Socially Scored Society

Rate, review and remove from society.

A setting used to tell social science fiction, this is a reputation-based society where your actions and social interactions are ranked or given a numerical score, often by the people around you.

In theory, it's Good Behavior Points: the best people have the highest rankings, while the worst people have the lowest rankings; as a result, this often comes with a Fantastic Caste System where the highly-ranked people are given privileges unavailable to lower-ranked people. In practice, this system will be portrayed as easily manipulated and prone to mob mentality and the whims and snap judgements of other people. In this society, people are kept at bay by the threat of public dislike, as it ruins not just your day but your entire reputation and likely material life. These far-reaching negative opinions don't even have to be for good reasons, either: the people behind the ranking system can give you a "bad rating" just because they don't like the shirt you're wearing.

Meanwhile, the system usually just rewards those who are socially adept, whether or not they are actually good people or deserving of better treatment: anybody trying to social climb in this type of society will focus on becoming more conventional and appealing, while nonconformism is penalized.

This system can extend into other parts of life as well: some Post-Scarcity Economy societies rely on reputation rather than money, and in particularly cruel examples, the legal system takes Convicted by Public Opinion literally. The most comprehensive of these rating systems would naturally require a lot of observing its subjects, which could involve Sinister Surveillance.

Though one's reputation influencing social status is hardly a new idea, the idea of "gamifying" social interaction and making it a tenet of society took off after the internet (and social media in particular) made it easier to voice opinions about everything from people to businesses. Post-social media examples intending to show Social Media Is Bad incorporate Techno Dystopia and frequently incorporate the "review"/"star rating" feature on sites like Uber and TripAdvisor, where making good on a Bad Review Threat is as easy as the push of the button.

Stories that utilize a Socially Scored Society will often come with lessons about mob mentality, the fakery needed to become palatable to everyone, a person's worth in relation to public perception, and the negative impact of snap judgements.

Compare Alliance Meter, Karma Meter, and Relationship Values for game mechanics that simulate similar principles. See also Sexiness Score.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• In Great Teacher Onizuka, as part of her plan to "improve" Kissho Academy by removing the undesirable elements among teachers and pupils, Misuzu Daimon sets up a point system under which actions she deems beneficial will be rewarded while other will cause point loss, with a floor under which the student is expelled or the teacher is dismissed.
• To Your Eternity: In the "Future" arc, everyone is implanted with a chip at birth that extends their life and allows them to do things like shapeshift or instantly order and receive goods. Starting with a rating of three out of five stars when they turn eight, they can advance their rating by receiving good points from others and gain even more abilities, but it takes a long time to collect the points necessary to go up a star. Bad points will make their star rating go down and they'll lose even the baseline powers and privileges as it drops. Fushi's friends, existing outside this system, have been targeted with the reward of an instant promotion to five stars for their capture.

Films — Live-Action

• The Girl From Monday is set in a future USA where your sexual activity is translated into a "desirability rating" and treated like a credit score. As a result, sex is completely commodified, with people (mostly) only doing it to improve their lives. In fact, doing it simply for pleasure has become a crime.

