The plus side is that Klout is so bad at measuring anything approximating influence that it's more of a scam than a real problem in the sense that this post fears (at least currently). It's a really lazily computed metric that's not validated against anything at all. Given an hour, HN users could probably come up with a dozen still-imperfect but less stupid metrics, and maybe some sort of start at a validation approach. But in the world of clueless social-media-marketing execs, they're able to sell it to people who are even more clueless than themselves. I hope that continues for now at least. =]