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Comment by kylnew | Hacker News Reader

> People are awarded credit points for activities such as undertaking volunteer work and giving blood donations while those who violate traffic laws and charge “under-the-table” fees are punished.

> Other infractions reportedly include smoking in non-smoking zones, buying too many video games and posting fake news online.

This reminds me a lot of that Black Mirror episode where everyone upvotes and downvotes each other in contribution to a social credit system that prevents a girl from traveling and being treated kindly by anyone

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soon China will go straight to Larry Niven's The Jigsaw Man [1] where sentences for crimes include forced donation of all organs. this includes traffic offenses and the like.

On a different tact, the US is just as guilty of this with the over the top of punishment of those convicted of sex crimes where you can be publicly embarrassed by law enforcement after you served your time. Where you can be told where you can live and not live or even go. Considering the power it gives over one group of people it is not hard to see how it will expand to other crimes

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jigsaw_Man

holy smokes false equivalencies!

I had a shock when, the day after seeing that episode, I read a news item about China's proposed social credit system.

That black mirror system is p2p when China's system is centralized. I believe the black mirror system is worse.

The Black Mirror system reminded me more of Uber: drivers doing the utmost to ingratiate themselves to passengers for fear of losing their livelihood through a few bad scores.

I wonder how things would go if the score was private.

Also, what would be the consequences of knowing who upvoted you or downvoted you ? Now that I think about it, neither imgur or hn let you see that. Should we be entitled to that kind of data ?

Just curious - why do you think a centralized system would be superior to a decentralized system? That would allow the norm to be dictated by the central authority, and not through public consensus.

Punishing people based on public consensus is lynching.

Sorry, there is a misunderstanding. It's the other way around. I believe the black mirror system is more efficient to establish social control and is more perverse because everyone is policing it, watching you and reporting you. It's the real nature of big brother (what I remember from the book): everyone is big brother in the end and there's no escape.

Our life would be worse in a black mirror system than in a Chinese system.

Both systems are fucked up though.

are you sure about that? with hive mind mentality both are essentially a single entity working against you.

One of the option is self-regulated, the other is not. That last one conjures up a single entity you can identify yourself against. You can antagonize it, fight it. The first one doesn't give you that anchor.

"Fake News" i.e. anything that mentions Tibet, Tiannamen Square, selling Falung Gong organs for transplantation etc.

That episode is called "Nosedive" (season 3, episode 1).

IIRC that episode was actually based on sesame credit itself when it was first announced.

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