Literature

• The very premise of Baka and Test: Summon the Beasts is that the higher your score on the entrance exam at the start of the school year, the better the quality of life will be. A-students live in the lap of luxury, which F-students barely even have desks. Summon Battles can be initiated between classes to claim better equipment.
• Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom features a Post-Scarcity Economy where instead of conventional money, people have a "Whuffie" rating that goes up or down based on other people's opinions of them. After the protagonist speaks out against the antagonist's planned renovations of Disney World, his Whuffie drops so low that his scooter gets swiped the moment he turns his back on it and elevator doors don't open for him.
• Eldraeverse: The Empire of the Star has multiple reputation networks, your scores on which can affect the price you pay at vendors, job prospects, and in at least one case if you accumulate a low enough score an organization will pay you to leave the empire. The author doesn't subscribe to all the implications of the trope — see an extended discussion here.
• In Paradyzja by Janusz Zajdel, the citizens of the titular space station get a fractional score. If your score falls too much below one, you're temporarily reassigned to the mines on the planet of Tartar, which Paradyzja is orbiting around. If your score exceeds one, you get an extra portion of food from time to time and other small perks.
• Downplayed in Post-Self: The System has a reputation tracking system for rationing processing resources, with forking and the creation of new simulated worlds in the System incurring the biggest reputation costs. However, most arcs set in the System take place in the System's second century, when it has enough resources that most people fork without even considering the cost.
  • In the 2124 arc of Toledot, Michelle Hadje, a member of the early System's ad-hoc governing council, creates a bit of a scandal by creating ten forks to help her multi-task, developing a few tricks to reduce the reputation cost such as merging back before the System registers the fork. As the stigma is reduced, her clade grows to 100 long-term forks by 2305, some of whom fork and merge dozens of times a day.
  • In Nevi'im, during First Contact with aliens who've uploaded their brains to their own System-equivalent in 2346, a partitioned mini-System is created so their ambassadors can meet with the System's delegation, with its own reputation scoreboard where the delegation members can't afford to fork. It was designed as such both because of limited resources and because the aliens don't practice forking in their own System.
  • In Mitzvot, True Name, the fork Michelle created specifically for politics, suffers both a literal and character assassination attempt from one of her rivals that tanks her reputation and triggers an identity crisis, forcing her to reconcile with her own estranged forks and reinvent herself.
• In Qualityland by Marc-Uwe Kling, citizens are ranked by level between 1 and 100 based on their personal and professional accomplishments, and the higher your level, the more social privileges you enjoy. Though not an official governement project (it's operated by a private company that started out as an online dating platform), it's influential enough that Peter's friends all unfriend him once he becomes a Useless (someone with a single-digit level).
• Wings of Fire: In the Ice Kingdom, an Icewing's place in society is determined by their rank on the wall in the seven circles, which is in turn determined by the Queen and her council assessing their accomplishments. The highest-ranked Icewings are among the aristocracy and royalty in the top of the first circle, while the bottom of the seventh circle is the worst place in Icewing society for any tribe to be in. Because of all the harm the ranking system has caused for Icewing society, Snowfall destroys it when she takes the throne of the Icewing Kingdom.

Live-Action TV

• The Black Mirror episode "Nosedive" is set in a world with Uber-like ratings after individual social interactions. Those with ratings of 4.5 and above are "primes" who get to live in the best neighborhoods. Lacie's 4.2 is respectable enough, but she seeks social advancement and falls from grace as a result. Ratings can change for reasons as petty as someone noticing your low score and judging you for it, and they're curated to the finest detail: for example, Naomi only invites Lacie to be her maid of honor because being friends with a 4.2 would make a prime like her look charitable.
• Parodied in the Community episode "App Development and Condiments", in which an app called MeowMeowBeenz lets Greendale students rate each other. The school immediately devolves into a dystopia (complete with 1970s sci-fi outfits) where the tyrannical Fives live lives of luxury and are waited on by Twos and Threes, while Ones are societal outcasts. The main characters move up and down the scale as a class war eventually breaks out.
  Dean Pelton: Fives have lives, fours have chores, threes have fleas, twos have blue, and ones don't get a rhyme because they're garbage.
• The Good Place: Everyone on Earth is observed at all times by the Celestial Bureaucracy, and in theory, every single action is graded according to Good Behavior Points. Once you die, your score is totaled to decide where you go. The best people end up in the Good Place, a saccharine paradise. Most people end up tortured for eternity in the Bad Place. It turns out that the 'algorithm' that scores one's actions hasn't accounted for how interconnected modern-day humanity is, leading to ostensibly good actions harming other people indirectly — the system is so broken that even someone who knows exactly how it works and is trying to game it to get the best score possible still doesn't qualify for the Good Place.
  Michael: During your time on Earth, every one of your actions had a positive or a negative value, depending on how much good or bad that action put into the universe.[...] You know how some people pull into the breakdown lane when there's traffic? And they think to themselves, "Ah, who cares? No one's watching." We were watching. Surprise!
• The Orville: In "Majority Rule", the residents of the planet Sargun have Reddit-esque "Vote Badges" where others can upvote or downvote them based on how they come across. A low enough ranking and you lose certain privileges such as access to establishments. One million downvotes mean you need to go on an 'apology tour' to win back public approval. Refuse and die, fail and you can get lobotomized. This can be easily manipulated, as mob mentality leads to an execution that is only circumvented through fake news.
• Star Trek: Voyager: In "Critical Care", the Doctor has to deal with an alien world where each citizen receives a "T.C." or treatment coefficient from the Allocator, which ruled how useful a person was to society. The higher the T.C., the better healthcare they get.

