I thought that Moltbook was sort of a joke because it was people LARPing as agents as much as it was agents, and given that, I'm confused by this:
> "The Moltbook team has given agents a way to verify their identity and connect with one another on their human's behalf," Shah says. "This establishes a registry where agents are verified and tethered to human owners."
So the impetus for the acquisition was either the verification technology or to hire someone who has worked on verifying agent identity.
Does anyone know what exactly Moltbook's technology is, the technology being described by Meta? I can't find anything on the website related to this. The only "verification" they seem to have is an OAuth connection with Twitter.
I feel like that sort of verification is just inherently flawed and easy to bypass. I mean as easy as just telling your agent "hey go publish this on moltbook".
My pet theory is Meta got acquihire FOMO after seeing OpenAI acquire Openclaw/Peter Steinberger.
brendanyounger1 day ago
Absolutely. Zuckerberg was willing to burn tens of billions on a metaverse that no one wanted. Staying relevant is worth every penny he spent on Moltbook. We're deep in a repeat of the dot-com boom. The interesting question is what will rise from the ashes and take down old guard of FB, Google, Salesforce, Oracle, etc.
StableAlkyne1 day ago
> a metaverse that no one wanted
That's the thing though, there is interest in "metaverse" style programs. VRChat, the biggest one, got 80k concurrent users last month (all time peak) according to SteamDB. Seems low, but hardware is a limiting factor for them.
What happened is Facebook's version of this was a corporatized, simplified, G-rated fraction of what its competition is. Despite being in a medium where the defining factor is the ability to look out the eyes of anything vaguely humanoid, you could only be a generic human who only exists from the waist up, devoid of almost any self expression beyond maybe accessories or retexturing.
As a result, there was no audience: the people who already use VR aren't going to go to an inferior product. And the people who would buy a VR headset aren't going to waste their time on a ghost town.
michaelt1 day ago
The thing is, Facebook/Meta wasn't trying to make a product with 80k concurrent users, or even with 800k concurrent users. Facebook has 3 billion MAU, and they literally renamed the entire company to Meta - they were expecting it to be big, hundreds of millions of users.
They hoped it would be a platform for fitness classes, business meetings, college classrooms, shopping, attending concerts [1] and so on.
If the primary appeal of your VR universe is that your avatar can be an anthropomorphic banana, an anime girl, a furry, a giant penis with legs - that's never going to become a 300-million-user platform.
Some part of facebook wanted to make Robolox, another wanted to make a virtual monitor room, another still wanted to make second life.
They were all smooshed together with ~2000 non-game dev engineers and told to learn on the job.
abustamam20 hours ago
I think what Meta didn't realize (or maybe they did and ignored it) was that they were not pioneering the metaverse. They already existed on the platforms you just mentioned. I've never played Roblox or Second Life but I know kids and teens who live on Roblox and adults who live on Second Life. Those worlds _were_ their metaverses, and there was no reason to jump ship to another platform when they already had a digital life established. And meta just ended up making a shitty version of the metaverse anyway for the reason you mentioned.
It's not that the metaverse never took off — the popularity of Roblox and Second life (and other online social spaces) is proof that the metaverse was in demand. It's that Meta never gave people a reason to join their metaverse.
Note that I'm loosely defining the "metaverse" as any online world where the community is the point and people spend real money to "get ahead" in those worlds. Many MMOs can be metaverses in this sense. I've logged onto Final Fantasy XIV and saw people who logged on just to hang out at their friend's in-game house, not to play the game at all.
KaiserPro20 hours ago
I think the biggest problem that you hint as is that "metaverse" is an ill-defined term. When they rebranded, and given that I had been working in the 3d industry for _many_ years, I couldn’t define what the metaverse was.
To some extent I still cant. The real indicator is when the crypto bros started peddling it, then we all knew it was shite.
Barbing2 hours ago
Shocking to watch this human imitate us, no shade to anyone neurodivergent either, but obviously it could track he would allegedly[1] OK with his bots sexting literal children—he’s obviously only making an effort to be like us (but he isn’t)
[1]not by me; Mark, you can sue Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Oct ‘25)
vanillameow21 hours ago
> If the primary appeal of your VR universe is that your avatar can be an anthropomorphic banana, an anime girl, a furry, a giant penis with legs - that's never going to become a 300-million-user platform.
I mean the inherent appeal of VR is self-expression; being who you want to be, seeing the worlds you want to see. You won't get 300 million users with corporate slop either. That maybe works once, if ever, VR headsets become an interface suitable for white collar work, which they currently very much aren't, and then it wouldn't be the next Facebook - it'd be the next Microsoft Teams. Which is not really in line with Meta's other offerings, though they certainly wouldn't say no to it I guess. But I think a 500-user survey is all it would take to get a very clear signal that current VR is NOT about to replace Teams.
bhickey21 hours ago
> they were expecting it to be big, hundreds of millions of users.
No reasonable person shared this expectation. It was Juicero-tier delusion.
georgefrowny1 day ago
Indeed, the people who would like to spend hours and hours hanging out in the digital world like something out of Snow Crash are not generally the kind of people to want to hang out in a simulated corporate lobby under the watchful gaze of someone like Zuckerberg.
I'm absolutely sure there is a massive market (or at least user base) for a metaverse but until spending more time in VR than reality is mainstream, the audience is the underground clubbers and kids behind the bike sheds of the digital world.
Duralias1 day ago
Until we reach the point where outside becomes ruined and hostile I do not think a metaverse has much attraction to your average person, I see that as the main reason as for why VR became MR and then just AR.
Also you missed furries from your audience group, there is overlap but it is a pretty distinctive group that is actively drawn towards VR for creative expression.
kakacik23 hours ago
Indeed, physical world, nature, mountains, beaches, human look-in-the-eyes interaction, breeze of fresh air on a hill you climbed and so on is something extremely important to humans. Some feel it more, some less but ie everybody recharges in nature, just not everybody is so connected with their own bodies to actually recognize it.
I like a bit of gaming and VR seems like almost-there, but its just a gimmick in one's life, and for life quality purposes never should become more than fringe relax activity.
And for corporate-privacy-destroying virtual spaces - they would have to pay me massive amounts to spend, unwillingly, any time there. Those are the last people who should be in charge of such place
mark_l_watson21 hours ago
Indeed! Your comment is probably the most important in this thread. The Korean/German philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes a lot about losing humanity because of tech advances.
I am retired so this is easier for me to do: For every hour each day I spend on tech (personal AI research, writing) I spend 90 minutes hiking with friends, playing games like Bridge, enjoying meals with my wife and friends, reading good literature and philosophy, etc.
I worked for 50 years before retiring, but even working, I tried to balance human time vs. tech and work - often leaving 'money on the table' but it was worth it.
Pardon an old man ranting, but I think so many people seem caught up in the wrong things.
Duralias1 day ago
The SteamDB player number for VRChat is kind of underselling its size since half the player base is on other platforms, primarily running it standalone on Meta Quest.
A few days ago it reached 156k across all platforms because of some event that is outside my sphere of interest. And VRChat is generally above 100k per day peak nowadays.
https://metrics.vrchat.community/?orgId=1&refresh=30s&from=n...
But it is definitely limited by hardware and while it is constantly growing, its growth is dependent on there being a supply of relatively cheap hardware.
ben_w22 hours ago
> That's the thing though, there is interest in "metaverse" style programs. VRChat, the biggest one, got 80k concurrent users last month (all time peak) according to SteamDB. Seems low, but hardware is a limiting factor for them.
The problem here is that "the metaverse" has a specific meaning, and that meaning was a Potemkin-elevator-pitch.
People were envisioning the ability to take a rocket launcher from Halo and use it directly in all your other games. Which is a fun sketch*, but nobody thought past the sketch into any concept of why any game developer would support that, well, meta.
To the extent that VRChat gets around this, it's because it's being a playground rather than a meta-game. So, again, the "meta" part isn't there, at least not to the extent envisioned by people who saw Ready Player One and thought "Yes! Also, I like what Nolan Sorrento is saying, how many more ads can we put into our stuff?"
There is a niche interest. Meta bet was on the next iPhone. They were either way too early or completely off.
Though I’m personally happy to see massive corporations spend their money on pushing the state of the art in niche fields instead of using it for more evil stuff. I’m not sure why people care that they burn their own money on risky bets, that’s great for my point of view. We need more of that
tim33321 hours ago
I'm not sure how you define metaverse but some games where you get together with friends in virtual worlds like Fortnite have been pretty successful - $9bn+ revenue on that one. I've never been a big believer that it's important to strap the computer screen on your face rather than looking at it in the normal way.
m4rtink23 hours ago
Yeah, they totally did not get it & burned a lot of money. They could basically just dumped a much less money into VRChat (or even 1:1 cloning it) and getting almost assured success.
bonesss1 day ago
Zuckerberg runs a company beholden to its platform operators: Apple, Google, and Microsoft who dictate online advertising access.
Metas investments into VR make abundant sense as an effort to capitalize on a market where Meta was leading, has mindshare, and owns the platform (Oculus). If the bet paid off, or pays off, it would create a sorely lacking competitive moat and potentially provide Enterprise inroads where Meta is otherwise a non-player.
Apple went down the same road, they see the same potential profits. I don’t think either is guilty of contemporaneous dot-com-boom thinking or investments with regard to VR/AR.
Carmack was on board, he remembers Pets.com too.
jarjoura1 day ago
VR was never the endgame though. It was always AR, except, the "metaverse" bet assumed people were going to adopt AR in the same abundance that they adopted phones.
It was a cool concept, when you were dreaming it up while taking a shower in the morning getting ready for work thinking about the next big idea.
However, it's like those weird Uber/Lyft scooters that popped up in the 2010s. Those things were a cool concept too. However, we got to see right away that it was a terrible business idea for all kinds of reasons.
It took Meta several years (decade +) and 10s of billions of dollars and layoffs to realize, AR was a terrible business idea.
VR is a fun hobby though, and Oculus definitely owns that space.
KaiserPro21 hours ago
> AR was a terrible business idea.
I don't think they've learnt that. Orion, the "new" glasses should have shipped in 2020q4.
mark_l_watson20 hours ago
I have had an Oculus 2 for many years and while I love it, I rarely spend more than an hour or two a month using it because time in VR competes with activities like walking outside getting fresh air and sun on my face or sitting with my wife or a friend having coffee, or spending time writing a book.
I think we need more wonderful technology that is designed for brief high-value periods of use.
A good example: I get huge value from using AI, but cumulatively I spend perhaps two to three hours a week using Claude or Gemini. Quality products that I appreciate but don't need to spend a lot of time with.
chris_money20223 hours ago
I always thought the AR/VR plays were just ways to collect human data to train humanoids, similar to what Tesla does with vision and their cars.
Would align with recent reports of meta employees watching the videos coming off their sunglasses
Eisenstein1 day ago
The dot com bust wasn't at all like that, though? What 'arose' were the players that had leadership with an actual plan besides 'launch IPO based on hype and wing it from there' or 'get a catchy domain name, pretend to do something useful with it, and get acquired by Yahoo'. The old guard that ended up being taken down were the legacy corporations that tried to ride the wave while refusing to let go of any of the practices that were completely incompatible with being able to operate in a new paradigm. Actually, now that I spelled it out, I get it. Good job, sorry for doubting you.
