You are not a number

Ever noticed how by being online you are slowly being turned into yet another number? The rise of so-called social media metric services by Klout, Kred and Peer Index has slowly been ruining my experience on Twitter. And not because people using them would tweet button their Kred+ or Klout+ onto Twitter, which is already annoying enough.

I refer to of course to the number game. The age old belief that huge follower number equals that of influence is still popular and while it is true to a certain degree, it is easy to game Twitter and up your numbers artificially. I won't go into details, but one method is through boosting their Kred, Klout and Peer Index number by tweeting endlessly about stuff they obviously have no clue about thus boosting their respective social media metric thingy. Gullible people would then be fooled into thinking that these people are worth following because hei, they have a big score next to their name so they are experts.

This, of course, is bullshit.

So why should I give a shit? Well because some of these people are good Twitter users who has turned evil. They have value I do not want to miss hence why I was following in the first place, but they also dilute their value with nonsense. They would set up some auto tweet some random stuff service so their Klout number would not fall. Stuff like what I am going to tell you next.

I had the misfortune to once read an advice RTed into my timeline. This advice was so ridiculous and stupid in epic proportion you can actually tell that it was crafted by a so called Social Media Guru/Expert/Specialist TM. It went something like this:

"If you want people to RT your tweets then you better start to RT theirs"

I could not remember who it was who retweeted it, nor the person who originally tweeted that but I hope they are reading this: you retweet because you saw a tweet you want to share, not because you want another twitter user to reciprocate. Advice like this ruin my Twitter experience because I do not know if a retweet that just entered my timeline is there because of the user's genuine desire to share, or because they want to game Twitter.

You can follow me on Twitter. But do not worry as I will not be expecting you to RT my miserable tweets to your followers.