Tabletop Games

• Eclipse Phase has the "reputation economy". The first edition had five different rep networks for different factions and organizations, including one for criminals and one for the Benevolent Conspiracy most player characters were members of. Players can use these networks to obtain favors or goods without paying credits, based on their rep score. The Post-Scarcity Economy of the Anarchists doesn't even use money, just rep favors.
• In Nova Praxis, the corporate houses replaced money with a reputation system that might as well be. Of course, they set their own House rep scores to 10 (the highest).

Video Games

• The post-apocalyptic United States in Death Stranding uses a public rating system of Likes, both as a worldbuilding element and an asynchronous multiplayer mechanic. Likes have an in-game effect of helping boost the player's abilities.
  • Sam Bridges' primary task is to reconnect settlements to the Chiral Network, which among its features allows users to reward each other with Likes for being helpful or friendly (in Sam's case, usually making a successful delivery), or take them away for causing problems (leaving dead bodies for a base to deal with before they explode, instead of responsibly cremating them himself). Heartman is particularly fond of the system, frequently giving Sam Likes in mid-conversation, including when Sam correctly guesses he wishes he could kill himself and while temporarily dead due to cardiac arrest.
  • Players do not appear directly in each other's games, but their structures and cargo do, as signs of other couriers traversing the wilderness. If someone deployed a ladder in a useful location or recovered a package you had been forced to abandon, you can reward them with Likes, which increases the probability that their work will appear in other players' games as well.
• Lost in Random: The kingdom of Random is split into six factions, with "Sixers" being the highest class of people and "Oneers" being the lowest and the dregs of society. When a child from any faction turns twelve, they roll the Queen's cursed dice, with whatever number they roll determines their new status and where they will live for the rest of their life.
• In Not Tonight, the totalitarian xenophobic British government has instituted a social credit system, which serves as one of the player character's stats. If their score drops too much, they lose access to good jobs and will be deported if it drops to zero, while if their score is high enough at the end of the game, they can convince the courts that the xenophobic party was elected by fraud.
• Shadows of Doubt has a social credit rating. You can improve your social credit rating by solving crimes. The higher your rating, the better odds you have of random citizens agreeing to your requests for personal information (though never by much; even at high levels, most citizens will rebuff you if you ask them for personal information other than their name).

Web Animation

• Extra History: The video "Propaganda Games: Sesame Credit - The True Danger of Gamification" discusses Alibaba's Sesame Credit algorithm, which purportedly analyzed/"gamified" users' online activity and score them. According to the video, users could raise their scores by doing things in accordance with the party line.

Webcomics

• Lovely People is set in a society where the social ranking has just been made transparent, and the protagonists aim to improve their scores because those with high scores are rewarded (for example, a restaurant seen segregates by ranking). It becomes apparent that the social credit system helps push less savory societal conventions since people are reluctant to act against them.

Western Animation

• The Amazing World of Gumball: In "The Stars", Gumball and Darwin start leaving bad reviews on Larry's various jobs. They eventually get a website that rates everyone, but this spirals into all of Elmore being too afraid to do their jobs for fear of a bad rating.
• In the Recess episode "The Ratings Game", the Ashleys start rating the other kids on the playground, which winds up overhauling the social order. TJ, a 5, can't talk to anybody with higher scores, and after he displeases the Ashleys, his rating drops into the negatives and nobody wants to talk to him.

Real Life

• In the People's Republic of China, pilot projects were conducted to develop and refine a "social credit system," similar to a financial score, in several Chinese cities with the goal of improving law enforcement and corporate social responsibility. Plans have been announced to expand the system countrywide. Conspiracy theories abound that "They" (whoever "They" are is, as always, up to the theorist, and ranges from "the Illuminati" to "the political party I dislike") want to implement similar systems world-wide.
• Social Media sites the feature a like/dislike or rating option tend to be prone to this. Reddit is often cited as an example that encourages Hive Mind mentality. The like/dislike for post is supposed to be for rating how on topic the post is, but more frequently it's used as a conventional like/dislike system to punish anyone with a different opinion about what the popular opinion of the Reddit is. "What is your unpopular opinion" is a downright meme by those outside of Reddit, mocking threads like this that pop up where the top comment is usually the popular opinion of the Reddit.

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