People seem to be divided into two major camps: those who think the whole thing's hilarious and awesome, and those that think the whole thing's terrible and unfair. While I can definitely understand the frustrations of the latter group, I think I ultimately have to side with the former. That said, I have no intention of actually backing potato salad.
First, let's talk about why this is so frustrating. It's not fair. It's like somebody won the lottery without even playing. What's worse, this injustice was facilitated by thousands of people who should have known better. He did nothing to deserve this money, and has no obligations to do any good with it. Hell, he's outright forbidden to even donate it to charity.
But ultimately, he did nothing wrong. He put a joke on the internet, a joke he probably never thought would pay off. If you want to get mad at anyone, get mad at the backers. Potato salad might even be a good thing in the long term if it incentivizes Kickstarter to tighten up it's recently loosened standards before more malicious exploitations crop up.
He might be doing something wrong depending on how he ends up spending this money. If he simply took the money and spent it on himself, then yes, that would be pretty terrible. But from the look of the campaign page it seems like he has every intention of giving back to the people who supported him. Between hats, shirts, an internet party, and possibly a full blown recipe book, good things are coming out of this. Sure, they're frivolous things, but still good.
Furthermore, potato salad is probably not actually taking away from other, more serious projects. Perhaps there are a handful of people who literally backed potato salad instead of something else, but my guess is that for most it's had little to no impact on what other projects they back. Kickstarter's public stats show us that there are very few projects that almost succeed. 80% of projects that make at least 20% of the way eventually meet their goal. Bottom line: if a campaign isn't already going down in flames, it'll probably succeed regardless of how much attention people pay to potato salad.
There are a lot of lessons we can learn from this whole thing, but I'm going to mention one in particular. The value of something is not always proportional to the effort put into it. Potato salad highlights this in a blatant way, but it's nothing we haven't seen before. It's why Cow Clicker has probably made more money than your favorite indie game. However frustrated you are doesn't change the fact that lots of people genuinely enjoy Cow Clicker.
The thing that both potato salad and Cow Clicker have in common is that they don't require investment. Once you get the joke, you've already gotten the value. Actually playing the game (or backing the campaign) is simply going along with the joke. Most projects do this in the reverse order. You invest time/money/emotions first, and may or may not get a return on that investment later. There's an inherent risk to those projects that simply isn't present in potato salad.
In the end though, fairness and equality are not the same thing, and we can't enforce one without constraining the other.
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