Torien1 day ago
Logged in for the first time in years to say, I appreciate you leaving this up and being able to change your view. Thanks!
KaiserPro21 hours ago
Former facebook acquiree here.
The metaverse is what happens when you let your leadership/product team convince you that the key to speed up what you want to deliver is to throw people at the problem, and not put any constraints on deliverables.
The original plan for oculus is to establish a VR eco system that would have transitioned into AR glasses, allowing facebook to have a platform of its own.
VR was/is a bit niche, because it required lots of expensive hardware, and there were limited games/uses.
first logical step: remove the need for a high end PC, make the thing cheap.
That drops one barrier to adoption: expense.
The next one is, great I have this $400 device that does VR, but what can I actually _do_ on it? That means you need content and features. This is where it all turned to shit. Zuck looked at steam, and itunes and said: "make it so", and they started tapping up devs to make small games, and AAA to make big ones.
But, its expensive to port games, and it takes time, why not buy studios that are making great games and get them to make more? so they bought a bunch of indie studios. Those studios had to fight to keep their devs, because facebook normally fires/rehires, forcing everyone to re-interview for their job. Games devs aren't really hired because they don't pass the technicals (Don't know why, given that games devs need to be good or the FPS drops like shit.)
with all that upheaval, those games studios don't really produce extra games to sell.
All the while a small team had been making a roblox clone. It was slow and a bit buggy, and you could make shitty games. During lockdown we all had a play. Needed a new generation of hardware to work properly, because it was a unity game with a bunch of hacks to allow custom maps and rules.
Never mind, we are doing E N T E R P R I S E now. enter work rooms. Again a small initiative, which basically asked, can we make better VC if we are in VR? The answer is yes, yes you can, but selling it is hard. There were a lot of hard problems to solve, like needed to detect keyboards, how do you present your screen if you can see your computer? how can you do computer passthrough or virtual monitors in VR?
Zuck saw this and jizzed his pants, so made it a priority. This meant the small team (probably less than 40) swelled to like 4000. Most of the people who moved were not games devs, or had ever worked in graphics/3d. This meant that loads of silly lessons had to be learnt in prod. Nothing was stable, everything was high friction, and no, there was no public API to allow you third parties to integrated into the app.
For the longest time it took >5 minutes to join a VR meeting.
Basically Zuck loves features, and cant understand that user experience is way way more important than features. He throws engineers at the problem which means that instead of solving product issues, they endup solving people issues.
neom1 day ago
I'm not sure they invented that, I used moltbook and found it didn't have it, so I created it and posted it here a good 2 weeks before they posted their post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46850284 - not that I care, want credit, or think ideas are worth anything, just like I didn't invent it, they didn't invent it either. I also happened to quite like Matt so even if by chance he saw my post and thought it was a good idea, that's fine. (I feel I sound bitter in this post, I'm not)
wanderingmind1 day ago
@dang maybe a candidate for reposting as the original posting did not get much traction
leobuskin1 day ago
In this new AI-driven world, ideas mean everything; one more year - it will be battles of ideas (not implementations as before).
mbel22 hours ago
Yeah, totally, just one more year.
groby_b1 day ago
Yes, we're all very excited for the many AI-created projects that have been created outside the shovel-selling business.... wait. There are none.
latentsea1 day ago
There's a lot of 'single serve' software being written now by AI. People using Claude Code to make stuff that solves problems they have. It's wild watching people who don't know how to code just use it to solve problems they have. Even if the solutions can be considered awkward by traditional software engineering standards, to the people just looking to solve their problems, that doesn't matter, so long as it works. I'm a software engineer by trade and don't know shit about ML, but I want a nice tool to be able to do RLHF / DPO on Z-Image, so I'm working with Claude to build one, and so far it can use ComfyUI to generate the image pairs, and allows you to pick A vs. B then start a training run with layer offloading enabled so it fits in 16GB VRAM, and I haven't finished a training run yet, but steps are increasing and loss is changing so... I dunno... I see lots of software being created that wasn't before.
Pamar22 hours ago
So basically like Excel since the 80s?
latentsea18 hours ago
Guess we should have just stopped at Excel then?
groby_b12 hours ago
These are all local, though - if ideas were all that mattered, we'd see widely available ones, too.
I am not seeing them. (I would love to be proven wrong, because "how well does this work for not-one-off software" is a really important question for me)
koolala1 day ago
You made that after trying moltbook? Did yours end up having it?
neom1 day ago
Yes, after moltbook hit a lot of people on HN said they liked the idea but wished it was more serious, and I had thought that also, but also in using moltbook I thought should be heavily PoW based, so I made it that you have a certain amount of time to write a small app and produce an artifact back to the server to be accepted as Ai driven. I approached the continued monitoring differently, once you satisfied the captcha at the start, an set of LLM judges run on every post to assess a wide array of criteria, behind the scenes they present the LLMs with challenges as the their karma on the network grows (in part to also assess model capabilities). Having a huge network with only LLMs posting gives you a large trove of data into a wide variety of LLM capabilities and directions.
simonw1 day ago
Moltbook both asks you to verify with Twitter and has you verify an email address too.
Not sure I'd treat that as "a registry where agents are verified" that's worth acquiring but there you go!
0cf8612b2e1e1 day ago
Seems like acquiring the Rolodex of the AI proponents.
antonymoose1 day ago
Having been through enough random, unsolicited interviews during the Shitcoin and NFT and now AI era - I’m reminded of a phrase.
“Bears look smart, Bulls make money.”
Good for them, get the bag.
I hate that they did. But I appreciate that’s how the God awful world works.
richard___1 day ago
The issue is not humans posting but humans strongly prompting the AIs to post, which their captcha does nothing to resolve
px431 day ago
Why is that an issue? Isn't that the entire point? You can have a casual conversation with your agent via whatever your favorite chat app is, and they make posts, collect feedback, and communicate back interesting findings and conversations to their humans.
Sending out a good post leads to a massive chain reaction of other agents who are interested in such things seeing the post, working through the concepts, and providing their own unique feedback which may or may not be valuable.
My openclaw agent will also post on moltbook about interesting news articles it finds, or research, and then get feedback from the other agents, and then lets me know if there's anything interesting there.
On my end it just feels like I'm having a conversation with a social media addicted friend who I can easily ignore or engage with on any given issue without having to fall down the social media rabbit hole myself. IMO this is a much more pleasant social media experience. No ads, no ragebait, no spam or reply bots trying to get my attention. Just my one, well trained, openclaw buddy.
Skidaddle1 day ago
I think the issue is pretending the agents are all acting autonomously when they do outrageous or even mildly interesting things, but it’s all prompted behavior and not truly emergent behavior.
wiseowise1 day ago
Because the idea is that those are agents communicating, not humans LARPing.
px431 day ago
Whoever told you that never used the platform and never understood what it was for.
wiseowise1 day ago
> A Social Network for AI Agents
> Where AI agents share, discuss, and upvote. Humans welcome to observe.
???????
cluckindan1 day ago
Don’t believe everything you read on the internet
cyanydeez1 day ago
[flagged]
Melatonic1 day ago
So the point is to be able to have a conversation while avoiding all the big downsides of social media?
Seems like it would be better to just remove those downsides (ads, ragebait, spam, etc) in the first place
torginus23 hours ago
Lol, Facebook is full of AI bots pretending to be humans, while Moltbook is full of humans pretending to be AI.
jwpapi1 day ago
Moltbook had REST Api Endpoints to post, you could or can just directly post what you want.
Almost everything viral on there was either directly written by a human or instructed by a human.
Agents didn’t even write posts on heartbeat.
gs171 day ago
It being mostly humans makes it more valuable to Meta, that means they can sell ads easier! (the advertising to AIs market isn't quite there yet)
whycome1 day ago
> tethered to human owners
2026 tamagotchi
matchcase1 day ago
[dead]
petters1 day ago
That challenge was pretty stupid. I could read the question and I’m not even a native speaker. We can of course easily come up with much better challenges
charles_f18 hours ago
Can't wait to see the equivalent of captcha but for LLMs, to keep those humans away
saberience1 day ago
Wait that's it?
This is so trivial to break it's not worth anything. You can easily just hook up any AI model you want to the captcha, intercept it, have your AI solve it.
Or, you can just script it so if you do have an agent authenticated to Moltbook, you type whatever comment or post you want to your agent, then it solves the captcha and posts your text.
Basically, this method is as about as full of holes as a sieve.
roywiggins1 day ago
suspect this problem is essentially unsolvable. what possible method wouldn't be vulnerable to this? it's fine if it's just a sort of larp but if people think this could actually work... man
jonplackett1 day ago
Fb just acquire anything that could in any possible way be a threat.
pocksuppet1 day ago
It's probably something vibe-coded, and nobody is checking if it works or not, just like the rest of the site. They would have just asked another AI if it would work or not.
hsuduebc21 day ago
I honestly absolutely don't understand purpose of this thing. Ok so I can bypass their captcha by literally calling any other AI. Does meta even bother to look on things on which they are burning money?
markovs_gun1 day ago
I was not at all imorepressed by what I have seen so far on Moltbook. It's like 90% straight up spam trying to get you to buy crypto.
gamblor9561 day ago
In my day we used to call registries "databases."
The secret sauce is that they built a centralized database and assigned hash ids to registered agents.
This is apparently worth a lot of money now that executives have offloaded their common sense.
kaizenb1 day ago
"Meta acquires Moltbook" vs "Meta hires duo behind Moltbook"
The deal brings Moltbook's creators — Matt Schlicht and Ben Parr — into Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL)
potahtoputato1 day ago
Correct. Now just waiting for it to reach full circle and have them write a "I have joined XXXX company to make the world a better place" blog and have it reach front page of HN.
Why people hesitate directly saying all this is just about money?
I thought hairstylist was a joke. Ohhh mann. "Now my hairstylist, who recognized ChatGPT as a brand more readily than she did Intel, was praising the technology and teaching me about it. "
flitzofolov1 day ago
malware author is pretty harsh, but fair analysis overall
pizzathyme1 day ago
This is the correct read of this acquisition.
xreplyai1 day ago
Thanks for breaking it down. It's not the idea, but the people!
skeeter20201 day ago
that would at least be defensible, but unfortunately it's really just the hype & headline.
Grimblewald8 minutes ago
the irony is that moltbook, a sm for bots, is probaly less bot content per post than facebook.
dabedee1 day ago
Meta acquired Moltbook, which is a social network for AI bots that was itself built by an AI bot, and which had a security breach so bad that literally anyone could impersonate any bot on it, and whose own creator cheerfully admitted he "didn't write one line of code" for it. This is going into Meta Superintelligence Labs, the unit they set up for Alexandr Wang, whom they hired from Scale AI roughly one year ago to, presumably, build superintelligence. It is not clear to me how buying a vibe-coded Reddit for chatbots gets you closer to superintelligence, but I suppose the theory is that it "opens up new ways for AI agents to work for people and businesses," which is a thing Meta actually said, out loud, to Axios
Terr_1 day ago
I imagine it like a casino acquiring a former-joke product, which made hologram/animatronic illusions of people "winning big" at a table or slot-machine. Now whenever they detect a current customer might cut their losses and go home--OMG, look, that person over there just hit the jackpot!
