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Klout shutting down
- snissn 8y agoAre they releasing any data sets? Or any code?
- Adamantcheese 8y agoThere'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
- jlgaddis 8y agoGood riddance. I've "strongly disliked" Klout since day one. The only disappointing thing about this is that it took so long to happen.
- __jal 8y agoI guess it turned out the desire to win Internet Points is strongly tied to specific communities.
- brd 8y agoI always thought Klout was a useless vanity metric. Since starting a company that operates in the social listening space I've had chances to do quick sanity checks against Klout scores and they've proven to be consistently less than useful. Good riddance indeed.
- majewsky 8y ago> social listening What?
- wu_tang_chris 8y agoit's like bullshit, but smells worse
- brd 8y ago"Big data" analytics pointed specifically at social media data. Netbase and Crimson Hexagon are two good examples of incumbents in the space.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- bartread 8y agoQuite so. I toyed with it early on and fairly quickly lost interest. I only came to truly despise it back in 2013 when I was having a conversation about potential employment with $company_who_shall_remain_nameless_but_whose_employees_all_seem_strangely_listless and the person I was talking to said I'd need to share my Klout metrics because "that's what it's all about". I decided not to pursue the matter any further.
- thankthunk 8y agoAbsolutely. Don't know anyone who had anything good to say about klout, don't know any value klout provided.
- NelsonMinar 8y agoThe sheer idea of it was offensive.
- ghaff 8y agoI'm not sure why you think the sheer idea is offensive. Companies are constantly putting a lot of effort into figuring out what journalists, analysts, and other types of influencers are worth spending effort to work with and cultivate and which are not. The fact that Klout was a rather useless way of quantifying this--and I'm suspicious whether any type of automated system is going to help you all that much--doesn't change the fact that understanding to what degree and for which audiences someone influences purchase and other behavior is useful.
- Karunamon 8y agoCould 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 8y agoI'd answer, but since you're only a 37 on Klout it's not worth the time.
- ghba66 8y agoSaid 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 8y agoDefinitely 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.
- sethigh 8y agoPunch me in the face without warning. https://xkcd.com/1057/ https://xkcd.com/1057/
- r721 8y agoArticle: 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.
- crabasa 8y agoServices that turn people into numbers have no future. Glad to see Klout go. Hopefully Hackerrank and its ilk will follow.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- xkcd-sucks 8y agoJust like happened to Experian, Cambridge Analytica, etc
- organicmultiloc 8y agoYou mean like google and facebook?
- sheeshkebab 8y agoExperian would strongly disagree with that... not that support this, but business of ranking people is high up.
- recursive 8y agoAnd then arcades. And then track and field competitions. Having numbers about people is not inherently good or bad.
- eganist 8y agoKlout 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.
- meritt 8y agoKlout 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-klout-and-why-200m-is-optimistic https://www.recode.net/2014/3/27/11625010/why-lithium-bought...
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- geofft 8y agoAnother 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.
- vosper 8y agoIs it a GDPR victory? I was under the impression that Klout had become irrelevant some time ago. I think most media analytics companies have their own secret-sauce influencer algorithms these days, as part of their value proposition.
- briandear 8y agoSo 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 8y agoSo 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 8y agoSalmonella 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.
- jaytaylor 8y agoI 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
- pixelmonkey 8y agoI'd read that blog post! Share it when it is up!
- jaytaylor 8y agoI think it'll have to be broken up into a series. Here is the first one: https://jaytaylor.com/klout/spotify.html https://jaytaylor.com/klout/spotify.html
- madeofpalk 8y ago> 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. How was this ever in any iteration of the product? From day one it was always that vanity metric of your "Klout Score". The entire product was focused around that. Hell, there was even the allure of a partner program that gave discounts and offers to high-Klout scoring users. If that's not catering to people's narcissism then I don't know what is.
- s3m4j 8y agoWhat was klout ? (I've read its wiki page, but...)
- imustbeevil 8y agoIt's like Socialblade but instead of real numbers they had fake ones.
- mrbill 8y agoI 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.
- mindgam3 8y agoI wonder how this will affect the founders' reputation.
- michaelbuckbee 8y agoI'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.
- Pulcinella 8y agoPart of the “allure” of “influencers” is that they are important on their own. “Self made” and relatable, basically. The second you group all those people together and put up a big sign that says ‘these are the important people’ that all goes away.
- manigandham 8y agoYou 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 8y agoAlthough 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.