Klout shutting down | Hacker News Reader

Klout shutting down

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96 pointserickhill55 comments

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

I'd read that blog post! Share it when it is up!

I think it'll have to be broken up into a series.

Here is the first one: https://jaytaylor.com/klout/spotify.html

> 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.

Whuffie: I remember when Tara Hunt described it for the first time on stage. I was there. Quite an interesting concept.

If that was the "initial core idea" it was never implemented. It was narcissism from day one.

Almost certainly Klout is shutting down at this moment because of GDPR, which means they probably have been selling user data for a long time and/or stored PII insecurely and accumulated too much tech debt over the years to be able to do anything about it.

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.

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

lol. Are you trying to imply you were the life of the party? And Klout's business model was clearly pilfer everyone's data from other sites that were "linked."

Not trying to imply that at all, I'm just one person! And not even a real party animal.

I believe the timing was purely coincidence.

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

I guess it turned out the desire to win Internet Points is strongly tied to specific communities.

I 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.

> social listening

What?

it's like bullshit, but smells worse

"Big data" analytics pointed specifically at social media data. Netbase and Crimson Hexagon are two good examples of incumbents in the space.

Quite 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.

Absolutely. Don't know anyone who had anything good to say about klout, don't know any value klout provided.

The sheer idea of it was offensive.

I'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.

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.

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

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.

Is 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.

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?

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.

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.

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

I didn't write the GDPR. The people of the EU democratically elected a government that did. They made that government arbiter over what's good for them.

However, am I not permitted to agree with them?

If Unroll was willing to explain their business model to users and let the users make an informed decision, then yes, the users could decide for themselves. Unroll decided that not enough people would willingly sign up knowing the consequences and that it wasn't worth it.

Unroll.Me decided that if it explicitly told people what it was doing, it would be out of business anyway. I think that shows that people in the EU did decide for themselves once the information asymmetry was resolved, and decided no.

Worse than that. Unroll would just send those emails to the spam folder utterly ruining email reputation for otherwise legitimate marketing campaigns. Not sure if it's different now, but I had a loooot of cleaning up after that service started becoming "mainstream."

Uh, that sounds awesome. Harming marketing is basically always good.

Uh .. no it isn't. These were campaigns the users explicitly opted into (with a checkbox during signup, unchecked by default) and a very very visible unsubscribe link at the bottom of _each_ email.

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.

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

Hopefully Hackerrank and its ilk will follow.

Just like happened to Experian, Cambridge Analytica, etc

You mean like google and facebook?

Experian would strongly disagree with that... not that support this, but business of ranking people is high up.

And then arcades. And then track and field competitions.

Having numbers about people is not inherently good or bad.

Article: 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.

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.

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.

Part 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.

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.

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.

I wonder how this will affect the founders' reputation.

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...

Punch me in the face without warning. https://xkcd.com/1057/

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

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

Are they releasing any data sets? Or any code?

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

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).

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.

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