Yeah, I feel like there are members of the public who think a $20,000 dollar goal should pay for 3 or 4 people to work on a thing for a while... IT DOESN'T! It might pay 1 person to work on something for a few months.

This is why kickstarters should already have substantial progress made on a project before asking for crowdfunding, but if people want to bet on the Longshots with nothing to show but an idea, they should expect to get burnt from time to time.

This is a dangerously low-quality comment.

For some people knowing that you disappointed people ("a fan" would be right word in case of Stephenson) that believed in you so much could be easily worth of committing seppuku or something.

For all of the threads recently discussing failure and founder depression, you flippantly suggest someone should kill themselves for "disappointing some fans". Have you ever failed as ambitiously and publicly as Neal Stephenson did here? Maybe you read the story and thought he did not sound as apologetic as you'd like, but having read the rest of the backers' notes I'm pretty sure that he and the rest of the team have put their lives into this for years.

It's kind of like wondering how 100 people managed to eat a whole extra large pizza. Like, the pizza might seem quite large to you personally, but it's really very little food compared to what 100 people would normally eat even as a snack.

One shouldn't have to imagine - there should be a basic accounting in cases that fail and raise more than some fairly low threshold of cash. I don't mean like an IRS audit level of detail, just a 1 or 2 page breakdown and maybe a notarized declaration.

Can't say I'm very surprised, the whole project reeked of nerd hubris.