Question: What do you get when you combine potatoes, eggs, and mayonnaise? Answer: A $40,000 potato salad on Kickstarter. That is right! As ridiculous as it sounds, someone (Zach Danger Brown) has put his potato salad making dream (a dream of one night making potato salad) up on Kickstarter for funding with the outrageous goal of $10. Well, the Internet being the meme hungry rotating door of limited attention spans that it is has proceeded to well-exceed this measly goal of an Alexander Hamilton by about $39,990!

Now I love the idea of Kickstarter. I think it has been more of a benefit than a hindrance, but it is things like this that make it next to impossible to accept Kickstarter as the legitimate enterprise that it is for many people around the world. Like people who sell Grilled Cheese with Jesus grilled into it on ebay for thousands of dollars, the capacity to exploit on Kickstarter still seems rather high. Now Brown’s goal was only $10. It is not like he asked for all this money. But with the right amount of hype, the most well-intentioned joke can go on to spur situations such as these where tens of thousands of dollars are given away needlessly. There are many causes on various charitable websites, or projects of great merit on Kickstarter and Indiegogo that barely scrap together the funds to do actual good. Oh, Internet…

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What do you think about the current state of crowd-funding? Feel free to leave a comment below!

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