We think 'sexy' is a weird characterization. Sexy is usually what happens at the end, when the final result is shared or published to the public. How sexy a project is usually has nothing to do with the scientific impact of the research - e.g. the bat fellatio project.
Instead, we want to make people realize that the research process itself is sexy. And that in itself is a social experience.
What I mean is that when I look at your site, I find the same thing I mostly find on other crowdfunding sites: projects that are easy to explain and to which it is easy to draw popular attention.
The vast majority of scientific research simply doesn't fit in that model. Newton's work leading up to the Principia Mathematica simply did not have a cool-sounding elevator pitch. Neither did Einstein's early investigations into the photoelectric effect that led to relativity.
My problem with crowdfunding research is the exact same problem that increasingly occurs with ultra-scarce research grants: research effort is diverted into advertising and into projects that are easy to advertise to broad audiences, at the cost of deep research.
So then we have to ask ourselves, for a value of "sexy" being "easy to advertise and explain", do we want research to be sexy? If not, why should we require it to be sexy?
We've discussed this many, many times, and I think for us starting off it's just a really careful balance. You can definitely make technical depth 'sexy' in the same way vein of what makes Wikipedia sexy (depth, thoroughness), but it comes down to process and not so much delivery.
At least that's what we decided. If you make your elevator pitch about how you are guaranteeing a cure for cancer, maybe you're sacrificing value. But if you make the pitch about the process and steps, while validating basic things like fraud, ability, capacity, then maybe you're onto something.
