Tom Scott isn't alone in his frustration with Klout, the San Francisco-based startup that rates people's social media "influence" based on their activity on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms.
But unlike most of us, the 27-year-old Londoner decided to do something about it. Thus was born Klouchebag.com, a hilarious rating system launched on Friday that turns the Klout algorithm on its head, issuing stinging rebukes to social media obsessives for such crimes as mangling the English language, begging Twitter followers for retweets, and "every useless check-in on Foursquare or its horrible brethren."
Just to be upfront, PCMag isn't claiming innocence in the promotion of the sort of social media obsession derided by Klout's critics—heck, we've even published a guide to boosting your Klout score. Scott told PCMag that he had "been annoyed with the idea of Klout for a while" but it was a recent profile of the service by Wired's Seth Stevenson that proved to be the straw that broke the camel's back for him.
"That story is what inspired Klouchebag," he said. "Today, I registered the domain name—sadly, 'klunt.com' was already taken—and built the site in a couple of hours of spare time."
So far, so good for a few hours of coding. The site uses what Scott describes as the "ARSE rating system," sussing out a person's klouchebaggery based on the following amusing metrics:
- Anger: profanity and rage
- Retweets: "please RT"s, no or constant retweeting, and old-style
- Social Apps: every useless check-in on Foursquare or its horrible brethren
- English Usage: if you use EXCLAMATION MARKS OMG!!! or no capitals at all, this'll be quite high
- (and so on)
Check out how social media enthusiast Ashton Kutcher rates on Klouchebag scale:
The Wired article described a disturbing new economic landscape where employers reject job candidates based on low Klout scores and customer support representatives prioritize helping callers based on their likeliness to spread the word about their treatment via social media as measured by the ranking service.
One source told Stevenson that after his low Klout score of 34 doomed his chances of getting a job at a marketing agency, he spent six months furiously trying to boost his Klout score—eventually getting it up to a 72, at which point an avalanche of job offers came streaming in.
The tale may be anecdotal, but it's this sort of blind deference to an arbitrary scoring system like Klout's and subsequent attempts to game it in one's favor that has Scott and many others fuming.
"Klout annoys me for the same reason that search engine optimization annoys me," Scott said. "It's an enormous amount of effort designed to game an arbitrary and often-changing system. Imagine if all that time went into actually making interesting things, or caring about the people around you."
"To quote the WOPR computer from WarGames, 'The only way to win is not to play,'" Scott concluded.
Interested in your own Klouchebag rating? You can click over to Klouchebag.com, type in your Twitter handle, and find out just what sort of a social media prat you really are.
For more from Damon, follow him on Twitter @dpoeter.
