2012 by Lcarsos (talk | contribs) (Adding Category Comics featuring Black Hat)
Jump to: navigation, search
Kickstarter
If you pledge more than $50 you'll get on the VIP list and have first dibs on a slot on ANY of the pledge levels in the actual campaign.
Title text: If you pledge more than $50 you'll get on the VIP list and have first dibs on a slot on ANY of the pledge levels in the actual campaign.

Explanation

If you are not familiar with Kickstarter, it is (in their own words) a platform for funding creative projects in which anyone can give money at any level of funding starting usually as low as $10. Funding at different levels gets you different perks.

In this comic, Black Hat is attempting to game the system by raising money to work on the perfect Kickstarter pitch. He appears to have gained no money, but has only started the scheme that day. The irony of the image text is that you do not need to be on any VIP list to have dibs on the pledge levels. Anyone can give any amount of money. That is the goal of Kickstarter and it has been wildly successful.


comment.png add a comment! ⋅ comment.png add a topic (use sparingly)! ⋅ Icons-mini-action refresh blue.gif refresh comments!

Discussion

Also note the Droste effect of Blackhat's video: in the video he's holding a copy of the current webpage. 75.103.23.206 21:52, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

It's also worth noting that the kickstarter shown in the video has 2 days remaining and has raised a four digit figure of a 7 digit total (otherwise being a complete failure).86.141.223.90 22:43, 8 February 2013 (UTC)

It seems to me that in the video he has 2 days remaining, somewhere around 53,090 backers and has raised more than $8,000,000, out of an unreadable goal. 79.82.208.103 12:58, 2 June 2013 (UTC)

Could this be a scam? I don't know that much about kickstarter, but I know Blackhat, and scamming people seems like a common activity for him. 108.162.212.184 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

I changed the second paragraph of the explanation pretty radically. It's not an ideal explanation right now, because some facts are vague and unsatisfying, but it's better than it was, which was blatantly false. I'm assuming that since Randall made the joke he did make in the title text, at the time of this comic's publication, Kickstarter didn't have any limits on pledge tiers. It does now, which makes the title text make no sense. If someone could verify all this and correct accordingly, that'd be great, because I don't know how to go about it.172.68.174.70 04:35, 19 February 2020 (UTC)