I have a Klout number of 17. That's pretty low, and it may well be that everyone gets that number simply by signing up. Somewhere along the line, maybe a year and a half ago, I think I reached into the high 30s or low 40s, but it was downhill from there. Actually, after signing up, which I did only in order to see what it was all about, I did nothing purposeful in order to increase my standing. It wasn't that I didn't see the point, but rather that I disliked the entire idea.

Although I disliked it, I could still understand why someone thought that they were on to something. No matter that an unexplained algorithm is determining how significant you are (or aren't) to the rest of the online world, it seems that when offered the opportunity to increase their score many people wanted to do just that. And of course it helped that Klout made deals with actual material companies that offered perks to Klout users with high scores. The fact that you were influential in the online world meant that you'd get worthwhile freebies in the physical world. That can be hard to resist.

Perhaps the best article about Klout is an early one, from April of 2012, by Seth Stevenson in Wired - "What Your Klout Score Really Means". Stevenson doesn't deny the pull of the perks, but he also focuses on the ways in which a desire to up one's score causes users to focus on whatever is popular, ultimately creating a very dull playing field. Klout held no interest for me personally, and probably wrongly assuming that others would respond like me, I couldn't foresee much of a future for it. I've been wrong before. It seems that although at some stage of the game Klout fell on to hard times, about a year and a half ago it made somewhat of a comeback ... though it was again quiet since then, until last month when, perhaps in an effort to raise its own score, its owners made public how it calculates users' scores.

I really don't know if anyone still takes Klout seriously. Their algorithm for determining our online influence has changed over the years, but I still think that Reuven Cohen's explanation in Forbes from 2012 of how, and perhaps why, it works is still pretty accurate:

Essentially Klout considers your net worth to be the sum of how often you tweet, get retweeted and how many people follow you. They then apply this to various marketing initiatives. If I have Klout, I get preferred access and free stuff that other less influential folks won’t get. A whole new class structure based solely on your ability to tweet. Yes, a social media currency combined with a social class structure.