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Scifi short story where everyone's lives are recorded, and based on this everyone is ranked at every different skill there could conceivably be



I read this story in the last 10 years. It is a scifi short story, probably published in Giganotosaurus or some other sci fi short story collective. Definitely published online.



The story is kind of like "The Entire History of You" from Black Mirror, where people's whole lives are recorded by small devices. Except the conceit in this story is that everyone's "talent" at different things (think... everything from juggling to cooking) is ranked, and social value and popularity is derived from this.


So this leads to a bunch of people trying to find the obscure thing that they can climb the rankings in (I seem to remember the protagonist was at one point in the top 500 Male jugglers under 30 or something like that). Then one day, he has sex, and is suddenly the number 1 Male Lover in the world. I think this happens, at least.


Later on, he finds a community who has given up the devices, and finds joy in doing things even though they aren't the best at them. I remember the girl being impressed by his juggling (?) "even though he isn't even in the Top 100", and the love interest's lack of world-weariness enlivens the protagonist.


Thank you to anyone who ended up reading this!



Answer



Camera Obscured by Ferrett Steinmetz. I read it in Asimov's Science Fiction magazine, which from the ISFDB entry would appear to the the only place it has been published.


The story starts:



It had been a week since Victor “Yo-Yo” Pino had been stung by a hundred and seventy-four bees. And after a brief hospital stay at the 8,546th best emergency care center in the world, Victor's mother made him go back to his classes at Wilkinson High, the 4,378th best high school in America.




Your recollection is lightly off. Victor wants to be the worlds best lover (hetero male) and figures out the secret to this is just to be a nice guy. The current top lover is a chap called Angata Mahamoud:



It didn't matter. On the third afternoon, as Victor lay dejectedly in his bed, kismet struck in the form of a television show—specifically, a documentary on the the ex-girlfriends of Angata Mahamoud, the World's Best Lover (Hetero Male).
...
Truth was, Victor realized, Angata wasn't that great a lover. He was simply a nice man who'd had the good fortune to sleep with four women who had no other experiences to compare with. Angata had stumbled into an isolated bubble of four people, none of whom had even kissed anyone else in the world—so the Worldwork algorithms couldn't contrast and compare their results with those of previous lovers to fine-tune the thousands of other factors that made people over-and under-estimate someone's skills in bed.



So Victor sets out to find six girls he can sleep with who haven't had previous lovers. This search leads him to Rosalie, the girl he tries to impress with his juggling:



He thought about listing all the things he couldn't do, but that would have taken too much time. “I can juggle,” he volunteered.

“Get outta town,” she said, punching him in the arm. “You're like a piñata, Vic. I keep poking you and weird shit falls out. Juggle for me.”

His stomach clenched; he hadn't juggled since his final ranking (3,212,091st). “I'm not good at it.”




Spoiler: it doesn't work out.


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