Kickstarters are fucked up
Dec 15, 2017 9:16:34 GMT -5
Post by 40oz on Dec 15, 2017 9:16:34 GMT -5
The below is a story about how my brother revealed blindspot on his understanding of the propagation of internet popularity and traffic, which enabled him to tread into unfamiliar territory with high esteem, confront some critical self evaluatory questions, and ultimately make a fatal wrong turn on the road to self-destruction.
My brother is very ambitious and is an aspiring christian film director. His hobby projects involve shooting some incidental family events and vacations and editing them together to resemble seriously professional work. He's actually very good at it, too. He's been working with some close friends to direct and shoot a short film about Jesus' 40 days and 40 nights in the desert. The idea has been on his mind for quite a while. The pitch is that he intends to do all of the shooting through his iPhone -- I guess to suggest both how innovative he is and possibly get some endorsement from Apple or something, I think. He has a lot of interesting ergonomic selfie-stick things and drones to shoot from interesting angles.
I haven't really been in very close contact with him throughout the process, so I don't really know what his intentions are with this film project or how he plans to go about it. He had already finished a pretty awesome trailer for his movie. I was under the impression that he had all the details worked out and was going to begin shooting this February. I think someone pitched the idea of running a kickstarter for his project, and he later romanticized about the idea of scoring a $40,000 kickstarter budget to shoot his film with.
He started a group chat with my other siblings linking to his kick starter page, and asked if we had any suggestions to improve it. Between all of us, we located a couple grammatical errors and typos, but all in all it was as good as we have the capacity to help him with. Outside of this little internet community, I don't have any real expertise about promoting or marketing or anything. But I do know that unless you're a major figure in the public sphere of the internet, these kickstarters rarely work. I sincerely doubt most strangers are going to want to donate a few thousand dollars so they can get a Jesus t-shirt and their name in the credits for a Christian movie.
So his kickstarter launches and he's working around the clock trying to get it across in social media. He's posting about it on facebook daily, tagging all his friends and family in the posts, and practically begging people to share his posts. It's gotten really annoying. My wife got in an argument with me asking why she's being tagged in these posts about this movie she has nothing to do with. I tried to explain to her that my brother is grasping for straws to generate awareness for his project. I made a generous pity donation to his kickstarter, but I was fairly sure he's not internet savvy enough to generate the kind of awareness and motivation people need to pitch in to something like this. I don't think anyone on the internet really cares about Christianity, much less want a Christian film.
In the group chat he's been giving everyone updates on how his kickstarter is doing. He was really optimistic at first, and within a few days was ecstatic about an extremely generous $5,000 donation (which I'm sure came from my mom and dad.) but it wasn't long before he reached the final week of his kickstarter and only had reached 15% of his goal. He began asking us directly if we had donated yet and when we did. Some of the details of his questions seemed to suggest to me that he was probing to find out how much came from who.
He wrote a very long, sad, and despondent facebook status after his kickstarter failed about how how empty this all made him feel, and that he now realizes that no one seems to care about his dreams the same way he does. There was an inkling of hope in the final line of his status that said he was still going to shoot the film anyway despite this loss. Usually when I talk to him about this kind of stuff, he's pretty reasonable, and understanding, but the way he conducted himself on the internet made him look like a massive attention whore, where his self-esteem is quantified by how many likes, shares, and retweets he has and measuring how other people value him with how much they donated to his kickstarter.
The problem isn't really with kickstarter itself, but rather that if you're not amazing in the eyes and thoughts of everyone you meet, kickstarter becomes a laboratory where you get to test your misplaced values against the general interests of the internet, and realize the flaws of your human existence in a quantifiable digital form that most people are probably better off not knowing about themselves in the first place. You realize that your friends and family have been white-lying to you for years, by pretending to like the same things you like. The honest truth is that your ambition has been radiant, healthy, and contagious for the people you've surrounded yourself with, which makes you a magnetic personality to be around. But at the same time they recognize that your ego is fragile and no one wants to be burdened with the responsibility of devastating you with shining light on your character flaws, when there's a risk of crushing your spirit and potentially ending the friendship.
