Opt Out of Klout Now
shkspr.mobi
shkspr.mobi
1. A system in which I personally have to contact every scammer that had the same idea is not a system I wish to accept and play along with.
2. By going to their site and authenticating, I have proven to them that I am a) an active user and b) there is a chance they may hold some power over me by collecting my data. While they may make a "promise" not to store my data, they can toss the list of opt-out users over the wall to another "entirely different" company which also collects my data and now sees fit to prioritize me. I don't know about this other company, so I can't opt out. See 1.
3. As nochuck13 said: Their Facebook opt-out auth demands access to your friends list.
For #3, access to your public profile AND friend list really is the minimum level of access you can ask from the Facebook API. See https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/login/public-....
I get where you're coming from, but I don't think this is a real danger. Klout had to work hard to gain traction, I don't think any copycats are going to find anywhere near enough success to even show up on your radar. I think most people, even outside the tech bubble, are well aware of Facebook whoring as a phenomenon and Klout's business model is headed towards in inevitable jumping the shark and backlash against social media fetishization. We are quickly approaching the point where Facebook and Twitter are simply utilities and there is a limited appetite to go all meta on this stuff when it isn't novel anymore.
That said, I agree nothing really good can come from opting out that can't be gained from simply ignoring Klout entirely. If the scenario in the OA ever happened where my performance evaluation at work evaluated by Klout score I would take that as a golden opportunity to heavily berate said evaluation system. Of course I'm an engineer not a social media wank, so perhaps a douchey performance review for a douchey job is in order?
This does sound like a bait-and-switch from Klout, but I don't understand the appeal of networking for networking's sake.
But, in seriousness, with those buttons you can see the reach of that post on each social network. It would be fairly trivial for you to verify those numbers are correct and to come to your own conclusions about whether my blog has "influence".
I'm not against badges per se - but I don't like an obfuscated way of calculating something.
Basically, can you expand on: "A vaguely plausible "score" that you can use to justify your "investment" in tweeting all day long."
Thanks
They have a score for you which they can then sell on.
Sme with Kred. You don't sign up - they just assume passive consent.
So if you have a twitter account, they can generate a score for the twitter user using publicly available information and then if you sign up to klout, link these existing calculations to the newly created account.
Facebook: "Klout Opt-Out would like to access your public profile and friend list."
I've never done Facebook OAuth. This isn't really the bare minimum is it?
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/login/public-...
A manager could equally well bring up your number of twitter followers (that's publicly viewable, right?) in a performance review.
Case in point: some recruiters are starting to take Twitter follower counts into consideration. That trend, coupled with all the perverse incentives associated with having a putatively massive Twitter following, have led to the gaming of Twitter, the purchase of zombie followings, the proliferation of bot farms, and so forth.
We'd better believe the same thing will happen with Klout if it ever becomes even mildly important in professional life.
Also checked and saw that they didn't start constructing another page of me using my FB address, so I think I'm Klout-free so far. What makes it hard is that these bartards make profiles without your consent. I honestly wonder if there's anything that legally prevents them from making another ID of me through tumblr of facebook url identifiers.
Regarding the guys website. When did it become a thing to make all content bold? I have been seeing this more and more. It's horrible. Recently The Guardian mobile website started using a bold font and I haven't used it since..
that said: if you have a screenshot of your browser w/ the font showing and what desktop env+browser you're in, I can probably tell you what's wrong.
It's no longer about our skill in our work, but by how well we market ourselves. You can see this when you see people doing jobs they are unqualified for, or just plain bad at.
Social networks, including Twitter double as self marketing tools. Klout exposes this clearly. For some, under the guise of "keeping up with friends" or "keeping abreast of technology", it's a clambering to the top of the ladder of the "self-marketeers"; either socially, or in industry.
I beg people to consider, is that really the pinacle of human existence?
Edit: by the narrow standard of skill, Steve Jobs would qualify for someone who made it early on through hustle and his affiliation with Woz. You can argue that hustle and ambition is a skill...and those who are considered high-influencers might argue that they, too, are ambitious hustlers.
