

One-dimensional Reputation Is Meaningless - zohaibr
http://diegobasch.com/hey-klout-one-dimensional-reputation-is-meani

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bunderbunder
Just because you can't measure the ambient temperature in liters doesn't mean
the liter is a useless metric.

FWIW, Cory Doctorow already dealt with this issue in "Down and Out in the
Magic Kingdom". In it, the measure of social capital is called Whuffie, and
there were multiple scores based on it. Mentioned in the book were:

\- absolute Whuffie (Which, contrary to the article's title, is meaningful. An
absolute measure of clout is what's being implied by the observation that
everyone knows who Barack Obama is, and the number of people who know much
about me can be measured in the dozens.)

\- 'right-handed' Whuffie, which is a measure of a person's reputation among
people you regard highly. Think "personalized Google results."

\- 'left-handed' Whuffie, which measures a person's reputation among people
you regard poorly.

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alain94040
I disagree. My beef with Klout is that it measures authority using the wrong
sources. I keep giving a real-life example[1] that everyone gets wrong. My
friend is a Vice-President at Google. He doesn't tweet (he has better things
to do, frankly). His Klout score is -- none --. Somehow, I believe he is more
influential than me :-)

I did write an influence algorithm for a previous startup in which that same
friend was getting a great score. So it's possible to get it right. Klout
doesn't.

What Klout gets right is self-promotion: twitter addicts will tweet and
retweet their influence, thus promoting Klout. Smart play by Klout.

[1] [http://blog.foundrs.com/2011/08/18/why-klout-sheds-no-
light-...](http://blog.foundrs.com/2011/08/18/why-klout-sheds-no-light-on-my-
world/)

~~~
diego
The point is that "authority" or "influence" without context doesn't mean
much. Your friend is Vice-President at Google. So, how
influential/authoritative is he in the world of sports? How influential is
Roger Federer in the tech world? Would you rather have Ashton Kutcher as an
investor or, say, Paul Graham?

One number won't tell you the information you need to answer these questions.

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doug1001
so you are against the idea that every person should have a single number
irreversibly associated with them, and which represents their intrinsic worth
as a human being?

~~~
samstave
Bonus points if the number is so formed that corporations can extract the age,
race, sex and nationality of the product, er, users.

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cmcewen
Claiming that Klout is "meaningless" is a misleading way to convey his point.
The author really means to say that measuring influence in more than one area
would be better in some situations than a single score. However, given that a
large number of people use Klout, and some people get free stuff just for
using Klout, it certainly has meaning.

While knowing the horsepower, dimensions, top speed, and durability of a car
would certainly be better for some people than a simple "car score", that "car
score" might in fact be useful to a large number of people.

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flipside
It's all about context and trust. Without both it's all pretty meaningless.

This is something I've given a lot of thought to and I'm working on
implementing such a system.

Here's hoping that theory keeps holding up to reality.

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ktizo
I used to have a 12 dimensional reputation until spacetime cooled and I had to
take on this 3 dimensional one and discard my lizard form.

~~~
samstave
Is your reputation recognized across the 4 different corner harmonic 24 hour
Days rotate simultaneously within a single 4 quadrant rotation of a squared
equator and cubed Earth.

~~~
threepointone
(ref: <http://www.timecube.com/> )

~~~
ktizo
Heresy! The earth is a tesseract, everybody knows that.

