Crowd sourced scientific funding is a fine way of supplementing existing infrastructure and it&#x27;s good for funding small side-projects that augment existing grants &#x2F; research groups. It&#x27;s also a good way for amatuers to get a hobby project funded.<p>But it&#x27;s not an adequate alternative to more traditional forms of scientific funding, for a lot of reasons.<p>First, the amounts are just too small. Even a very successful crowd funder would have an incredibly difficult time paying for a <i>single</i> full time employee, even at grad student rates and even before administrative overhead &#x2F; tuition. Which is essentially $10-$15&#x2F;hr.<p>Second, if you look at sites like experiment.com, it&#x27;s rare for a project to be funded without a very clear picture for what questions are being asked, how they are being asked, and exactly how they will be answered. And none of the projects I found asked to recoup that cost. This is particularly problematic for fundamental research, where scope and intent are not well-defined almost by definition.<p>(Being a cynic, I&#x27;d be unsurprised if a lot of the people doing the crowd funding thing in small dollar amounts are mostly just in it for the sex appeal it will have on their next grant report, rather than e.g. actually needing the money. There are often way easier ways to scrounge up a few thousand bucks at a major research university. Heck, were I did grad school, you could get grants in the small thousands just for being a grad student with a pulse, and doubling that money was about as easy.)