Twitter is, after all, a soapbox, so naturally, nonsense and egotism are bound to spill out. Some conflate the chatter—tweets, retweets, mentions, followers—with influence. Others see it as measuring sticks for asshattery. Tom Scott is a member of the latter group.
Repulsed by Klout—“the horrible social-game that assigns you a score based on how ‘influential’ you are online,” as Scott describes it—he’s created its perfect counter: Klouchebag. The new site takes into account anger, retweet abuse, social apps, and English misuse to generate a douchebag score for public Twitter users. For instance, because they’re self-promoting serial retweeters who can’t spell, Charlie Sheen and Katy Perry register scores in the low 50s—“a bit of a douchebag” on the KB scale.
The algorithm isn’t perfect, though. Take writer Bret Easton Ellis. His tweets, of course, have few spelling and grammar errors, but very precise punctuation (no random exclamation points). So, he registers a 5 (“a nice person”). Lest you forget, he wrote American Psycho.
Take Klouchebag for a go here.
