If you’ve been following the “social reputation” space, you’ve probably heard about Klout. The service attaches a score to you based on your online activities. Apparently, this score means something to a small subset of people.
Needless to say, some companies are actually relying on this type of scoring during the hiring process, which I think is absolute bullshit, but that’s a post for another time.
Until then, here’s the truth behind your social reputation score, thanks to a service called Klouchebag. By the name of it, you can tell that it’s clearly poking fun at Klout and those who take it seriously.
With some sort of secret sauce, perhaps more advanced than Klout even, the site will give you a score based on how annoying you are online. Simply pull up the site and enter your twitter name:
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Once you hit submit, the magic will start working as the service looks through all of your tweets to see just how douchey you are. According to its creator Tom Scott, here’s how the scores are calculated:
Klouchebag uses the ARSE rating system. Anger: profanity and rage. Retweets: “please RT”s, no or constant retweeting, and old-style. Social Apps: every useless checkin on foursquare or its horrible brethren. And English Usage: if you use EXCLAMATION MARKS OMG!!! or no capitals at all, this’ll be quite high.
After it went through my tweets, I was given a pretty high Klouchebag score:
The site calls itself the “Standard for Asshatery” and it’s an absolute gas. With design cues from Klout itself, it’s a reminder to not take social reputation scores seriously at all. So it’s safe to say that if you’re offended by this, then it’s likely that you need to get laid.
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