On the other hand, though, neither is a backer an investor, even if many of ZPM’s backers insisted they be treated as such. A Kickstarter pledge does not buy a portion of a company. Backers do not sit on the board; they are not enfranchised to review the company’s audited financials. Investors’ interests, at least ideally, are aligned with those of the company, whereas nothing in the crowdfunding relationship ties a backer to the company for the long term. Moreover, the last thing Kickstarter wants to deal with is S.E.C. regulations.

In the platform’s early days, Kickstarter’s founders hardly imagined that a situation like this would arise. Neither was a technologist — Perry Chen, now 38, was an artist and gallerist, and Yancey Strickler, 36, was a music journalist — and although several of their recent hires have engineering backgrounds, they continue to see Kickstarter as something of an arts institution. Their office building, in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood, is a remodeled pencil factory where thousands of square feet are given over to a gallery, a theater and a shadowy, silent library. During the platform’s initial phase, it did support some manufactured objects (simple iPhone cases, for example), but it wasn’t until 2010, when the founders were faced with an iPhone tripod proposal, that they had to decide if such commercial projects qualified as “creative” in the way they intended. As Strickler remembers it, the tripod’s creators responded that their particular tools happened to be injection molding and AutoCAD software, but that their enterprise was absolutely in the spirit of the platform. Kickstarter agreed to host the project, but that decision inspired a sustained effort to shape best practices for gadget campaigns. Its new rules included a requirement that there be a working prototype, and a prohibition on fancy computer renderings. (A spokesman for Kickstarter noted that if ZPM had listed its project today, it would have had to work hard to bring its pitch up to that standard.)

Until last October, Kickstarter’s terms of use stipulated that project creators had only two options to discharge their obligations: ship or refund. Today, in response to situations like ZPM’s, creators can refund, ship or explain, and if a full audit — financial or narrative — shows that the creators have made “every reasonable effort” toward a decent outcome, the backers are encouraged to feel satisfied. Strickler told me he feels it undermines the whole concept of crowdfunding to guarantee that products will be delivered or that refund money will be held in escrow; the acceptance of some risk, after all, is an integral part of patronage. “We wanted to protect a creator who makes an honest effort and comes up short,” he told me. “We wanted to reserve legal efforts for real bad-actor behavior.”

Even arts projects, of course, sometimes fall through. In December 2009, for example, the musician Josh Dibb (a member of Animal Collective) raised $26,000 to travel to Mali and record an album; six years on, his backers have yet to enjoy a single limited-edition-LP chord. A documentary filmmaker I spoke with raised more than $100,000 in 2012 to make a film about happiness in the Himalayas; he is drained from the effort of trying to explain himself to his backers. But the problem is especially acute with devices. The Wharton School professor Ethan Mollick, who has published several papers on crowdfunding, has found that more than 80 percent of hardware projects ship with significant delays. Most of those do ultimately deliver something, but Mollick has found that 14 percent of the projects studied have, since 2012, shipped either nothing at all or something too shoddy to use. An entire new consulting industry has in turn grown up to help crowdfund products. Just last month, Kickstarter unveiled a new section of its site, Campus, where creators can share hard-won advice and concerns.

The policy change has made things cleaner for Kickstarter when projects fail, but it arguably has complicated the creator-backer dynamic. If backers lack an absolute right to a product, and their legal options are limited, the policy only heightens their feeling of entitlement to full disclosure. “I long ago gave up on getting a machine, but I want my $250 of information,” Woodhouse told me. Backers feel they are part of an Internet community that has been not merely disillusioned but somehow also rendered unreal, and they get worked up to know how they were let down. The sense of broad collective purpose that makes any given Kickstarter campaign compelling is exactly what can make it, for backers and creators alike, especially dangerous.

On March 16, Gleb Polyakov and Janet Tambasco, each 26, sat on either side of me in an empty San Francisco cafe. It was the sort of laminate-floored, Mayan-mural-walled joint that could still afford rent but couldn’t afford one of the high-status, Ducati-looking contraptions with which ZPM sought to compete. The coffee wasn’t great, but it was free-refill plentiful, and they’d been a little wary about giving out their current mailing address. Recently one backer, an engineer and father of four who spent time on the phone with them offering design advice and kept a very religious Christian household, doxxed Tambasco’s mother, posting her personal information to a public Kickstarter thread. Polyakov and Tambasco had schlepped a Perspex box full of beta machines in various stages of dishabille.