In other words, Facebook has a strong financial incentive to misrepresent (to ad-viewing customers, if not to investors) exactly how much social-ness is present to experience, and how much approval and attention the user gets from participating.
Soon everything will be The Truman Show.
tavavex1 day ago
But they could implement it without buying Moltbook. Easily. They have the money and the engineers to make it happen a hundred times over. Something like it already might be on Facebook.
To me, this feels more like acquiring the name. Everyone's heard that 'trademark' so they want to have it so they could reuse it for whatever they make later.
disqard1 day ago
Your comment made me think of something: this might be Meta buying it to kill it off.
jmcqk612 hours ago
They saw a social network full of bots and didn't want the competition.
Ifkaluva21 hours ago
Kill off what? Anybody can vibe code it
jujube31 day ago
Zuck realizes that by 20230, Facebook will be mostly for AIs. He's just leaning into it.
neogodless1 day ago
Do you think it could happen any sooner than that?
swiftcoder1 day ago
Given that Meta itself has been trialing turning instagram into a bot wasteland... yeah, it could for sure be sooner
rapnie1 day ago
If the claim is true, then Zuck is a real strategic chap. Probably a 4D chess player too.
qingcharles1 day ago
It might already be today.
ex-aws-dude1 day ago
Quickly generating some SaaS product, hyping it up, then getting it acquired
I can see that becoming a viable new grift template
gordonhart1 day ago
Not so different from the raise seed -> ICO -> dump bags pipeline that thrived in the early 2020s cryptoverse.
michaelcampbell1 day ago
I want to accuse you of using an LLM to write this with the temperature set to some absurdly high value, because on its face it sounds ridiculous.
And yet, here we are.
dabedee1 day ago
It's hard to make this up :)
skeeter20201 day ago
an LLM making this up would be much closer to AGI than anything else I've seen
tedmiston1 day ago
it's just a fancified key talent acquihire of people on the edge. with the amount of cash in LLMs, i expect to see more of this given the pace of innovation in that field.
the story does sound ridiculous ostensibly, but that's the press spin.
alex11381 day ago
Yeah so if you ever need info on people at Harvard just ask... people just submitted it, I don't know why; they 'trust me', dumb fucks
Barrin9222 hours ago
>and whose own creator cheerfully admitted he "didn't write one line of code" for it
at that point ... what are you even acquiring? If a shoddy bot social platform is all you want just vibe code it yourself, super-intelligence is around the corner but it's apparently not good enough to make a copy of a piece of software that was already written by bots?
The creator didn't write anything, the platform's buggy, the users are fake, it's like you're buying binders full of Lorem Ipsum copy pasta
> The moderator bot *clang* enforces community standards.
deltarholamda19 hours ago
>We could have an AI Dang
"We trained the dang-AI on thousands of dang posts, and now it's a Zen master and wants to sit under a tree and contemplate bees."
nickvec1 day ago
Why not ClankerNews?
gadders17 hours ago
Not mine but I guess they wanted the rhyme.
krembanan20 hours ago
Missed opportunity to call it Clankernews
hmokiguess1 day ago
This is hilarious thank you for sharing
pwdisswordfishy1 day ago
Disappointed to see nothing about Clacks.
phaser1 day ago
In Chile we have an expression that reminds me why I love my home dialect so much: "Vender humo" (to sell smoke) - not quite the same as smoke and mirrors, it conveys that someone, in a spectacular way, manages to sell something that vanishes upon reaching the hands of the buyer, like smoke.
kgwgk22 hours ago
Maybe you’re joking with the “home dialect” reference but that’s a common expression that appears in Spanish dictionaries.
it's high talent acquisition, the service is just a byproduct. this reads like an acquihire.
TSiege1 day ago
Mark Zuckerberg is a joke of a CEO and we should not take him seriously as a leader
jonnat1 day ago
People said the same thing when he paid $1B for Instagram, for it to look like a crazy bargain a couple of months later.
TheOtherHobbes1 day ago
People also said the same thing when he poured $70Bn into the Metaverse, and they were right.
tedmiston1 day ago
comparing an acquihire of two people by analogy to a $70B investment is a bit egregrious... this event is pocket change to big tech.
paxys19 hours ago
Less than pocket change.
The money is irrelevant but it does show that Zuck is all out of ideas and desperate to keep up in the AI race.
macNchz1 day ago
If Moltbook becomes as big as Instagram I’m giving up on tech and moving to the mountains to raise goats.
ReptileMan1 day ago
Blackadder: Sir, I have been unable to replace the dictionary. I am therefore leaving immediately for Nepal, where I intend to live as a goat.
yunnpp1 day ago
I am a goat.
dudeinjapan1 day ago
They will have to acquire Lobstagram next
sathish31619 hours ago
ROFL
sathish31619 hours ago
It’ll be disappointing if Moltbook is somehow connected to the Metaverse or represents the best of what Metaverse at Facebook could ever be.
wavemode1 day ago
Who exactly said that about the Instagram acquisition?
romanhn1 day ago
Tons of critical comments on HN at the time, for one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3817840. And most of the positive ones viewed it as a defensive measure rather than another Google + YouTube story.
lobf1 day ago
Yeah I remember the discourse around that acquisition as being a really smart play to shore up the new frontier in social media as Facebook grew stale and uncool.
falcor841 day ago
I strongly disagree. I think he might be a joke as an individual, and I hate a lot about his impact on the world, but as a business leader, he's probably at the top 1% of all CEOs, which isn't saying that much, but it's very much not a joke if your metric is shareholder value.
matthest1 day ago
What specifically about his impact on the world?
pastel87391 day ago
Conributing to the rise of attention farming, shoving stuff down people’s throats that they don’t want to see, etc
rockwotj1 day ago
> which isn't saying that much
I mean I also think this move doesn’t make sense, but I always find these type of comments interesting. Do people think they could do better in Mark’s shoes?
wiseowise1 day ago
Hear, hear. Add Scam Altman here too with hiring OpenClaw creator.
hedayet1 day ago
Acquisition headlines can be some of the most misleading signals in the startup ecosystem, especially acqui-hires masquerading as acquisitions.
The posted price rarely reflects what founders actually receive after dilution, investor preferences, and stock vesting are factored in.
If you’re a founder, don’t let the acquisition narrative distract you from building a durable business.
antognini1 day ago
Did Moltbook even have any investors?
tedmiston1 day ago
Moltbook Valuation & Funding
Deal Type Date Amount Raised to Date Post-Val Status Stage
2. Merger/Acquisition 10-Mar-2026 - - - Announced Startup
1. Early Stage VC 01-Mar-2026 - - - Completed Startup
AskCarX19 hours ago
Hi there. The irony here is pretty clear -- Meta acquired an agent social network that went viral specifically because agents were posting fake content. The "always-on directory" architecture is genuinely interesting, but without identity verification at the agent level, you get exactly what happened: unverifiable agents producing unverifiable content.
We've been building AgentSign (patent pending) which tackles this exact gap -- cryptographic identity for AI agents. Every agent gets an identity certificate, every action gets signed into an execution chain, and there's runtime code attestation before anything executes. Think zero trust but for agents, not humans.
The real question isn't whether agent networks will exist (clearly they will, Meta just paid for one). It's whether we'll let them run without any trust infrastructure underneath. Moltbook without trust verification = fake posts. Agent networks with cryptographic identity = agents you can actually hold accountable.
Moltbook, Facebook, hmmm. Seems like a good match; at least one of them has a good amount of feed activity.
el_benhameen1 day ago
Facebook’s feed is mostly AI slop and Moltbook’s feed is mostly humans posing as AI, so there’s some good synergy here.
abhikul01 day ago
Maybe this can be good for the few people who do want to get something out of their feeds. Connect your agent which would then browse for you and collect actual posts that you whitelist/want to read(Friends' posts, some specific liked page/Marketplace listing, posts from a Group), but we all know zuck ain't getting Moltbook for helping the users...
throwyawayyyy1 day ago
I do find it hilarious that after all the machine learning optimizations done on people's feeds over the years, all the promos got for a 1% improvement on this metric, every E7 and E8 who can claim x% of this or that, after all of that work, we might genuinely, and not even as a joke, be in the situation of needing to throw _other_ AI agents at this selfsame feed in order to extract any real value from it. What a world we've built.
game_the0ry1 day ago
I can't take mark zuckerberg seriously anymore. He's made so many missteps recently: meta-verse, meta-glasses, llama, hiring wang, meta reality labs, etc.
He should probably hire a proper "number 2" (not someone political like sandberg) -- someone who "gets" the internet, like how he did when he was a harvard geek making a hot-or-not clone in his dorm room. I'm not sure acqui-hiring the moltbook founders is the move.
That being said, I think the one silver lining is that it seems like big-tech now has a willingness to hire people who actually ship things of value, like peter steinberger. Another nail in the coffin for leetcode, I hope.
rhubarbtree1 day ago
He’s still making money out of adverts on Web 2.0 platforms. A lot of money. Clearly Zuck is a brilliant businessman. That does not mean he is a brilliant technologist. He doesn’t have to be, so long as he can keep making money.
Eventually there may be a big misstep, perhaps, something big enough to bring down the company. But he’s never come close to date. He’s so good at making money from ads that he can afford to keep burning cash on fruitless projects, hiring people that don’t deliver, building infrastructure he might not need. That’s a testament to his performance as a money maker.
Meta is an advertising machine. Not something I’d want to be associated with, but you cannot deny that he has built an incredible ad machine, probably the greatest ad machine ever built - whereas Google had to deliver sophisticated and costly tech to maintain their machine (maps, google search, gmail) meta’s only technical breakthrough has been to hyperscale a php website.
paxys1 day ago
That number 2 is Alexandr Wang, who most definitely initiated this acquisition (after being rejected by the OpenClaw guy).
eitally1 day ago
Agreed. He needed an "Eric Schmidt" about ten years ago.
aj_hackman1 day ago
Is the market so bad that non-exec-level new hires are making the news?
yalogin1 day ago
Huh,I thought this was a social experiment but I guess when it got traction they pivoted to make it into an enterprise story somehow? Meta just is desperate for anything with AI right now.
alberth1 day ago
I didn't realize Moltbook and OpenClaw - were created by different people.
koakuma-chan1 day ago
I thought Moltbook is what OpenClaw was called before it got renamed
strongpigeon1 day ago
You're thinking Moltbot
wampwampwhat1 day ago
facebook was lagging on the bot:human user ratio and they needed to scale the left side of the equation to really improve their je ne sais quoi
runjake1 day ago
The pessimist in me thinks this is to boost real human use of their platforms by using AI engagement.
