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Comment by jlgaddis | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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

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.

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

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