It doesn’t have to be srs bsns, but it’s not a game
I've been thinking a lot about Klout since my post a few weeks ago, and I realized another reason the so-called metric rubs me the wrong way—it's not just reductive, it implies that you can win at having an online persona.
We've all known people who have to win at conversations. Dilbert has a character named Topper who tries to do just that. And the idea goes back much further than that.
Those people are at best irritating, because conversations aren't set up to win or lose in the way that arguments are.
But that's the Klout model: You have to conform to someone's Platonic ideal of how a social media account should be run, and that is too often an obnoxious plan.
I'll admit that I've always thought of Twitter as a place to find funny people to follow, so I have a philosophical problem with the ranking and quantifying that characterizes Klout, but there's more to my objection. Merlin Mann talks about time and attention a lot, and I've taken that a step further. I think that we need to respect one another's time and attention. And mindless posting to boost a pointless score isn't respectful.