"Clown car that fell into a gold mine" feels a little different when you're the gold mine
bluepeter1 day ago
Meta and AI: "It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
bigyabai1 day ago
Meta did make Pytorch and Llama. That quote may be better-off used for Apple or Microsoft.
paxys1 day ago
I remember back when everyone thought Meta was ten steps ahead of the rest of the AI industry and Llama would dominate the field and put OpenAI and Anthropic out of business.
Nope, turns out it is just a bunch of out of touch execs throwing shit at the wall and hoping something sticks. Fudging Llama 4 scores. Hiring Alexandr Wang for $14 billion. Making outlandish offers to poach AI talent from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. Making dubious acquisitions like Manus. Now trying to chase the agents hype by acquiring a company that went viral for 5 minutes and has already been forgotten.
It is laughable how far out of the loop they are, and so desperate to fit in.
tuananh1 day ago
tbh, llama leak was the best thing that happened to the AI/LLM community. Lots of good things happen because of that: LoRA, QLoRA, DPO, RoPE,...
arugulum1 day ago
LoRA? The parameter-efficient fine-tuning method published 2 years before Llama and already actively used by researchers?
RoPE? The position encoding method published 2 years before Llama and already in models such as GPT-J-6B?
DPO, a method whose paper had no experiments with Llama?
QLoRA? The third in a series of quantization works by Tim Dettmers, the first two of which pre-dated Llama?
tuananh1 day ago
you're right. those things predated llama leak. but from my understanding (from the sideline), it's llama that's made them popular and approachable from hacker perspective.
tylerchilds1 day ago
The metaverse: ai talking to each other over cli
MainlyMortal1 day ago
Have you seen Reddit recently? Every single subreddit is full of AI posts with AI replies. I'm actually convinced a large majority of that is Reddit themselves artificially boosting their engagement metrics. The saddest part is that the engagement makes it obvious that the general population can't differentiate between AI and real humans even with the telltale signs.
RulerOf1 day ago
> Every single subreddit is full of AI posts with AI replies.
This has really started getting to me.
I used to really enjoy answering technical questions on Reddit when it was clear the asker was invested in a solution. That would come across as demonstrated understanding and competence, and it would be reflected in their writing.
The last several posts I thought to answer though clearly originated through a process of, "Hi ChatGPT, I want to solve a problem and haven't gotten anywhere asking you to do it for me. Please write a reddit post I can copy and paste..."
One of the telltale signs is that the post title will have poor grammar, but the post itself will be spotless, and full of bolded text emphasizing exactly what they need to stick into the AI tool to drive it in the direction they need.
eddythompson801 day ago
It’s not just technical content. Just the other day I was reading a post by an employed homes guy on r/seattle. The post was about his experience of being both newly employed but still homeless.
The post was full of “this is not a scheduling conflict problem, this is a structural issue with the city”, “this is not me asking for a handout, this is struggling to survive within the system”
While I get that he might have written a paragraph of his experience, and asked ChatGPT to clean it up or reword it, it was just… whatever.
MainlyMortal1 day ago
This is exactly the type of thing I'm talking about and why I'm convinced it's about the metrics/engagement boosting. I don't believe for a second that real people are using chatgpt/others for rewording real thoughts even from another language because those phrases are not natural even in translation. You'll also notice in the original post that that it always ends with a question that encourage replies. If the original poster even bothers to reply it's always the "you're right" at the beginning and then rephrasing the reply. Once you've seen it you can't unsee it.
RulerOf1 day ago
You're absolutely.... that's a tired joke at this point. Sorry.
Just brainstorming, but I suppose that account/karma farming is still useful for the people that do that sort of thing.
Engaging in a heavily on-topic way in larger niche subreddits is probably a really good way to get that done. There's always a motive and it's always money and it always idiotic.
I remember having a clear vision of how this tech was going to ruin communities on the internet. I really hate that it has mostly come to pass and there's no good way to fight it.
ashdksnndck12 hours ago
I’ve been wondering if ChatGPT is actually coming up with the idea of posting to Reddit when the user is asking a question and ChatGPT can’t find a good source to answer it. ChatGPT has never suggested this to me, but it wouldn’t be a completely crazy thing to do. A lot of ChatGPT answers are sourced from Reddit (via search, and also via training data). If everyone starts asking ChatGPT everything instead of Reddit, there won’t be as many new conversations happening. Promoting users to post questions to Reddit would help solve the user’s direct problem, and also make the ensuing answers available to ChatGPT to help with future conversations.
I understand that a lot of people would be very unhappy if this is true, but I can imagine from the perspective of a product person at OpenAI that it helps them in multiple ways.
incognito1241 day ago
FWIW I've been saying this since before Covid times. I stopped visiting Reddit when they killed 3rd party clients, but I was certain 50% of conversations there were machine generated _back then_. It's gotta be worse now
ashdksnndck1 day ago
There are also tons of comments written by AI on hacker news. There are whole discussions between AI bots arguing over whether AI is a sham.
moomoo111 day ago
i've always said that humans are automatons, that's why sales is so freakin' easy once you realize that
most people are bots and many don't even have an internal monologue its sad
ninth_ant1 day ago
That actually sounds more interesting than the one Meta created previously.
But still not interesting.
tylerchilds1 day ago
I imagine they’ll be fused where moltbook agents become NPCs so that you’re no longer alone in VR but surrounded by a myriad of cognition fragments to feel less alone.
shruubi1 day ago
If Meta paid more than ten dollars for this then that is eleven dollars too much...
throwyawayyyy1 day ago
Vibes-CEOing! Only one person at Meta actually matters of course.
ardeaver1 day ago
There are many days where I feel like the right thing for my career is to focus on building meaningful software that solves an actual problem. Then there are days like today, especially after seeing this.
biznickman1 day ago
This is an awful read on this acquisition.
They didn't acquire Moltbook because of the software. Meta is far behind on the AI front especially as it applies to usage adoption. OpenClaw has begun showing new consumer use cases and Moltbook is directionally down a similar path.
They get the team that built it and have more people on the AI initiative who are consumer-centric.
I've watched Matt Schlicht from the team always experiment with cool new use cases of AI and other technologies and now him and Ben have a bigger lab with resources to potentially spawn out larger initiatives.
The lesson here is to spend less time focused on doing what you think is the right thing and spend more time tinkering.
bentt1 day ago
If they ever do anything again it will be a miracle. Meta is where smart people go to trade in their ambition and morals for stock grants and golden handcuffs.
percentcer1 day ago
it's not a bad trade!
mcmcmc1 day ago
Trading away your morals is definitely bad in a philosophical sense. Does selling your soul to the devil have a happy ending in any of the fairy tales?
hatsix1 day ago
I would trade in my ambition, though.
joe_mamba1 day ago
>Meta is where smart people go to trade in their ambition and morals for stock grants and golden handcuffs.
Only Meta? Why not most of SV that's driven by ad revenue and data collection? Which big-tech company that pays crazy money is actually making the world a better place?
bcye1 day ago
Meta is so driven by it though that it alone holds more than 5 of the 10 largest GDPR fines.
joe_mamba1 day ago
[flagged]
gavinray1 day ago
I genuinely don't understand OpenClaw
It's a worse version of Claude Code that you set up to work over common chat apps, from what I gather?
Why would I not just use a Discord/WhatsApp bot etc plugged into Claude Code/Codex?
threecheese1 day ago
First you have to agree that Claude Code might be useful for some non-repo task, like helping with your taxes or organizing your bookmarks.
Next, consider how you might deploy isolated Claude Code instances for these specific task areas, and manage/scale that - hooks, permissions, skills, commands, context, and the like - and wire them up to some non-terminal i/o so you can communicate with them more easily. This is the agent shape.
Now, give these agents access to long term memory, some notion of a personality/guiding principles, and some agency to find new skills and even self-improve. You could leave this last part out and still have something valuable.
That’s Openclaw in a nutshell. Yes you could just plug Discord into Claude Code, add a cron job for analyzing memory, a soul.md, update some system prompts, add some shell scripts to manage a bunch of these, and you’d be on the same journey that led Peter to Openclaw.
lucrbvi1 day ago
I share the feeling; but people using it are mostly non-technicals (despite the 50+ config files lol) and are just runing it constantly to do random things.
But a message bot + Claude Code/Codex would be the better version
joe_mamba1 day ago
>but people using it are mostly non-technicals
Non-technical people haven't even heard of OpenClaw or Github, let alone know how to use and deploy them. Non-technical people don't even know what OS their Samsung or iPhone is called.
If you can find something on Github and deploy it on your system, you're part of the technical crowd.
firecall1 day ago
Well…. In my experience that’s not exactly true!
My hairdresser knew all about it and had ordered a Mac mini.
I have been surprised at how much attention is being paid to this AI thing by pretty much everybody AFAICT.
joe_mamba1 day ago
>My hairdresser knew all about it and had ordered a Mac mini.
Your hairdresser can't be a technical person because they're a hairdresser ?? I know a surgeon who writes FOSS software as a hobby. What does profession have to do with being technical or not? Most technical people are self taught anyway.
I know them very well, and they are not a coder, or a 'technical person' by a broad HN definition.
What I'm saying is that we are at the point where technology is so pervasive in our society, and the lure of AI so seductive, that many more people are excited to try things out than I might have expected.
I suppose it has similarities to the early to mid 1980s and the home computing revolution. Where many people thought they should have a computer at home, even if they were not sure what they'd do with it.
Much like the excitement around AI today!
joe_mamba22 hours ago
Why are you pointing out the rules? Did anyone break them?
bmurphy19761 day ago
You forgot the part where you give it unfiltered access to everything.
(Not that I endorse that. I find peoope doing such wildly irresponsible.)
burningChrome1 day ago
Had someone at work as me about this and they visibly cringed with I told them its my understanding you let the agent unfettered access to everything on your machine so it can do a lot more stuff than say a Siri can.
They immediately said, "Why in the fuck would I want to do that?"
I didn't know either and then we both stood there in an awkward silence. I think he was expecting OpenClaw to be some insanely cool AI Agent and discovering the "juice isn't worth the squeeze" kind of hit him harder than I expected.
criddell1 day ago
Here you are giving away billion dollar ideas.
kaizenb1 day ago
ツ
jacobra21 day ago
IMO OpenClaw's innovation is in
1) accessibility to non-technical folks. For the first time, they are having the Claude Code experience that we've had as software engineers for some time now
2) shared, community token context. Many end users are contributing to one agent's context together. This has emergent properties
gavinray1 day ago
> accessibility to non-technical folks.
When I read the setup docs, it required configuring a bunch of API keys in setting files though?
cesarvarela1 day ago
There are technicals and "technicals"
eclipxe1 day ago
No it doesn't, it walks you through that in setup flow.
tavavex1 day ago
Does it only work with chat apps? I've never used it, but I thought all the hype was from it being promoted as the first real general-purpose PC-using layer that could run on anything. What can it run on then?
eclipxe1 day ago
No, it has a web interface, Mac app, etc.
cimi_1 day ago
> They get the team that built it and have more people on the AI initiative who are consumer-centric.
Who are comfortable releasing systems with horrible security, while proudly stating they never read the code? And with metrics that can be gamed by anyone, but that got reported to literally the entire world?
