This morning, twitter once again suggested I follow a person who I dislike. While I haven’t seen any direct evidence that this individual is abusive and violates boundaries, I’ve seen plenty of secondary evidence, including accounts from individuals. It bothers me that because this individual has friends in common with me on twitter, or has some sort of social media profile similar to my own, twitter thinks I should connect with them.

Then I started pondering something that was said the other day on a podcast, regarding Klout Score. IIRC, it was the Giant Beastcast, talking about hotel room upgrades based on Klout score, after a conversation about Uber drivers and their ratings systems. I sent them a tweet, suggesting that they read Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, by Cory Doctorow.  I know I’ve mentioned in my past writings about this book, and about the Whuffie system, a social currency that we seem to be drifting ever closer to. I wondered if there was a social media pattern to abusers that could be detected.

In the past I’ve stated that looking at someone’s fetlife friend’s list can provide you with some potential insight into their social position, intentions and perhaps even their character. I’ve stated that I tend to distrust people who have friends that fall entirely into one category, especially if the cruder among us would describe that category as “prey”. If I were better at extracting and processing data, or programming, I’d attempt to see if there was a pattern recognition system that could be developed, to provide some sort of background alarm for this sort of thing. Sadly, the only person I know who was working on this sort of thing has a tendency to alienating people and making their work unpalatable to others.  (LS – DAUR)

In other news, I have started playing Ingress again. The weather is nice, so I’ll be other there walking about more.