Social media has a fraught relationship with neurosis. Obsessive people are essential to sites like Facebook and Twitter. They add energy and buzz. Their identities get tied up with their avatars, and that in itself makes the sites seem important. They provide much of the content. A study published last fall reported that twenty thousand users on Twitter provide half of what’s read there. But obsessives are dangerous, too. They can make the site seem creepy. Do I really want to check Twitter, Facebook, or Google Plus if all I see are the same thoughts, infinitely recycling, through the same minds? Is it fun to read anything from someone who seems to spend more time tweeting than living?
Social media also has a fraught relationship with competition. If you’re designing a social network, you want people to feel as though effort boosts status. That will lead to more effort. But competition can also be inimical to friendship. It’s hard to make everyone feel like a winner. And no one wants to use something that makes him or her feel like a loser.
Each site deals with these problems differently. Twitter does everything it can to make users obsess about follower count: every time you click on someone’s name, you see how many people follow them, and, for better or worse, you develop some notion of their worth. You know that they click on your name too. Google Plus shows its heart—or perhaps its lack of a brain—by concealing the number somewhat. LinkedIn’s solution is kind. It prominently displays the number of connections you have, until you reach five hundred. Then it just says you have more than that. New users get to experience the thrill and buzz of watching the number climb; but they rarely feel like the lonely kids in the high-school cafeteria.
The newest social media tool to grapple with this is Klout, a service for measuring your influence on all of these social networks. The company was launched two and a half years ago, and it has recently passed several important milestones. Wired just published a long feature on it; yesterday it released an iPhone app; and recently, for the first time, I read a letter from a job candidate that mentioned his Klout score.
Klout grades users on a scale of one to a hundred based on some proprietary algorithm that counts how often your comments are retweeted, liked, or shared. If you want your score to go up, tweet more and get influential people to retweet you. Don’t ever go on vacation. If you’re on a social network, Klout gets your score, whether you’ve ever logged into the service or not. Think of a mercenary socialite, holding a calculator and trying to figure out who to invite to a party based on import. Then put whatever number she arrives at on every guest’s lapel. That’s Klout. Rick Ross has a score of eighty-five; Rick Santorum has a score of eighty-two; Rick Perry has a score of sixty-six. Rick Astley has a score of forty-seven.
The idea is very clever, and very timely. There are all kinds of ad-hoc ways to figure out how influential people are on social networks. You can count their Twitter followers. You can figure out the ratio of followers to the number of people they follow. Or you can divide their followers by their number of Tweets. Klout takes those indicators, adds a few more, and then just gives you a number. Klout doesn’t equal real-world clout, but, as the ratio of Ricks demonstrates, the numbers are pretty good.
The numbers are also obviously important to employers, marketers, and socialites. Seth Stevenson, the author of the Wired piece, reported that the Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas has surreptitiously upgraded the rooms of people with high Klout scores, presumably in the hopes of tweets about their happiness. A company called Wahooly gives people with Klout scores equity positions in startups in return for attention. Klout scores will no doubt appear in many future job applications.
But clever ideas are not necessarily good ones, and Klout is designed in a way that makes it likely to fuel both unhealthy obsession and unhappy competition. When you log into Klout, it makes it easy to see, in order of score, exactly how all your friends rank. The number is more personal than those used by other social networks, and Klout displays it prominently. The iPhone app shows your Klout score in a blaring red circle —just like the number of unread e-mails and unheard voicemails. “Look at me!” it’s yelling. And sometimes, when you do look, it tells you that you’ve become less important, less interesting, less retweeted, or less whatever. Do you really want something in your pocket that will tell you what you’re worth?
The structure of social networks subtly changes the way we act. And Klout seems to encourage nothing good. To make your score go up, you have to tweet out of obligation, and you have to try to influence the other influencers. This fall, when Klout changed its algorithm, causing some people’s scores to drop suddenly, the C.E.O. of the company was subjected to harassment. “I got everything short of death threats,” he told Fox News. When you set your profile in Klout, you can pick “I am an individual influencer” or “I am a brand influencer.” I don’t really know what either means, but they both sound creepy. After I check Klout, I want to shower.
My hope is that Klout changes. The company could redesign itself in a way that wouldn’t encourage either neurosis or competition. The app should hide your score. There should be no ordered ranking of your friends or the people you follow. You should have the option to keep your score private. People who did so would have to forgo upgrades at the Palms, or Wahooly equity; but there are worse problems to have. If Klout isn’t going to change, however, I hope it just goes away.
Illustration by Kate Prior.