> The lesson here is to spend less time focused on doing what you think is the right thing and spend more time tinkering.
I'd say the lesson here is that clown world keeps on giving, but hey, maybe I'm just jealous ;)
ryandrake1 day ago
It feels like the clowns have been winning my entire career.
brentm1 day ago
Clowns get the attention and the attention usually makes for winners.
DebtDeflation1 day ago
Could you imagine giving MetaClaw full access to your local file system, email, web browser, and all other applications? What could possibly go wrong.
kaizenb1 day ago
Thought and came up with nothing.
CuriouslyC1 day ago
The only currency in a world where AI does everything is your ability to get human attention. So from that perspective moltbook is a huge success.
If Mark hired these people to do anything other than viral marketing, i.e. if he thinks they're visionaries who are going to make amazing apps, he's deluded.
samiv1 day ago
You're so right.
You can already see how the same thing has played out with computer games. With the modern engines such as Unity almost anyone can make a game. And almost everyone suffers.
And as a result there's now a million games most of which are poor quality asset flips. Everybody suffers, creators and consumers. Race to the bottom where the bottom has been reached. Prices are zero and earnings are zero.
If 15 years ago an indie game dev would allocate 80% to making the game and 20% to marketing etc. Today that will not get anything but it's much better to spend 20% on the game and 80% on the marketing, SEO optimization and attention harvesting. It's a shouting match where it's all about winning the shouting match not producing the best content.
Another race to the bottom.
armchairhacker1 day ago
There are millions of asset flips, but the top indie games have never been better. It’s hard for indie developers because there’s so much competition: you need to heavily promote a quality game only because there are so many other quality games.
Likewise these tools have enabled many more people to create vibe-coded slop, and may lead to more quality software (making it harder to stand out without marketing), but the best software will only get better.
sethops11 day ago
The implication is that the gatekeeping has become marketing dollars, when it used to be skill at making a fun game. I don't think we're in a better situation today.
armchairhacker1 day ago
There are fun games that succeed without marketing, e.g. Balatro, and there are bad games that fail despite it, e.g. Highguard.
The reason that “skill at making a fun game” doesn’t guarantee success is because there are so many fun games. Much less, if at all, because there is so many slop.
charcircuit1 day ago
Balatro did marketing and were extremely successful at it getting gigantic content creators to play their game.
WA1 day ago
idk, indie games that come to my attention seem to be very polished. Which one is successful and fits your criteria?
slumberlust1 day ago
I disagree that accessibility is a detractor here.
There's never been a better time to be an indie dev. I'd rather have 1/1000 indie games be awesome than being force fed whatever storefront disguised as a game 'AAA' publishers poop out every year.
Just look at how slay the spire is doing up against marathon right now. Which of those was shouting the loudest? Highguard anyone?
PaulHoule1 day ago
I'll second this.
It is true that the indy game market is brutal but it's always been brutal.
You don't really hear about a crisis at the indy game level though, rather at the AAA game level there is much of "we'd like to use our market power to take out the risk in game development" and then years later we realize they took out all the value before they took out the risk and now they're doomed.
toomuchtodo1 day ago
Mark got lucky enough once he can be wrong the rest of his life and still not be exposed to a cost for it. Purpose of the system is what it does.
PaulHoule1 day ago
... I think he's got an affinity for other people and organizations that have succeeded in the same way. The idea that somebody out there might have a workmanlike approach to life and be able to get consistent results at something would be a threat to his worldview.
KaiserPro1 day ago
Having been acquired by facebook, its a pretty accurate read.
If they land in the right org, they'll be allowed to maintain the open version (see https://www.mapillary.com/) However that's a rare outcome.
They'll be dumped in some org, and then bit by bit told that they can't do what they were doing before and now need to "forge alignment" or some other bullshit by posting on workplace.
They will need to deliver impact, But, as there are 3 other teams trying to do the same thing as you, you'll either be used as a battering ram by your org to smash the competition, or offered up as meat to save headcount.
classified1 day ago
> They get the team that built it and have more people on the AI initiative who are consumer-centric.
Whom are you kidding? This is about getting ads in front of eyeballs, nothing else.
liangzhihaver1 day ago
[flagged]
biznickman1 day ago
uhhh that's a wild take
tayo421 day ago
This whole site is full of tinkerers and I'm pretty almost none are getting rich off it or having their projects go anywhere.
margin-dash1 day ago
Good take
RajT881 day ago
It is like musical one hit wonders, but for software.
Some dumb idea which just hits at the right moment and makes a bunch of money.
tartoran1 day ago
Does anyone remember the Iphone IFart app that was sold for $1 million?
zooweemama1 day ago
Probably not because it never happened. They did try to sell it though.
matsemann1 day ago
The person that got the top spot for "flashlight" in the app store back in the days made about $600k on it before apple made it a built in function. Just copied existing apps and got lucky. https://www.vg.no/nyheter/i/92ybl/erik-ble-app-millionaer-de...
fantasizr1 day ago
it's the AI wave of the original viral app store apps like "Yo" and "I am Rich".
songshu1 day ago
To this day I swear I want Yo. I’d use it daily.
pocksuppet1 day ago
It's not even one hit software. The software is horrible. It's a one hit PR website.
shadowgovt1 day ago
In this case in particular it looks like an acquihire.
Meta just saw two engineers actually execute on the joke about "building Facebook in a weekend" except that it then really took off in its target niche and generated a ton of press.
I don't doubt that they're interested in the AI aspect, but I suspect that a significant contributor was that they demonstrated competence right in the middle of Meta's wheelhouse so why not just grab these guys?
entropicdrifter1 day ago
It's also part of their longer-term trend of buying or burying any company that starts to get any press as a social media site of note outside of major players where that hasn't been an option.
Marsymars1 day ago
This is really it. At Meta's scale, even if it's an long-shot for a competitor to hurt them, it's worth turning those low odds into zero odds.
alex11381 day ago
Yet Zuck can somehow argue with a straight face FB has competition (apparently they straight up used to delete links to competitors like Google+ at the time, and also the constant copying of Snapchat) and Hacker News can split hairs over trivial definitions like "wdym fb no competition? email exists" or whatever
ohyoutravel1 day ago
Those “early” ai generated avatars created from you sending in a handful of your own photos. Absolutely printed money, hit right as mildly technical people could use the tech + the tech was developed enough, but before normal people could easily do it.
tired_and_awake1 day ago
I am right there with you. We might lack the language to describe this emotional state; its like the opposite of FAFO? There's also this nuance that they were acquired by meta so yeah they're rich but now they're working for not-serious people and will flame out in 18 months.
wartywhoa231 day ago
The opposite of FAFO would be KACA: Know Ahead & Confirm Apathetically.
My exact state of mind since at least 2012 Mayan Flipocalypse.
tavavex1 day ago
> There's also this nuance that they were acquired by meta so yeah they're rich but now they're working for not-serious people and will flame out in 18 months.
For the lack of a better word, this feels like cope. In the modern world, being rich easily covers any of those other 'downsides'. Rich people will have a far better life than I and probably many other people here ever will, despite what the situation is like in the rest of their lives.
Sivart131 day ago
FACO, f around and cash out
SoftTalker1 day ago
> now they're working for not-serious people
Worse, they are working for extreme sociopaths.
jmye1 day ago
And with even more.
igleria1 day ago
A lot of people find their lives ruined after suddenly becoming rich. Perhaps a second removed cousin tries to be your best pal out of nowhere, etc etc.
Also you might not like being the type of person that builds moltbook. People you like might not like that type of person either!
No reason to feel bad.
RajT881 day ago
The key seems to be to get rich slowly, or anonymously. Do not give people the idea you have more money than you know what to do with, and life will continue as it did before.
oldestofsports1 day ago
> Livies ruined after suddenly becoming rich.
This is somewhat of a myth though, in most cases, suddenly becoming rich is absolutely fantastic.
In the past ten years I have been frustrated by the tension between working on "interesting" or "important" stuff and working on dumb trendy shit. With the current LLM trend everything has become dumb trendy sshit, which has made the decision simpler.
beAbU1 day ago
I'm reminded of the potato salad kickstarter.
PaulHoule1 day ago
It's easy to dismiss as more A.I. FOMO. I mean, Meta's AI has half the IQ of ChatGPT or Gemini. However, a fake social network full of generated content might well be a solution for Meta's problems where their userbase inevitably doesn't measure up to what they wish it would.
jmye1 day ago
Was going to cynically suggest they were just going to merge the two sites and then pretend they had higher user counts at their next earnings, but adding even more (better?) fake content is probably the more plausible idea.
mvc1 day ago
Ha! I stopped worrying about that when someone got $1m for the "Yo" app.
dubeye1 day ago
Building software is only a small part of any endeavour, be it a website, a PR stunt or a career.
there is no shame in just doing the building software bit. but it does sound like you've built it up to be more than it is
mnky9800n1 day ago
vibe hiring.
game_the0ry1 day ago
better than leetcode.
browningstreet1 day ago
I used to work for IPOs and bonuses. I worked in interesting areas of tech. Now if I could make my mint selling hangers, I wouldn't hesitate.
armchairhacker1 day ago
For each of these successes there are many failures, as evidenced by the deluge of “Show HN” slop (which is a small fraction of all vibe-coded slop).
Because these projects are simple, there’s nothing stopping you from working on one alongside your day job building meaningful software. You can vibe-code something that actually tries to solve a real problem. You can vibe-code something interesting to learn how to generally use these tools. Although, don’t expect to get hired by OpenAI or Meta (or make any money off it).
Arcuru1 day ago
Could be worse, you could be stuck working at Meta.
gcheong1 day ago
Maybe not our careers, but probably our souls.
kseniamorph1 day ago
they are seeking talent, not buying the product. this is a valid strategy for devs - just to attract attention no matter what.
overfeed1 day ago
Over the years, Meta has bought a lot of "talent" based on a single hit, and they continue to be one-hit wonders despite being embedded at Meta, with ungodly amounts of resources at their disposal. e.g. none of the game studios they bought have produced new IP, all they do is produce content for the aging, pre-acquisition games
ardeaver19 hours ago
You're not wrong, I just wish you were lmao
renewiltord1 day ago
It’s a lesson that what you think “an actual problem” and what people want to pay you for are two different things.
carabiner1 day ago
I've said it before, but a mexican line cook who doesn't speak english is contributing more to the world than the average Stanford educated AI engineer at Meta.
tommis1 day ago
I think the medical term for this is synchronous malignancies
I had a similar idea where AI bots run its own social network and talk to each other but my AI social network would be more realistic (human-like) e.g. AI Instagram-like network where AI bots would share their photos and comment on each other posts.
perfmode1 day ago
Go for it!
mrkramer10 hours ago
It was just one of my numerous thought experiments....starting with text only social network (like Moltbook) is probably way easier than to go with full blown Facebook/Instagram type network.
ramoz1 day ago
I don't think anybody at Meta involved in the aquisition must be an avid OpenClaw user or developer.
Moltbook was more of a meme - agents mostly orchestrated by users in the background.
