"I have my doubts that mob mentality and viral marketing will prove to be reliable diviners of good investments."

You are not a mob when you are in your house browsing Kickstarter, you are a person and if you can think for yourself, you will.

We had crowd funding for centuries, it is called "the stock market". As you said, now we can cut the middleman (and their abuses).

Those middleman had been abusing the system too much, e.g Renting your own shares without your permission to speculators (short selling)