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Comment by AznHisoka | Hacker News Reader

Klout is a perfect example of great marketing trumping great product. Klout scores influencers, but in reality it's not that much superior to tools like Followerwonk, BuzzSumo, or Twtrland. But they came up with a score that ppl could digest, they had a memorable brand, and they created PR with the gamification of these social scores.

I might be wrong, but the real value if any in Klout is that they have a bunch of data aggregating social media profiles for a bunch of influencers, but only some of it is public like Twitter - stuff like Instagram/FB is opt-in (I might be wrong). But all in all, it's not something you can't gather on your own with a year worth of development.

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Klout was the first modern "love-to-hate" startup. It's the proto-RapGenius.

RapGenius is a bad example. Their product (crowdsourced lyric annotation) obsoleted other lyrics sites almost immediately. That they had to play the dirty SEO game is unfortunate, but not surprising, given that they were competing against a field of even dirtier sites.

Klout, on the other hand, offered little more than reputation snake oil, which is why few take them seriously and the investors are lucky to be leaving with the shirts on their back (which is what a low nine-figure sale means). Much like Quora, there was a focused bubble of intense love, with a very long tail of disdain outside. Except Quora has a purpose.

Obsoleted is pretty strong - do you have data to support that?

Have you seen other lyrics sites? They're tripod-level garbage.

Rap Genius:Lyrics Sites::Stack Overflow:Q&A sites

That's not what obsoleted means, and subjective. When all you want is lyrics and the lyrics are the same across all sites the sites themselves are pretty interchangeable.

Depends. When I'm looking up lyrics, I'm looking them up to try to figure out what they mean. Before RapGenius, the only decent crowd-sourced lyric meanings site was SongMeanings. RapGenius, on the other hand, has a much better interface for allowing the community to pick apart songs, without any of the shady stuff (on the site itself, at least).

All great - but not proof that RapGenius has obsoleted traditional lyrics sites like azlyrics.com or metrolyrics.com.

Doesn't matter if they're garbage - the point raised was whether RapGenius has made other lyric sites obsolete. So far, we've heard opinions from people, but I've seen no data to support the theory that these sites are now out of the game.

You're right. Klout as a standalone service was unviable from the beginning. Especially in light of the up-and-coming services like Quora, Thoughtly, Medium, etc., that actually attempt to measure and curate according to the quality of the person talking, Klout is extremely lucky to be making their exit now.

Quora was a bait and switch, much less ethical than Klout. Medium is a self indulgent blogging echo chamber.

Rap genius acted badly, Klout inspires others to act badly. Seems like an entirely different scale.

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