Klouchebag Is Here To Mock Klout And The Sad People Who Care About It

By now everyone knows that Klout is terrible. In fact, the only thing worse than Klout are the people who actually care about their Klout score. Thusfar in my life I’ve been fortunate enough to only have met one person who actually said the words, “What’s your Klout score?” in my presence and I literally laughed in his face — while also hoping that his car would tumble down a cliff later that night.

What makes Klout so horrendous — in addition to just being disgusting in theory and appealing to the saddest people in the world — is that its horsesh*t “algorithm” for “measuring influence” rewards people who tweet a lot. This is the dumbest f*cking thing this side of a Gallagher show. It just encourages people to be obnoxious Twitter users.

Who the hell wants to follow some prick who tweets nonsense every five seconds? Those are people you unfollow! They are the opposite of influencers. They’re…defluencers(?). No one should ever tweet unless they have something funny or interesting to say/share. Otherwise shutup and don’t clog your followers’ feeds up. In short, Klout basically encourages the worst people using social media to be even worse.

Take, for instance, this guy — Calvin Lee — mentioned in the journalistic blowjob Wired recently gave Klout. He exemplifies everything that is wrong with Klout and the people who care about it.

Calvin Lee is a graphic designer in Los Angeles with a Klout score of 74. He has received 63 Klout perks, scoring freebies like a Windows phone, an invitation to a VH1 awards show, and a promotional hoodie for the movie Contraband. To keep his score up, Lee tweets up to 45 times a day—an average of one every 32 minutes. “People like food porn,” he notes, “so I try to post a lot of pictures of things I eat.”

Lee once took a vacation during which he had no access to the Internet. This made him uncomfortable. “I was worried that brands couldn’t get in touch with me. It’s easy for them to forget about you. And I knew my Klout score would go down if I stopped tweeting for too long.” When he was loaned an Audi A8 for a few days as a Klout perk, Lee knew exactly where he wanted to drive it. He road-tripped from LA up to San Francisco, eventually arriving at the Klout offices and shaking hands with Joe Fernandez. Naturally he tweeted and hashtagged the entire journey.

I hope Calvin Lee — who follows 80,000 people on Twitter (following an impossible number of people for a human to actually follow is another way to raise your Klout score, naturally) — gets eaten by a grizzly bear. No, seriously, I really do.

But since the odds of that happening are sadly slim, I can at least take solace in knowing that Klouchbag is here to mock people like Calvin Lee, aka @mayhemstudios, and, of course, Klout itself.

Reports Mashable:

While Klout measures influence on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and Foursquare to assign its users scores from 0 to 100, Klouchebag calculates “how much of an asshat you are on Twitter.”

Klouchebag obviously mashes together two familiar words — Klout and douchebag.

Besides the guy who created Klouchebag — who says he did so in response to the Wired article I cited above, the only person with a perfect Klouchebag score of 100 is Piers Morgan.

Perfect.