The best satire is the one where you can’t immediately tell. This nailed that.

Even the logo is spot on. This is dark satire indeed, predicting the near future where someone out there actually will offer such a service, and millions will buy into it. This would be a perfect fit in the world of Black Mirror.

As both a speculative fiction author and an entrepreneur, new ideas sometimes have me on the fence for whether I should make them into businesses, or into dystopian novellas.

Anywhere we can read your work?

Probably YC Round 2019.

Happens rarely, but I laughed out loud at a HN comment :)

Also the title.

Made my day

this would be hard to scale as you would probably need to generate new images for each client, but if you could auto-generate imagery per client that would help (still the subscription needs to be priced higher)

The "influencer" would just have to take a lot of pictures for each event. Maybe the same from different angles...

Could easily generate hundreds of photos from one "session".

One issue at a time

Or China if they could improve your 'social credit' rating. I am a little disappointed though. From the title I thought the service would be for faking profiles in order to trick the data vacuuming companies. Filling their databases with fake useless garbage has been my desire for awhile.

FWIW services kinda like this already exist — there are marketplaces for "social influencers" to buy content.

Would be great to have a link in this thread for comparison?

Thanks - we're very happy with the reaction and all this amazing discussion - it's exactly what we wanted!

The bottom of the FAQ did me in, but that's a perfect place: the people who are about to bounce anyway.

It even looks like the 'e' is winking. I really like this logo.

I cottoned on that it was (probably) fake, but I can imagine someone doing this for real.

The movie Idiocracy is an example.

movie? thought it’s a documentary

yup, time-shifted documentary.

but the value of t in the film is erroneous, and the actual value is unknown.

LOL, yep. I used to refer to it as a movie; but now I call it a documentary.

Awesome idea for a satire site, and this appears to be well intended. However it did bring an interesting thought to mind: somebody could easily create a site like this for the express purpose of building retargeting audiences in a given niche. Post something likely to go viral in tech circles, for example, then throw retargeting pixels from FB, Google, etc on there. Notice that the URL posted to HN had a tracking parameter attached to it (“?HackerNews”). I didn’t bother to look at the code on the site, but I noticed that Adblock Plus blocked 4 elements on the page, so maybe they’re already doing this. Even just with the YouTube-based promo video embedded on the page, you can retarget people that watched the video.

I clicked through to the HN comments, going 'I bet someone will want to make this a business'. Sure enough :D

I think we might all be predictable.

So look. 3 hours after you wrote this (now, that is) you probably forgot your comment (whether a random HN project becomes a business or not). Here's my take for an answer - it doesn't matter :)

It probably touched base for everyone linking such mirrors with mental health points - fair play, I know I'll think about this tomorrow regardless of its far-fetched potential biz-prop. Cheers!

Which target though?

Amazing! But this is already realer than the satire suggests. Amazing article on rental friends in Japan: https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2017/11/paying-fo... And the curiously gender-specific invisible girlfriend: https://invisiblegirlfriend.com/

blink what the hell did I just read? He is pretending to be a father for eight years? And this is ongoing? o_O

That article on rental friends makes me so mad. I'd rather know that my dad wasn't around than be completely lied to like that. Jeez.

> And the curiously gender-specific invisible girlfriend: https://invisiblegirlfriend.com/

There is a male equivalent: https://invisibleboyfriend.com

Once again, Japan delivers on soul-crushing social dynamics.

Sometimes I fear that Japan is merely a reflection of what lies ahead for a whole lot of humanity once the global population/ urbanization density becomes high enough.

There's apparently an Invisible Boyfriend site, too. It's linked at the bottom. I have to suspect it gets less traffic, though.

I shared an office with the founder of Sanctus for a while (James) when he was working on a different startup. Sanctus is a brilliant idea that's doing good work. If it scales well it could make a real difference in a lot of people's lives. Nice guy too.

Cheers Chris :)

Campus north?

Ignite Loft.

Just wait, it's a fake door test and sanctus.io is actually going to pivot to this due to the overwhelming demand /s

Pivot in progress, raising a $10m seed.

Getting that domain probably wasn't dirt cheap either. Kudos for the commitment.

I worry for anyone that didn't immediately realise this is satire.

I wonder how many people would take this at face value though.

"MetaMask believes this domain to have malicious intent and has prevented you from interacting with it.

This is because the site tested positive on the Ethereum Phishing Detector."

Hm, I get this too because I have MetaMask. It uses this library: https://github.com/MetaMask/eth-phishing-detect

Running the detector on 'sanctus.io' gives a fuzzy match against the whitelisted domain 'auctus.org'. That's pretty odd, and clearly is a false positive. I guess it's better safe than sorry, but there should be an error message on that page that says something like "We think this site is pretending to be auctus.org, if you think this is a false positive than click here to continue".

Same here.... Curious