Kawasaki needs to re-read his own book on starting up... he made a ton on mistakes with this one.
PS: The idea itself is quite silly too... voting on rumors?! What is a vote suppose to do? Increase the likelihood of something being true? Problem with rumors is that only few people have the inside knowledge and you don't know who. By allowing those who don't know for sure to vote, those who are not stakeholders, the signal to noise ratio becomes quite low. The best predictor of rumors is a market-based model (full of insiders/stakeholders) or your own network of trusted sources (the traditional journalistic model).
I'd like to think that the real reason for the site has nothing to do with its stated purpose.
For example, collecting IP addresses or traffic patterns or vote clustering or word frequencies, I don't know, something. And the collected data is what has the actual value.
But really I think it was a case of someone hearing a "cool" neologism ("Dude; it's like, a rumor, but true!") and deciding to base a business plan on it.
Well one cool thing they have is that you can call in and leave a rumour and some fancy voice recognition tech will convert it to text and submit it. Has that been used much by any other websites?
PS: The idea itself is quite silly too... voting on rumors?! What is a vote suppose to do? Increase the likelihood of something being true? Problem with rumors is that only few people have the inside knowledge and you don't know who. By allowing those who don't know for sure to vote, those who are not stakeholders, the signal to noise ratio becomes quite low. The best predictor of rumors is a market-based model (full of insiders/stakeholders) or your own network of trusted sources (the traditional journalistic model).