
Klout shutting down - erickhill
https://twitter.com/ssxio/status/994656459895001090
======
jaytaylor
I was one of the first 10 employees at Klout.

The initial core idea was good: To hold big brands responsible by empowering
ordinary people to be heard and recognized as influential on social media.

From the inside, it was an amazing journey. Definitely the most fun job I've
had so far in many ways. So much technical freedom to do whatever we wanted
(yikes ;), and so many parties!

The team was also high caliber. Good engineers, good biz dev, marketing,
everything. Many of my former colleagues continued on to greatness, from
serial entrepreneurs, to one who's now the President of AOL. :)

After I departed in 2012, the public interest seemed to die down, and hockey
stick growth along with it.

Sad to see it shutting completely down, always thought it was a cool idea. The
amount of controversy just from putting a score by someones twitter handle
remains incredible! It really opened up my eyes to how much subtle product
decisions can manipulate users (for better or worse.. it's up to the PM).

At the same time, the way twitter caters to narcissism bothered me then and
still bothers me now. Would've been the best if we'd found a way to dial down
the narcissism and turn up just the Whuffie [0]!

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whuffie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whuffie)

~~~
rmason
Sorry but I didn't find it that compelling. A year after signing up I received
an email saying my score went up. So I took the bait, logged in and found my
score had not only not gone up but I was pretty sure it was lower.

A month later I received another email saying my score had gone up, this time
I had logged my score just to be absolutely certain. Sure enough my score had
gone down again!

After that I marked the Klout emails as spam. Any company that has to lie to
their users to get them to log in has already failed even if the end comes
years later.

I think the game was to goose the metrics so they could get another round of
financing. The goal should have been a focus on making the product more
compelling. Short cuts rarely work in the long run.

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jlgaddis
Good riddance. I've "strongly disliked" Klout since day one. The only
disappointing thing about this is that it took so long to happen.

~~~
NelsonMinar
The sheer idea of it was offensive.

~~~
Karunamon
Could you expand why? Every social network has its KPIs.. Facebook likes,
Twitter followers and retweets, Reddit karma. Klout always seemed like an
aggregator kinda like Metacritic is for reviews.

I never understood the visceral level of hate that Klout drew.

~~~
NelsonMinar
I'd answer, but since you're only a 37 on Klout it's not worth the time.

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geofft
Another GDPR victory. Previous partial victories (because they shut down
European service only) include Unroll.me, a service that would read your
inbox, click some unsubscribe links, and market to you based on the rest of
what they found, as well as targeted-advertising companies Verve and
Drawbridge.

~~~
briandear
So it’s a “victory” that people in the EU are unable to decide for themselves
if they want to use Unroll Me?

Who made you the arbiter of what’s good for people?

~~~
madeofpalk
So it’s a “victory” that people in the US are unable to decide for themselves
if they want to eat at Salmonella Kitchen Co?

Who made you the arbiter of what’s good for people?

Regulation "deciding" which businesses or services exist or not has existed
for eons. It’s why we require doctors to be accredited, or restaurants to pass
food and safety checks. Sometimes the balance of power is way out of the hands
of consumers and the "free market" needs a bit of a nudge to act in the
public’s best interest.

~~~
jjeaff
Salmonella Kitchen is a ridiculous example. Take something that is actually
controversial, like raw milk.

If people want to drink raw milk, let them.

Allowing a company to offer a service for free in exchange for a user's data
is very far away from allowing unaccredited doctors practice medicine.

GDPR is more like blocking people from braiding hair without a cosmotology
license.

~~~
madeofpalk
Companies can still do that - they just need to be honest and transparent with
their users.

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eganist
Klout was an utter blight among influencer culture (I still can't believe I
wrote those two words with a straight face)

On the tail end of my limited time blogging in the earlier part of this
decade, I'd interacted with enough bloggers in conference press rooms to get a
feel for how much people in these circles covet(ed) these metrics. I can't
cite the specific publication, but one case comes to mind where a blogger
reasoned with himself on using the most inflammatory language he could put
together in a series of tweets to boost metrics and his klout score,
specifically.

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crabasa
Services that turn people into numbers have no future. Glad to see Klout go.

Hopefully Hackerrank and its ilk will follow.

~~~
recursive
And then arcades. And then track and field competitions.

Having numbers _about_ people is not inherently good or bad.

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r721
Article: [https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/10/rip-
klout/](https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/10/rip-klout/)

>A Lithium spokesperson told TechCrunch that “the upcoming deadline for GDPR
implementation simply expedited our plans to sunset Klout,” though the primary
reason is said to be a new focus on messaging-based services.

------
mrbill
I had enough "klout" to get a Windows Phone (don't remember which model) for
review/use.. Played with it for a week, passed it on to other family members.
Great hardware, bad software... Cancelled my klout account in 2014 or so.

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michaelbuckbee
I'm mildly surprised that Klout is shutting down if only because they seemed
supremely well positioned to be at the forefront of influencer marketing.

While I'm mostly not a fan of the practice, it _is_ a real thing and lots and
lots of brands and people online interact extremely inefficiently through the
whole thing.

~~~
manigandham
You don't need Klout to tell you the follower count, which is still the only
real proxy there is for reach, bots and all.

Beyond that, no single platform has actually been successful as a "influencer"
marketplace anyway, it's all driven by agencies connecting directly.

~~~
ghaff
Although reach isn't really influence--especially influence that's relevant to
you as, say, someone running PR for a company.

But, to your main point, yeah. Whether it's agencies or in-house staff,
working with "influencers" beyond mostly broadcasting information is mostly an
individualized relationship business.

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mindgam3
I wonder how this will affect the founders' reputation.

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meritt
Klout was acquired by Lithium Technologies just over 4 years ago for $200M in
stock.

> Klout is not a universally loved company in social media spheres; its notion
> of measuring online influence by tracking social media activity has been
> rather controversial

[https://www.recode.net/2014/3/27/11625010/why-lithium-
bought...](https://www.recode.net/2014/3/27/11625010/why-lithium-bought-klout-
and-why-200m-is-optimistic)

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sethigh
Punch me in the face without warning.
[https://xkcd.com/1057/](https://xkcd.com/1057/)

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s3m4j
What was klout ? (I've read its wiki page, but...)

~~~
imustbeevil
It's like Socialblade but instead of real numbers they had fake ones.

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snissn
Are they releasing any data sets? Or any code?

~~~
Adamantcheese
There's this paper that they released; it's unlikely they're going to release
anything for security reasons.
[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1510.08487.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1510.08487.pdf)

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ghba66
Said by @ssxio, the guy who built tweeklyfm, a site that would post your
weekly lastfm stats to your twitter account... and then follow him without
your permission or knowledge.

This is, he took your private information (your Twitter authorisation keys)
and used it without your consent to do something shady (follow someone you
don't know to inflate his follower numbers).

~~~
jfktrey
Definitely a somewhat shady thing to do. To play devil’s advocate, though, I
would argue that inflating your follow numbers is less “evil” than building a
machine that takes in user data and spits out profit.