Thank you kickstarter for raising the question.
My brother is very ambitious and is an aspiring christian film director. His hobby projects involve shooting some incidental family events and vacations and editing them together to resemble seriously professional work. He's actually very good at it, too. He's been working with some close friends to direct and shoot a short film about Jesus' 40 days and 40 nights in the desert. The idea has been on his mind for quite a while. The pitch is that he intends to do all of the shooting through his iPhone -- I guess to suggest both how innovative he is and possibly get some endorsement from Apple or something, I think. He has a lot of interesting ergonomic selfie-stick things and drones to shoot from interesting angles.
I haven't really been in very close contact with him throughout the process, so I don't really know what his intentions are with this film project or how he plans to go about it. He had already finished a pretty awesome trailer for his movie. I was under the impression that he had all the details worked out and was going to begin shooting this February. I think someone pitched the idea of running a kickstarter for his project, and he later romanticized about the idea of scoring a $40,000 kickstarter budget to shoot his film with.
He started a group chat with my other siblings linking to his kick starter page, and asked if we had any suggestions to improve it. Between all of us, we located a couple grammatical errors and typos, but all in all it was as good as we have the capacity to help him with. Outside of this little internet community, I don't have any real expertise about promoting or marketing or anything. But I do know that unless you're a major figure in the public sphere of the internet, these kickstarters rarely work. I sincerely doubt most strangers are going to want to donate a few thousand dollars so they can get a Jesus t-shirt and their name in the credits for a Christian movie.
So his kickstarter launches and he's working around the clock trying to get it across in social media. He's posting about it on facebook daily, tagging all his friends and family in the posts, and practically begging people to share his posts. It's gotten really annoying. My wife got in an argument with me asking why she's being tagged in these posts about this movie she has nothing to do with. I tried to explain to her that my brother is grasping for straws to generate awareness for his project. I made a generous pity donation to his kickstarter, but I was fairly sure he's not internet savvy enough to generate the kind of awareness and motivation people need to pitch in to something like this. I don't think anyone on the internet really cares about Christianity, much less want a Christian film.
In the group chat he's been giving everyone updates on how his kickstarter is doing. He was really optimistic at first, and within a few days was ecstatic about an extremely generous $5,000 donation (which I'm sure came from my mom and dad.) but it wasn't long before he reached the final week of his kickstarter and only had reached 15% of his goal. He began asking us directly if we had donated yet and when we did. Some of the details of his questions seemed to suggest to me that he was probing to find out how much came from who.
He wrote a very long, sad, and despondent facebook status after his kickstarter failed about how how empty this all made him feel, and that he now realizes that no one seems to care about his dreams the same way he does. There was an inkling of hope in the final line of his status that said he was still going to shoot the film anyway despite this loss. Usually when I talk to him about this kind of stuff, he's pretty reasonable, and understanding, but the way he conducted himself on the internet made him look like a massive attention whore, where his self-esteem is quantified by how many likes, shares, and retweets he has and measuring how other people value him with how much they donated to his kickstarter.
The problem isn't really with kickstarter itself, but rather that if you're not amazing in the eyes and thoughts of everyone you meet, kickstarter becomes a laboratory where you get to test your misplaced values against the general interests of the internet, and realize the flaws of your human existence in a quantifiable digital form that most people are probably better off not knowing about themselves in the first place. You realize that your friends and family have been white-lying to you for years, by pretending to like the same things you like. The honest truth is that your ambition has been radiant, healthy, and contagious for the people you've surrounded yourself with, which makes you a magnetic personality to be around. But at the same time they recognize that your ego is fragile and no one wants to be burdened with the responsibility of devastating you with shining light on your character flaws, when there's a risk of crushing your spirit and potentially ending the friendship.
Thank you kickstarter for raising the question.