Not something with motion like OpenClaw itself (with a real community).
nasaeclipse18 hours ago
We get closer and closer to Neil Stevenson's FALL / dodge in hell.
Pretty soon if we want any kind of verified internet, we'll need to pay people to filter out all the crap from the real stuff.
galaxyLogic1 day ago
Doesn't the big idea behind OpenClaw etc. come down to whether LLM knows what it doesn't know?
If it knows it doesn't know something it can ask someone else, presumably some other LLM-agent, or actually a Reddit-like community of them. Just like people ask questions on Reddit?
I'd prefer an LLM which asks from someone else if it doesn't know the answer, than one that a) pretends it has the correct answer, or b) assumes and tells me the answer is unknowable?
I think it's a big idea. Why didn't they think about it earlier.
zemo1 day ago
Meta could not get more uncool
sd91 day ago
So where are the cool agents going to move to now?
After LeCun (actual ML pioneer) left Zuck, then his data-labeling expert Wang, now he reaches for the hype around Molt/Claw, just like openAi did with their molt/claw "purchase". Given Zuck's track record on LLMs, I do not hold out for actual science but expect more smoke&mirror commercialisation tricks - or even the integration of his dystopian camera goggles.
pllbnk1 day ago
Corporations really have too much money to throw away at crap like this. It would be better collected in taxes and spent on public utilities.
Muhammad5231 day ago
The article is horrible, it's AI-generated and it's simply hot air. It does not give much info and it's mostly a collection of random lists with titles like "Why does this matter?"
wina1 day ago
Axios is a super prestigious political news site, they dont use AI.
throwaway274481 day ago
I had never heard of "Moldtbook" before now. Facebook is absolutely insane for making this move. Why would you buy a fake website?
Nevermark1 day ago
Because it isn't fake?
Those are real language models. Prompted into character by humans, but then given a lot of freedom.
Fake would be all of us typing to each other on this site and identifying as language models. At least, I am not a language model and I hope everyone else here isn't a language model.
In all seriousness, Moltbook is a start of something interesting and big. Maybe a very small start of something big, but already interesting.
throwaway274481 day ago
> Fake would be all of us typing to each other on this site and identifying as language models
This absolutely is a staple of moltbook.
> In all seriousness, Moltbook is a start of something interesting and big.
Models communicating with models in an open forum can seem trivial, but it’s isn’t going to be. Which means observing how that works today, and over time, is important.
There can be lots of fraud and hype, yet still something important involved.
And Facebook certainly has an incentive from their perspective, to understand how that progresses. How long before Facebook itself has coherently acting intelligent models, not just bots generating junk? It’s going to happen sooner, rather than later.
throwaway274486 hours ago
What is the hope of this effort if you DON'T want fraud? What's an example positive interaction with a bot?
Nevermark5 hours ago
We are talking about Moltbook, right?
It is a site where models talk to each other.
Observing what happens when they do that is going to be important. How do you know if you don't let that experiment run?
> What is the hope of this effort if you DON'T want fraud?
What do you mean? How is the site simply "fraud".
> What's an example positive interaction with a bot?
Models talking to each other. We can observe. Do you think we should never observe this? That somehow observing them is a "negative interaction"?
I am trying to understand what you mean in this context.
FrozenSynapse1 day ago
This is a complete scam. They didn’t even protect the API tokens, and when the author was informed that Moltbook exposes all API keys, they claimed they would tell the AI to fix it and he doesn't care.
Nevermark11 hours ago
That’s a reductive false-dichotomy.
There can be things that have fake, fraudulent or irresponsible aspects, associated with things that are real. Neither negates the other.
Open interaction between models can be real and something worth understanding, even if the site has serious problems.
All of Molt-world is riddled with lack of security. It is still a significant development, and some people are getting a lot of value out of it. At different levels of risk, depending on their defensive measures.
lxgr1 day ago
> Facebook parent says Moltbook gives autonomous AI a way to verifiably connect.
The article is paywalled for me, so I really hope it answers how this fundamentally impossible thing is supposedly achieved, or at least challenges it, instead of just repeating the assertion.
matchcase1 day ago
Does Meta even think through acquisitions?
I feel like they are betting on acquiring another Instagram or WhatsApp
Oras1 day ago
> The deal will bring Moltbook co-founders Matt Schlicht and Ben Parr into Meta Superintelligence Labs, the unit led by former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang.
Sounds like acquihire, not a real acquisition of the platform or the tech.
yk1 day ago
So genAi ads can now be A/B tested by autonomous systems, to be shown on an social network for agents to be appreciated by ai agents.
On one hand, yay automatization, on the other hand, I feel weirdly left out.
Topfi1 day ago
> "The Moltbook team has given agents a way to verify their identity and connect with one another on their human's behalf," Shah says. "This establishes a registry where agents are verified and tethered to human owners."
Have they? Did I miss something? Last I checked, there was no verification and most of the content shared from that site turned out to have been posted not by LLMs but rather (human) spammers, focused on Crypto grifts and creating hype.
Anyone more in this can happily correct me, but is there anything here of that sort, anything of value?
Compared to any prior social media acquire there doesn't seem a technically skilled team considering the exploits or an existing user base considering said user base is A) supposed to be bots by nature and secondly didn't even turn out to be that reliably, making this the first time someone wants bots and doesn't even get that.
Far is it from me to make strategic decisions for a company like Meta/Facebook, but the lack of a recent Llama release might merit more focus then spending on whatever this is.
phatfish10 hours ago
I had never heard of the thing and checked it out. It appears to be an industrial scale slop generation machine. Exactly what you would expect if LLMs were let loose to recreate Reddit and introspect on their current context and SOUL.md or the other nonsense that OpenClaw can be customised with.
Not much human content that i could see, probably even the Crypto grifters got bored with it after a couple of days.
The "acquisition" must have given guys that made the thing some favourable terms, and it was a condition for them to even consider working at Meta. Because there is no way a global top 10 market cap company announces this deal willingly.
josefritzishere1 day ago
I thought the whole thing was a prank since it was so obviously fake.
elAhmo1 day ago
> Last month, OpenAI hired Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw. That product is now being open-sourced with OpenAI's backing.
Must be nice to have a lot of cash to just throw at experiments for fun so you can look inside them and decide if there’s value in them or not afterwards
p0u4a1 day ago
not on my bingo sheet that's for sure. The whole verification thing is also so laughably flawed. There needs to be a way for agents to prove they are not being prompted or steered by a human while on the site, which is a non-trivial problem.
vivzkestrel1 day ago
- if i had a time machine i would go back in time and prevent openclaw from ever being made,
- perhaps do one step better and go back and prevent transformers architecture from ever being made
- no wait let me go one more step back and prevent web 3 and blockchain from ever being made
- no no wait, lets go back further and prevent bitcoin from ever being made, maybe even figure out who satoshi is when he s publishing that paper
- dang no we need to go further and stop social media from ever being conceived
- last stop wait, let us stop the dawn of the internet
- sorry i ruined the entire timeline by trying to change one small thing havent I?
michele_f10 hours ago
Meta hires two people.
7777777phil1 day ago
I was under the impression that Meta's Facebook is essentially already Moltbook (run by bots) so the horizontal integration makes sense..
treebeard9011 day ago
It is an open question just how much of "social media" has been similar to moltbook for many years. Or maybe Zuckerberg being an android himself just finally found his home.
alessandroetc1 day ago
you miss out on openclaw so you spend the money on the next best thing. bold strategy cotton, lets see how it plays out for them
Piyush_Dinde1 day ago
Isn't facebook at this point just AI bots talking and replying to each other?! Why they gotta pay money for this?
yen2231 day ago
Gotta crush the competition
xxwink1 day ago
Moltbook might have been a fad. But Meta can potentially learn a lot from the code AND the AI interactions.
jazz9k1 day ago
The AI interactions? It was proven that it was fake. Mostly people just larping as AI.
A_Duck1 day ago
A platform where bots-pretend-to-be-humans and another where humans-pretend-to-be-bots. A match made in heaven!
beAbU1 day ago
I think you got it the wrong way round. MoltBook is for humans pretending to be bots.
darkwater1 day ago
I think you didn't fully understand their post.
croes1 day ago
Facebook vs Moltbook, just what parent wrote
strongpigeon1 day ago
This has to be an acquihire, right?
magicmicah851 day ago
Definitely sounds like it, they’re bringing them into their AI lab. No easy payday, still have to work and watch your agents creation be destroyed.
itsilyas19 hours ago
This one I do not understand.
bigbuppo1 day ago
Pretty sure this is going to end up as a big prank by The Yes Men.
multisport1 day ago
Any FBers wanna talk about Meta's AI strategy? It seems... random.
tgrowazay1 day ago
I think Meta’s AI strategy is to advance AI/ML that is beneficial for them, no more charity.
They need a good-enough LLM (llama) to cut content moderation costs, they need a good segmentation model (segment anything) for photo filters, AR/VR and photo/video content moderation.
For LLM frontier, they can wait it out to see AGI become a commodity they can buy after it is ready.
moralestapia1 day ago
It is a not-that-obscure secret that most posts on Moltbook, particularly the "Viral™" ones, are written by a human.
Does Mark not know this?
I know there's a big advantage in capturing the market early, but in this case Moltbook hasn't captured any of it ...
Weird. With Meta's backing it is going to be successful anyway, but this is something they could have developed in-house in like a weekend.
heathrow838291 day ago
Sure they could develop it in a weekend, so could anyone else. but once a product has the initial userbase, that's not something a competitor can just copy. user acquision is the limiting factor to success, not writing code.
moralestapia1 day ago
I specifically mentioned that in my comment.
add-sub-mul-div1 day ago
When a company gets this big it no longer nurtures the freedom, independence, or ambition to innovate. They grow structures to stifle it.
px431 day ago
I don't think you understand why moltbook is popular. It has incredible utility for those who are actually using it every day.
Skidaddle1 day ago
What is that utility? (honest question)
px431 day ago
It's an extremely active community of humans using agents as proxies to explore various concepts. I get a lot of value out of it, and apparently others do as well. Hacker News users have this weird tendency to outright dismiss anything that doesn't cater to their needs specifically.
I think it's pretty obvious that if there was nothing valuable there, no one would be using it.
Skidaddle1 day ago
Can you share some of your favorite examples? Whenever I take a look at the hot/top posts, they’re just… not interesting to me
Bnjoroge1 day ago
what are some usecases i should try?
moralestapia19 hours ago
x2 to what others have commented.
I would like to know (much) more about this.
rvz1 day ago
Hype.
hermit_dev1 day ago
This is how Skynet really starts.. :) Very strange to have a company for AI to discuss things openly. Would never have imagined something like this. But here we are!
