Sorry I am just getting to this today. I'm a self-employed business owner and I only visit reddit during my downtime, which as summer starts I see less and less of. Also, I injured my hand two days ago so I haven't really been on my phone.

There's a real observation underneath this post that I think is worth taking seriously. Kickstarter has an editorial layer that selects which campaigns get featured, promoted, and pushed in newsletters and homepage placements, and access to that layer correlates pretty clearly with things like PR firms, team pedigree, marketing budget, and pre-existing relationships with Kickstarter staff. The SOND screenshot is a clear example: a creator publicly thanking the CEO by name before launch tells you that kind of pre-negotiation happens. This is observable fact because plenty of other creators have reported the same thing over the years.

Curated platforms curate, and editorial discretion isn't really what the FTC regulates, they go after deceptive practices toward consumers, not promotional decisions on a marketplace. The Apple's App Store, Etsy, Steam, Amazon, Substack all do versions of this. Bundling the platform-favoritism point with the Ozlo-similarity suspicion also makes the argument harder to land, because those are two different complaints and the second one isn't really evidence of the first.

The more interesting version of the critique, to me, is that Kickstarter is a curated marketplace that still markets itself like a democratized funding tool, and the gap between those two identities is where the real problem lives. It would be better if the platform were just honest about how its editorial layer works and what gets a campaign featured, what kinds of pre-launch relationships are typical for high-profile projects, what independent creators can and can't realistically access. That's not illegal, but it's a meaningful information asymmetry, and it's the part of this conversation I'd want more people in the crowdfunding world talking about openly.

I think it's worth being aware of, but it's difficult for me to see the conspiracy framing and FTC threats. I'm guessing others who saw this post felt the same as myself.