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Comment by justinpombrio | Hacker News Reader

Apparently China plans to role out that kind of rating system by 2020, dubbed a "social credit score":

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-34592186

It's scary how relevant some of Black Mirror's themes actually are. This one in particular is so close, I wonder whether the show's creators used it as a template.

Edit: Apparently not, as this information is only publicly available since this September. Zeitgeist at work?

I've known about sesame since last year at least - it's getting more attention now but it was definitely public knowledge when this series would have been at the writing stage.

It's an idea from sci-fi - I can't remember who wrote what, but there was a society where citizens got more or fewer votes depending on their behaviour (edit: Alastair Reynolds? Banks? Feels like it was one of them.), and knew each other's scores, and Tom Disch's 334 is explicitly about scoring people, and one segment is dedicated to "Baz" desperately trying to get his score up by producing a piece of state-loving prose, before narrowly failing and being consigned to life as a faceless "g[ue|o]rilla" soldier - although in that the state scored you, not other people.

Don't forget Community!

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3278596/

and It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3765158/

Was the currency called whoopy?

[update]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whuffie

I was thinking later, Cory Doctorow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_King...

"Down and out.." or, "Why is sucks to be an asshole in a reputation-based economy".

+1 upvote, would cautionary tale again.

PS - If you haven't read Rapture of the Nerds, check it out. It's a Doctorow character (downer of a dude) in a Stross world (craaazy tech).

Funny coincidence, I'm reading The Prefect by Alastair Reynolds right now (literally). It has exactly what you say. People whose votes are vindicated get their votes weighted accordingly. They end up lobbied to but can't outright still their votes or their weights would go down.

Yup, that's what I was thinking of!

Daemon by Daniel Suarez contains the idea that people have reputation. Everyone can rate everyone and know everyone's reputation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemon_(novel_series)

Note: The sequel goes into way more detail on how the proposed system would work; the first book is really how it (frequently violently) takes over.

Charlie Brooker, the author of Black Mirror has had quite a few prescient moments: A previous series had the UK Prime Minister having sex with a pig, a year later it turned out that David Cameron had done something obscene to a pig as part of a college initiation ceremony.

Brooker claimed he was spooked by this coincidence.

And, wonderfully, hashtags from Black Mirror actually started to trend on Twitter as the news broke.

There's also North Korea's "Songbun" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songbun although it seems more coarse-grained than a numeric score.

Unless it's changed significantly recently, this "credit score" is only being used by Alibaba, and is more akin to a regular old karma system like that used on HN or reddit.

The article claims that Alibaba's solution is one of 8 private pilot schemes, and claims there are government planning documents for a much more comprehensive system.

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