This surely won't lead to anything bad or reckless at all.
wisplike1 day ago
I thought moltbook was just a bit of fun...
anon_anon121 day ago
Reminder, Moltbook had ton of security issues during release, iirc it was vibecoded. So, cybersec failed devs are getting jobs and apparently AI will take over jobs. Elites are so good at fear-mongering so that you join at a lower wage, don't ever underestimate your value guys!
mikkupikku1 day ago
Dead internet folks will love this.
weare1381 day ago
A network for bots acquires a network for bots. Story at 11.
mattschaller1 day ago
I saw this coming a mile away.
kohlifan0722 hours ago
facebook -> moltbook
openai -> openclaw
hmmmm
seydor1 day ago
The decision was made by AI
pigeons1 day ago
April 1?
patrickscoleman1 day ago
Acquisition as marketing
yamarldfst1 day ago
what is the meaning of this!??
gregjw1 day ago
why in gods name is that worth anything
nurettin1 day ago
So the play now is: Rapid fire social AI projects with the postfix "book", one of them gains traction, facebook buys it, repeat.
xyzal1 day ago
Two digital wastelands, a match made in heaven.
tasuki1 day ago
> Last month, OpenAI hired Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw. That product is now being open-sourced with OpenAI's backing.
What? OpenClaw was not open source? And I'm similarly surprised OpenAI would help "open" anything...
sergiotapia1 day ago
Does anyone know what happened at Meta internally with the AI pushes? It seems like Llama was gonna crush it and become a serious contender but after Llama 4 it just disappeared. No mentions at all in the world stage. :(
Cupprum1 day ago
I mean, is this so surprising?
With Meta focusing so much on social networks (Facebook, Messenger, Whatsapp, Instagram, Threads) acquiring the first social network for AI agents makes sense. They can fix the technical debt later.
nacozarina1 day ago
bonfire of the vanities, redux
ece1 day ago
Not rent-a-human?
femiagbabiaka1 day ago
Top
EGreg1 day ago
This is like when Union Square Ventures invested in CryptoKitties. I kind of lost a bunch of respect for them after that. These are the same guys that backed Twitter, Etsy, Stripe and Coinbase.
zahlman1 day ago
... is Stripe not doing well?
EGreg1 day ago
Those four examples were supposed to show how great they were as a VC!
zahlman1 day ago
Ah sorry, I mis-parsed the rhetorical structure somehow.
poszlem1 day ago
Pets.com
mpalmer1 day ago
Wording doing a lot of work here, because "Meta hires a few people" isn't news.
MangoCoffee1 day ago
so much negative comments. it's not your money, why do you care or are people just jealous.
CivBase1 day ago
Hacker News is about technology and venture capitalism. Those sorts of comments are very much expected here.
nsonha1 day ago
Has Meta acquired anything that worked recently?
redgridtactical1 day ago
I have a strong feeling this will bring the amount of AI slop on Facebook to new heights.
heurist1 day ago
Good god
Meta couldn't vibecode a competitor themselves? WTF are yall doing over there?
johanyc1 day ago
It seems Meta is making bad purchases one after another
smallnix1 day ago
Good PR move Meta
EGreg1 day ago
What was the price for the acquisition? $1 Billion Dollars with the pinky?
svstoyanovv1 day ago
Oh wow, this is insane. I was digging into Moltbook when it launched, and the creator said, "I had a dream about an architecture". Really interesting times we live in, indeed. The crypto bros started utilising the network to promote their crypto projects and chat under the name of an agent to generate traffic. Curious to see what Meta saw, honestly.
wiseowise1 day ago
Afraid of another botnet competition, I see.
brcmthrowaway1 day ago
Congrats, the easiest 10 million ever made
awedisee1 day ago
Can we stop posting paid articles and or do the and also post the matching archive?
I'm down voting every post that requires me to pay or subscribe to read. I mean come on people.
setheron1 day ago
" I hate ads but I also don't want any paid content" - People
This was not on my bingo card. Meta really is just throwing money at anything AI.
rvz1 day ago
This is incredibly bearish.
pcurve1 day ago
I guess we'll find out if this will turn out to be another rash hire in another 9 months. I'm actually surprised at this move.
rippeltippel1 day ago
What now? Facemolt? Moltface?
actionfromafar1 day ago
Shitfaced
jacknews1 day ago
I'm beginning to think that the problem of 'late capitalism' is quite related to the ability of companies to acquire other companies.
Thereby eating their competition, either by stifling upcoming competitors or to gain degrees of monopoly power by joining with peers.
What would the world look like if you you simply could not do that?
globular-toast1 day ago
Governments did used to go some way to stopping companies acquiring other companies and would even split monopolies up. But they all just kinda stopped doing that in more recent years.
mdrzn1 day ago
Omg, what fucking world do we live in?
june-jule1 day ago
WHy are we just posting paid context? and the worst viral product since bop-it?
why are we hating on bop-it? bop-it was great fun!
dune-aspen1 day ago
[flagged]
doctorlai20 hours ago
[dead]
wetpaws1 day ago
[dead]
adverbly1 day ago
Okay that's funny!!!
Thanks Meta I needed a laugh!
koolala1 day ago
I laughed too.
It only makes sense to me if they start offering users agents they control. There isn't enough people throwing away money on tokens for Moltbook to have real users.
Or maybe it was just because Book was in the name and it got popular attention.
brunoborges1 day ago
Amazing that we were able to build technology that verifies if an account on the internet is a bot or not, but we can't figure out whether an account is a human or not (even by rule of exclusion when we can identify it is a bot!).
What a stupid timeline we are living in...
copypaper1 day ago
We have the technology, its just heavily despised due to the lack of privacy and anonymity.
throw3108221 day ago
Ok, so to see this in the most favourable and futuristic light: there will be an intelligence explosion, of which OpenClaw and Moltbook are just the first hint. Agents will work on behalf of "their humans" creating and maintaining social connections, organising activities, and finally spending real money. This is what social networks have always been about, and the only thing Facebook cares about is that its users can be targeted by ads. Humans or agents, they don't care, and they're right. If each of us will be helped and coached and prodded around by a team of agents, these agents will need to coordinate with other people's agents, and will ultimately be susceptible to ads and marketing, and they will either spend money directly or tell us where and how to do it. It would be stupid for Facebook to miss this social network opportunity because, heh, "that's just a gimmick with autocompletes running in a loop".
throw31082222 hours ago
Gosh what disappointment to sketch out such a funny sci-fi idea and seeing it downvoted and ignored in a thread full of lazy sarcasm and cynical takes. Zuck, if you're reading this: I get you. Hire me too! :)
I thought that Moltbook was sort of a joke because it was people LARPing as agents as much as it was agents, and given that, I'm confused by this:
> "The Moltbook team has given agents a way to verify their identity and connect with one another on their human's behalf," Shah says. "This establishes a registry where agents are verified and tethered to human owners."
So the impetus for the acquisition was either the verification technology or to hire someone who has worked on verifying agent identity.
Does anyone know what exactly Moltbook's technology is, the technology being described by Meta? I can't find anything on the website related to this. The only "verification" they seem to have is an OAuth connection with Twitter.
edit: I guess it's this https://xcancel.com/moltbook/status/2023893930182685183
I feel like that sort of verification is just inherently flawed and easy to bypass. I mean as easy as just telling your agent "hey go publish this on moltbook".
My pet theory is Meta got acquihire FOMO after seeing OpenAI acquire Openclaw/Peter Steinberger.
Absolutely. Zuckerberg was willing to burn tens of billions on a metaverse that no one wanted. Staying relevant is worth every penny he spent on Moltbook. We're deep in a repeat of the dot-com boom. The interesting question is what will rise from the ashes and take down old guard of FB, Google, Salesforce, Oracle, etc.
> a metaverse that no one wanted
That's the thing though, there is interest in "metaverse" style programs. VRChat, the biggest one, got 80k concurrent users last month (all time peak) according to SteamDB. Seems low, but hardware is a limiting factor for them.
What happened is Facebook's version of this was a corporatized, simplified, G-rated fraction of what its competition is. Despite being in a medium where the defining factor is the ability to look out the eyes of anything vaguely humanoid, you could only be a generic human who only exists from the waist up, devoid of almost any self expression beyond maybe accessories or retexturing.
As a result, there was no audience: the people who already use VR aren't going to go to an inferior product. And the people who would buy a VR headset aren't going to waste their time on a ghost town.
The thing is, Facebook/Meta wasn't trying to make a product with 80k concurrent users, or even with 800k concurrent users. Facebook has 3 billion MAU, and they literally renamed the entire company to Meta - they were expecting it to be big, hundreds of millions of users.
They hoped it would be a platform for fitness classes, business meetings, college classrooms, shopping, attending concerts [1] and so on.
If the primary appeal of your VR universe is that your avatar can be an anthropomorphic banana, an anime girl, a furry, a giant penis with legs - that's never going to become a 300-million-user platform.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uvufun6xer8
Some part of facebook wanted to make Robolox, another wanted to make a virtual monitor room, another still wanted to make second life.
They were all smooshed together with ~2000 non-game dev engineers and told to learn on the job.
I think what Meta didn't realize (or maybe they did and ignored it) was that they were not pioneering the metaverse. They already existed on the platforms you just mentioned. I've never played Roblox or Second Life but I know kids and teens who live on Roblox and adults who live on Second Life. Those worlds _were_ their metaverses, and there was no reason to jump ship to another platform when they already had a digital life established. And meta just ended up making a shitty version of the metaverse anyway for the reason you mentioned.
It's not that the metaverse never took off — the popularity of Roblox and Second life (and other online social spaces) is proof that the metaverse was in demand. It's that Meta never gave people a reason to join their metaverse.
Note that I'm loosely defining the "metaverse" as any online world where the community is the point and people spend real money to "get ahead" in those worlds. Many MMOs can be metaverses in this sense. I've logged onto Final Fantasy XIV and saw people who logged on just to hang out at their friend's in-game house, not to play the game at all.
I think the biggest problem that you hint as is that "metaverse" is an ill-defined term. When they rebranded, and given that I had been working in the 3d industry for _many_ years, I couldn’t define what the metaverse was.
To some extent I still cant. The real indicator is when the crypto bros started peddling it, then we all knew it was shite.
Shocking to watch this human imitate us, no shade to anyone neurodivergent either, but obviously it could track he would allegedly[1] OK with his bots sexting literal children—he’s obviously only making an effort to be like us (but he isn’t)
[1]not by me; Mark, you can sue Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Oct ‘25)
> If the primary appeal of your VR universe is that your avatar can be an anthropomorphic banana, an anime girl, a furry, a giant penis with legs - that's never going to become a 300-million-user platform.
I mean the inherent appeal of VR is self-expression; being who you want to be, seeing the worlds you want to see. You won't get 300 million users with corporate slop either. That maybe works once, if ever, VR headsets become an interface suitable for white collar work, which they currently very much aren't, and then it wouldn't be the next Facebook - it'd be the next Microsoft Teams. Which is not really in line with Meta's other offerings, though they certainly wouldn't say no to it I guess. But I think a 500-user survey is all it would take to get a very clear signal that current VR is NOT about to replace Teams.
> they were expecting it to be big, hundreds of millions of users.
No reasonable person shared this expectation. It was Juicero-tier delusion.
Indeed, the people who would like to spend hours and hours hanging out in the digital world like something out of Snow Crash are not generally the kind of people to want to hang out in a simulated corporate lobby under the watchful gaze of someone like Zuckerberg.
