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Comment by spaceman_2020 | Hacker News Reader

spaceman_2020·

I had an idea for a funny little startup once: “Adopt an alter ego”

Essentially a marketplace where you can buy and sell prebuilt identities - complete with associated, aged, and populated social media accounts, email accounts, pictures, websites, etc.

I just like the idea of being different people online.

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Sounds like a side project idea: you enter a description of a persona, the bot buys some phone verified social media accounts, as well as gmail/msn/whatever (plenty of market places around) add uses GPT3 to periodically generate posts on said social media accounts, using the persona description.

Then you just need to fill the pipeline with persona ideas, and get nice account packages after a couple months.

Heh, persona as a service. Sounds a bit like the "new identity" thing in Breaking Bad. But online, and an alter ago.

The main roadblock here is the crime. You would need some safeguards to make sure these people aren't real enough to receive any government benefits, or open a bank account.

I disagree. The idea that we should nerf our security tools to prevent them from being used unethically just results in people using nerfed security tools for ethical purposes, while the people doing unethical things go elsewhere for their security tools.

Put another way, if your crypto isn't used by child molesters and terrorists, it's probably not very good crypto.

Crime is a largest potential customer ofc.

I love the idea that social media accounts, like wine, are more valuable if they're sufficiently aged.

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