> Certain individuals in the US want this, [...], yet you see one as a human rights abuse

Because the "want" is coupled with the involuntary conscription of those who don't want it. That's not just an academic difference. That some in China "want" it is almost irrelevant since China's government is implementing it anyway.

>you're not going to use the freelance carpenter that doesn't have at least a few of those things right? In fact, basically (or completely) no one will.

But like I tried to emphasize earlier, this does _not_ actually happen in reality. People still get hired all the time _without_ those customer histories. It truly is optional.

>livelihood depends on having a few testimonials or endorsements. [...] , but you still have to have them and that's the point.

And my point is that you do not have to have them. Otherwise, you'd have an infinite regress contradiction of nobody being hired because every carpenter at some point had zero customer history of testimonials. Carpenters eventually grow old and die which would leave us with new carpenters with no customer history. Nobody hires them, and therefore, nothing gets built. Obviously, if that apocalypse hasn't happened, it means real customers do in fact constantly hire carpenters without any testimonials. (Heck, most carpenters probably don't even have websites.)

In other words, the subset of carpenters that went the extra mile to place testimonials on their webpage did not drive other carpenters out of work.

Likewise, people might hypothesize that influential contractor websites like AngiesList would make contractors _not_ on that platform unable to get jobs. But their prediction would be wrong because that didn't happen. Lots of contractors ignore that platform even though AngiesList has had 22 years of existence and market penetration.

Same optionality will happen with freelancer ratings.

The China system frightens me. The freelancer ratings do not.

If anything, the more likely scenario is that the decentralized freelancer ratings will be ignored because too many bad actors will figure out how to create fake ratings from fake customers. Having a decentralized rating might be even be a negative signal: Customers would think that "only the scammers" would bother to prominently display their decentralized freelancer rating. This is similar to BBB Better Business Bureau "A" rating prominently displayed by many dubious and unethical companies. The BBB "seal of approval" becomes a joke.

The China social credit scoring is harder to ignore because it's centrally controlled and administered and everybody is involuntarily included instead of a voluntary subset like gig contractors. This makes a profound difference.

>No because testimonials aren't held across all time,

Does that mean you would be against contractors placing positive customer testimonials into an immutable blockchain?

>My problem with both rating systems is twofold. (1) the idea that it erases a right to be forgotten

I don't know all the details but presumably, the decentralized ratings would be an opt-in system. If a contractor wants to be "forgotten", just ignore it and don't create a profile on it. Same as if he ignores other decentralized systems such as Diaspora.

>and (2) that people will be coerced into the system.

I see no evidence that this will happen for contractors. History has shown that some contractors do "extra credit" to make them stand above the crowd and yet the majority of their peers will still not be (socially) pressured to emulate them. I also see no evidence that buyers of freelance work (such as homeowners en masse) converge to an ultimatum of only hiring contractors that emulate the contractors that advertise their customer histories.