Perhaps I am naïve but I believe that in the past people were more discerning about the true skill of an individual and less clouded by the appeal of the individual.
How do you judge a skilled plumber? Some might judge that person on speed. Others might judge it on cost efficiency in fixing the specified task. And others might judge it on the ability to anticipate other problems in the system and provide reliable estimates and options.
What I might consider the best plumber is different than what...the Plumbers Society would consider it. But a friend whom I trust may have the same standards as I do, and in that case, the hired plumber benefits from knowing my friend. Despite the many, many instances of when this has led to cronyism, is that such a wrong way inherently for business to be conducted?
I will try to bring this back to my original point - One that is not necessarily a good marketeer may be far more suitable for the job, yet good marketeers but unskilled plumbers (to say unsuitable for the skilled job at hand) seem to be "successful" in terms of success and profit in their field.
So when you go into this with the expectation that success/popularity should be directly related to skill, you are going to naturally remember the many examples of when bad people somehow have success. And so you conclude: success is not correlated enough to popularity, or else Person XYZ would not be famous/rich.
But let's say I, on the other hand, think there's a strong correlation between success and skill...and I can think of lots of successful people who also happen to be skillful...but I suffer from the same confirmation bias as you do.
So who's right here? I don't know, but I'm just pointing out that your assertion may not fit the actual facts (if we could ever quantify it).
I have also observed people keeping these roles through the relationships they manage with the people they are accountable to. Relationships in these circumstances are about marketing one individual to another.
I'd be surprised if these observations are limited to my own experience. Somewhere in amongst all the biases of our individual experiences we must determine something to be fact. For if I read and agree with a scientific paper which outlines something I regard as fact, it is still subject to my experience and hence we must ground ourselves on the basis of our collective experiences aligning.
I've now opted out, but I suspect doing so has fattened the profiles of everyone I follow as verifying Twitter id to opt-out meant granting access to who I follow for a brief moment.
Also great use of the word frippery. Never saw that one before.
Apparently some of my friends from the news industry (where I used to work), being minor local celebs/TV personalities... with thousands of follows they interact with daily... friends with proper international celebs... are scoring lower than some of my friends that just rant bullocks.
I wouldn't bother about this service being very indicative of anything in the real world.
I guess I'll just continue to hope they're not building a "shadow profile" on me based on my friends' public tweets (and pretending said profile doesn't exist... I don't appear to have one, anyway).
Scoring, ranking and sorting people is important for the future of the web. It's comparable to Google's pagerank. You need some sort of analyses/score/rank to value the content shared by someone. But with pagerank nobody complaint because the value was directly visible in the Google search results and it was just a website not a person that got a score. Know we're in the social age and it's not site's that are the publishers but people. And Klout is not the only one that's doing this, we are doing it, Google's doing with the G+ authorrank and Facebook probably has it as well in their edge rank.
The thing with Klout is that it's the only one that puts focusing on the person himself and touching your ego which can upset some people.
The applications and possibilities of the data are rarely thought of.
Klout and companies like it (and presumably yours) don't add any value. I can already find people just fine through Twitter or Facebook search. Klout scrapes my data, applies some formula and then tells everyone it means something and tries to convince people I don't know that this number tells them something about me, while trying to convince me that I should do something about that number so that strangers will think better of me.
I already have a job thanks. Klout is not providing a service or adding value. Go away.
I don't see people complain about karme score's here on HN, reputation on stackoverflow and loads of other site's while it's basically the same. A score that help people make sense out of the content these people are producing.
They draw most of their ire because the service is opt-out. Change it to opt-in and only the people who care about Klout will use it and the level of vitriol will go down.
Is your service opt-in?
It's a feedback loop where a few people at the top reap all the rewards for being at the top already (and being "recommended" to everyone else).
I'm not interested in having Robert Scoble or Michael Arrington recommended to me, I already know about them and am not interested in following them.
