[eykanal]

The argument here seems to be that Kickstarter, by hiding failures, is doing a disservice to others who may want to start a similar business.

Kickstarter is a business. Showing failures would be a bad business move, as the author admits; they obviously don't want to do that. On the other hand, entrepreneurs starting a business have a ton of work to do to ensure their business is viable. Kickstarter is doing them a tremendous favor by keeping failed attempts on their site; they don't have to do that! Writing a post that calls them out for not doing more to showcase failures seems pretty misguided to me; the only person served is the budding entrepreneur, and it has potential to significantly harm Kickstarter, as it could induce fewer people to start projects.

I guess I completely disagree with the post's intention.

[samineru]

I would agree if there were a way to find these failed cases if you looked hard enough. Other than acquiring the link before the end date of the project there doesn't seem to be a way. This may be a good way to check what happened to project X, but not to answer the question:

"How have other projects in field foobar done, which ones have failed or succeeded, and what does each group have in common?"

[misener]

That's exactly the kind of thing I'd like to be able to do. For instance, I'd love to know which categories have the highest success rates, etc.

[roc]

That sounds like an interesting project. Create a spider that crawls funding sites (more and more each day it seems) and collects statistics and timelines.

It could even search for references to individual projects on the popular search engines, to gather data on what sources for attention have what kinds of impact on which kinds of projects, etc.

[egypturnash]

There's one doing that, but only for Kickstarter - check out http://www.kicktraq.com.

[BlackNapoleon]

Volunteering to fund via kickstarter is....voluntary.

So the risk is on those who are choosing to obtain investment via the KS platform.