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Comment by packetslave | Hacker News Reader

An anecdote: a good friend of mine just found out she's pregnant with her first child. She's a huge Harry Potter fan, and her favorite characters are the Weasley Twins.

For not-all-that-much money, I was able to get James and Oliver Phelps (the actors who played the twins in all 8 movies) to each record a separate video message (about 1 minute each) wishing her congratulations by name and wishing her and her baby well.

I made the two Cameo requests on a Friday night, and had both videos by Sunday morning. Both were warm, friendly, and seemed to be genuine and happy for her (obviously to the extent that they know her: "name is X, first-time mom, huge fan".

She was absolutely over-the-moon happy about receiving them.

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This and other responses show where this service shines: as a gift to others. It's only sad if there's deception for money.

I think the key thing is knowing the "deep cuts" of your friend's fandom. You can get a lot of minor actors (one of whom is surely a recurring character on your partner's favorite under-appreciated TV show) for cheap.

But is it not deception (to ourselves) to believe that these celebrities somehow acknowledge and maybe even like us, when they required money to do so? (Never mind the concept of someone becoming more special than others by being good at pretending to be not themselves.) I realize I sound grumpy to many people but the whole thing seems like such a sham.

It’s not a sham to me. a celebrity says your name and wishes you a happy day, and someone paid them to do so. It’s fun - That’s all that’s to it.

The thing is, without some sort of barrier, they would be completely swamped by the public trying to get them to record these, and then would be practically forced to stop doing it.

They will be forced to stop when it becomes more popular anyways, unless some sort of lottery systems gets introduced or fees get bumped up into a $1000 range. But even then I think most will pull out of it after a while, especially if it gets popular, hard to imagine it is an exciting activity to do hundreds of such video messages every day.

They could add a "lottery" element to it. A less evil implementation of that would be to ask the performer what size stack they want and just keep a list of the latest n requests (or requests up to m days old). Automate a reply "sorry you weren't able to get a message from $celeb, blah". You'd need heavy filtering to avoid abuse (automated re-requests).

You must not like places where the wait staff show off their bodies and flirt for tips. That's basically the same thing but cheaper and more sexual.

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