I'd like to know about much lesser known people who've made very useful technical contributions in their fields (instead of prima donnas). So far, I've found out about these people from mailing lists, github profiles and perhaps hacker news, not ranking algorithms.
The "prima donnas" you're talking about are perhaps known to you but a larger majority not. But if you would look in the longtail you would definitely find interesting people.
I am perfectly well able to do this myself, thanks. Most of the ratings that surround online content are useless noise.
This strikes me as some kind of variant of the ad hominem fallacy. You don't need to know anything about the author to value their content. A piece could be anonymous or the author's sole work and still be worth reading; conversely, people with high internet reputations often write garbage.
Edit: I meant appeal to authority, not ad hominem. Insufficient coffee error.
And of course, you as a person can do this as one of the best. But can humans process a daily 400 million tweets this way?
There is a reason people provide context for what they say by sharing their experience. And just like in real life, taking legal advice from IANAL isn't something you should blindly do.
That doesn't follow. And, funnily enough, HN does deemphasise the author by showing the name in small grey text. There are plenty of reasons to attribute posts: the conventional expectation that one can be identified as the author of one's work, for one; the tendency of people to be more civil, for another.
> You're new to HN, so I'll let you in on something
Come on, I know I've only been here for nearly four years, but there's no need to be quite so patronising.
I wasn't being patronising. I was trying to make a point (though, I'll admit, it wasn't obvious). I admit that attempt was clumsy. Sorry for making you feel like you were being patronized. My intent was 100% honest though.
I was trying to show what could happen if association was removed. If context was removed. If I don't know who you are, how can I quantify your advice. After all, I'm much more inclined to appreciate people's opinions on the state of HN year over year if they've been participating longer than that.
> the conventional expectation that one can be identified as the author of one's work, for one; the tendency of people to be more civil, for another.
And context. Advice is cheap. Everyone can offer advice. And context helps us rate that advice. Just because something sounds good doesn't mean it should be followed, or even listened to.
And it's fairly easy to make a mistake in authoring what you say to the point that people misunderstand you, even if it's not what you meant.
Er, while we're citing logical fallacies...isn't your last assertion here an example of confirmation bias? Often, people with "high internet reputations" are heard most often, which means that when what they say is garbage, it will be quite prominent and memorable.
Scoring, ranking and sorting people is important for the future of the web. It's comparable to Google's pagerank. You need some sort of analyses/score/rank to value the content shared by someone.
Why exactly should I trust a service, any service for that matter to make such judgments for me?
And if you want to argue that it's the same thing as pagerank; well, that analogy is spurious, at best.
Nothing stops you from sharing rumors without creating a big movement around them. Being part of a boycott doesn't make you more important.
That's what angered me about it, anyway. I opted out a looong time ago and encourage everyone else to as well.
Just helping natural selection along.
Second thought - The activity that goes into my Klout score brings in a lot of work (networking!)
These seem contradictory. I guess in some ways, my Klout score is my own personal performance review. ;)
Is there anyway to opt out of Wikipedia? Say, somebody created a profile page for me without asking for my permission. Is there anyway to delete my page?
If you are a "notable person" then you can expect your edits to be reverted, however; on the other hand, if you are not very notable, a page about you would probably not survive very long anyway.
Easiest thing is to email me - tom@tommorris.org - I'm an admin who has handled hundreds, possibly thousands, of deletion debates. My Wikipedia account is here FYI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Tom_Morris
Or you can email info-en-q@wikimedia.org and you'll get an email from someone (possibly me) who is an experienced Wikipedian who'll be able to have a look at the article and sort out any issues therein, put it under protection if there's been vandalism etc. or nominate it for deletion if it doesn't meet the notability requirements.
The 'Contact Wikipedia' link is at the bottom of every page and the email addresses are linked from there - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Contact_us
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_living...
If people really want to avoid having their social media activities catching up with them, then make sure that you give [potential] employers completely different contact details. Ideally, have a separate email address for each social media service and never link them together.