The Douche Bag Index – My Scale
So I found this app… via some list, somewhere, and it’s useful. And obviously, the development team has a sense of humor.
DBI (affectionally called the Douche Bag Index) is a number that rates your followers according to how they use Twitter. DBI ranges from 0 to 100 and higher numbers represent people who are more likely to be annoying twitter users. Every follower’s DBI is relative to all TweetSum users so the number is constantly becoming more accurate as more people log in and manage their followers.
Applying my own judgment to the dbi, I scroll down the info screen until is see something like, “this tweep is very unlikely to reply to your tweets.”
Right.
I get that Twitter is a marketing tool. And one cannot possibly respond to every tweet. I skim them and only reply to a few. There isn’t enough time in the day to do more. (Which is really a bummer sometimes.) But if a person has a fairly high dbi, say over 50, that doesn’t necessarily deter me from following them if they might actually communicate with me.
My point is that I rate the dbi, myself, based on whether or not there seems to be an actual human on the other end of the tweet. I’m good with people spreading the word about whatever it is their into if they aren’t spamming me to death. I’m not offended by links back to blog. I might even become a fan. But if I get the same link four times a day and know jack about the writer then I’m going to lose interest in a hurry. In my mind, if you might be automated; that’s what makes you a douche.
I see that I am rated a 19 on the dbi, which is pretty amusing to me. I thought I would be annoying a lot more people. But apparently, writing provides me significantly less opportunities to stick my foot in my mouth than speaking to real live humans. Either that, or I just have conspiracy theories in my head am not nearly as foot-in-mouth as I imagine. Either way, a 19 out of 100 means that if I wanted to be a master douche I would have failed miserably.
Hmph.
btw, douche in French means to shower. It is a completely mundane word. I wonder how it made it’s way into the English language in such an unsavory manner.
[douche bag]
Searching douche bag and dumbass on Flickr did not provide people stupid looking enough for this post. I found these folks filed under redneck.
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