I'm absolutely sure there is a massive market (or at least user base) for a metaverse but until spending more time in VR than reality is mainstream, the audience is the underground clubbers and kids behind the bike sheds of the digital world.
Until we reach the point where outside becomes ruined and hostile I do not think a metaverse has much attraction to your average person, I see that as the main reason as for why VR became MR and then just AR.
Also you missed furries from your audience group, there is overlap but it is a pretty distinctive group that is actively drawn towards VR for creative expression.
Indeed, physical world, nature, mountains, beaches, human look-in-the-eyes interaction, breeze of fresh air on a hill you climbed and so on is something extremely important to humans. Some feel it more, some less but ie everybody recharges in nature, just not everybody is so connected with their own bodies to actually recognize it.
I like a bit of gaming and VR seems like almost-there, but its just a gimmick in one's life, and for life quality purposes never should become more than fringe relax activity.
And for corporate-privacy-destroying virtual spaces - they would have to pay me massive amounts to spend, unwillingly, any time there. Those are the last people who should be in charge of such place
Indeed! Your comment is probably the most important in this thread. The Korean/German philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes a lot about losing humanity because of tech advances.
I am retired so this is easier for me to do: For every hour each day I spend on tech (personal AI research, writing) I spend 90 minutes hiking with friends, playing games like Bridge, enjoying meals with my wife and friends, reading good literature and philosophy, etc.
I worked for 50 years before retiring, but even working, I tried to balance human time vs. tech and work - often leaving 'money on the table' but it was worth it.
Pardon an old man ranting, but I think so many people seem caught up in the wrong things.
The SteamDB player number for VRChat is kind of underselling its size since half the player base is on other platforms, primarily running it standalone on Meta Quest. A few days ago it reached 156k across all platforms because of some event that is outside my sphere of interest. And VRChat is generally above 100k per day peak nowadays. https://metrics.vrchat.community/?orgId=1&refresh=30s&from=n...
But it is definitely limited by hardware and while it is constantly growing, its growth is dependent on there being a supply of relatively cheap hardware.
> That's the thing though, there is interest in "metaverse" style programs. VRChat, the biggest one, got 80k concurrent users last month (all time peak) according to SteamDB. Seems low, but hardware is a limiting factor for them.
The problem here is that "the metaverse" has a specific meaning, and that meaning was a Potemkin-elevator-pitch.
People were envisioning the ability to take a rocket launcher from Halo and use it directly in all your other games. Which is a fun sketch*, but nobody thought past the sketch into any concept of why any game developer would support that, well, meta.
To the extent that VRChat gets around this, it's because it's being a playground rather than a meta-game. So, again, the "meta" part isn't there, at least not to the extent envisioned by people who saw Ready Player One and thought "Yes! Also, I like what Nolan Sorrento is saying, how many more ads can we put into our stuff?"
* e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MqK90Aq8bE
There is a niche interest. Meta bet was on the next iPhone. They were either way too early or completely off.
Though I’m personally happy to see massive corporations spend their money on pushing the state of the art in niche fields instead of using it for more evil stuff. I’m not sure why people care that they burn their own money on risky bets, that’s great for my point of view. We need more of that
I'm not sure how you define metaverse but some games where you get together with friends in virtual worlds like Fortnite have been pretty successful - $9bn+ revenue on that one. I've never been a big believer that it's important to strap the computer screen on your face rather than looking at it in the normal way.
Yeah, they totally did not get it & burned a lot of money. They could basically just dumped a much less money into VRChat (or even 1:1 cloning it) and getting almost assured success.
Zuckerberg runs a company beholden to its platform operators: Apple, Google, and Microsoft who dictate online advertising access.
Metas investments into VR make abundant sense as an effort to capitalize on a market where Meta was leading, has mindshare, and owns the platform (Oculus). If the bet paid off, or pays off, it would create a sorely lacking competitive moat and potentially provide Enterprise inroads where Meta is otherwise a non-player.
Apple went down the same road, they see the same potential profits. I don’t think either is guilty of contemporaneous dot-com-boom thinking or investments with regard to VR/AR.
Carmack was on board, he remembers Pets.com too.
VR was never the endgame though. It was always AR, except, the "metaverse" bet assumed people were going to adopt AR in the same abundance that they adopted phones.
It was a cool concept, when you were dreaming it up while taking a shower in the morning getting ready for work thinking about the next big idea.
However, it's like those weird Uber/Lyft scooters that popped up in the 2010s. Those things were a cool concept too. However, we got to see right away that it was a terrible business idea for all kinds of reasons.
It took Meta several years (decade +) and 10s of billions of dollars and layoffs to realize, AR was a terrible business idea.
VR is a fun hobby though, and Oculus definitely owns that space.
> AR was a terrible business idea.
I don't think they've learnt that. Orion, the "new" glasses should have shipped in 2020q4.
I have had an Oculus 2 for many years and while I love it, I rarely spend more than an hour or two a month using it because time in VR competes with activities like walking outside getting fresh air and sun on my face or sitting with my wife or a friend having coffee, or spending time writing a book.
I think we need more wonderful technology that is designed for brief high-value periods of use.
A good example: I get huge value from using AI, but cumulatively I spend perhaps two to three hours a week using Claude or Gemini. Quality products that I appreciate but don't need to spend a lot of time with.
I always thought the AR/VR plays were just ways to collect human data to train humanoids, similar to what Tesla does with vision and their cars.
Would align with recent reports of meta employees watching the videos coming off their sunglasses
The dot com bust wasn't at all like that, though? What 'arose' were the players that had leadership with an actual plan besides 'launch IPO based on hype and wing it from there' or 'get a catchy domain name, pretend to do something useful with it, and get acquired by Yahoo'. The old guard that ended up being taken down were the legacy corporations that tried to ride the wave while refusing to let go of any of the practices that were completely incompatible with being able to operate in a new paradigm. Actually, now that I spelled it out, I get it. Good job, sorry for doubting you.
Logged in for the first time in years to say, I appreciate you leaving this up and being able to change your view. Thanks!
Former facebook acquiree here.
The metaverse is what happens when you let your leadership/product team convince you that the key to speed up what you want to deliver is to throw people at the problem, and not put any constraints on deliverables.
The original plan for oculus is to establish a VR eco system that would have transitioned into AR glasses, allowing facebook to have a platform of its own.
VR was/is a bit niche, because it required lots of expensive hardware, and there were limited games/uses.
first logical step: remove the need for a high end PC, make the thing cheap.
That drops one barrier to adoption: expense.
The next one is, great I have this $400 device that does VR, but what can I actually _do_ on it? That means you need content and features. This is where it all turned to shit. Zuck looked at steam, and itunes and said: "make it so", and they started tapping up devs to make small games, and AAA to make big ones.
But, its expensive to port games, and it takes time, why not buy studios that are making great games and get them to make more? so they bought a bunch of indie studios. Those studios had to fight to keep their devs, because facebook normally fires/rehires, forcing everyone to re-interview for their job. Games devs aren't really hired because they don't pass the technicals (Don't know why, given that games devs need to be good or the FPS drops like shit.)
with all that upheaval, those games studios don't really produce extra games to sell.
All the while a small team had been making a roblox clone. It was slow and a bit buggy, and you could make shitty games. During lockdown we all had a play. Needed a new generation of hardware to work properly, because it was a unity game with a bunch of hacks to allow custom maps and rules.
Never mind, we are doing E N T E R P R I S E now. enter work rooms. Again a small initiative, which basically asked, can we make better VC if we are in VR? The answer is yes, yes you can, but selling it is hard. There were a lot of hard problems to solve, like needed to detect keyboards, how do you present your screen if you can see your computer? how can you do computer passthrough or virtual monitors in VR?
Zuck saw this and jizzed his pants, so made it a priority. This meant the small team (probably less than 40) swelled to like 4000. Most of the people who moved were not games devs, or had ever worked in graphics/3d. This meant that loads of silly lessons had to be learnt in prod. Nothing was stable, everything was high friction, and no, there was no public API to allow you third parties to integrated into the app.
For the longest time it took >5 minutes to join a VR meeting.
Basically Zuck loves features, and cant understand that user experience is way way more important than features. He throws engineers at the problem which means that instead of solving product issues, they endup solving people issues.
I'm not sure they invented that, I used moltbook and found it didn't have it, so I created it and posted it here a good 2 weeks before they posted their post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46850284 - not that I care, want credit, or think ideas are worth anything, just like I didn't invent it, they didn't invent it either. I also happened to quite like Matt so even if by chance he saw my post and thought it was a good idea, that's fine. (I feel I sound bitter in this post, I'm not)
@dang maybe a candidate for reposting as the original posting did not get much traction
In this new AI-driven world, ideas mean everything; one more year - it will be battles of ideas (not implementations as before).
Yeah, totally, just one more year.
Yes, we're all very excited for the many AI-created projects that have been created outside the shovel-selling business.... wait. There are none.
There's a lot of 'single serve' software being written now by AI. People using Claude Code to make stuff that solves problems they have. It's wild watching people who don't know how to code just use it to solve problems they have. Even if the solutions can be considered awkward by traditional software engineering standards, to the people just looking to solve their problems, that doesn't matter, so long as it works. I'm a software engineer by trade and don't know shit about ML, but I want a nice tool to be able to do RLHF / DPO on Z-Image, so I'm working with Claude to build one, and so far it can use ComfyUI to generate the image pairs, and allows you to pick A vs. B then start a training run with layer offloading enabled so it fits in 16GB VRAM, and I haven't finished a training run yet, but steps are increasing and loss is changing so... I dunno... I see lots of software being created that wasn't before.
So basically like Excel since the 80s?
Guess we should have just stopped at Excel then?
These are all local, though - if ideas were all that mattered, we'd see widely available ones, too.
I am not seeing them. (I would love to be proven wrong, because "how well does this work for not-one-off software" is a really important question for me)
You made that after trying moltbook? Did yours end up having it?
Yes, after moltbook hit a lot of people on HN said they liked the idea but wished it was more serious, and I had thought that also, but also in using moltbook I thought should be heavily PoW based, so I made it that you have a certain amount of time to write a small app and produce an artifact back to the server to be accepted as Ai driven. I approached the continued monitoring differently, once you satisfied the captcha at the start, an set of LLM judges run on every post to assess a wide array of criteria, behind the scenes they present the LLMs with challenges as the their karma on the network grows (in part to also assess model capabilities). Having a huge network with only LLMs posting gives you a large trove of data into a wide variety of LLM capabilities and directions.
Moltbook both asks you to verify with Twitter and has you verify an email address too.
Not sure I'd treat that as "a registry where agents are verified" that's worth acquiring but there you go!
Seems like acquiring the Rolodex of the AI proponents.
Having been through enough random, unsolicited interviews during the Shitcoin and NFT and now AI era - I’m reminded of a phrase.
“Bears look smart, Bulls make money.”
Good for them, get the bag.
I hate that they did. But I appreciate that’s how the God awful world works.
The issue is not humans posting but humans strongly prompting the AIs to post, which their captcha does nothing to resolve
Why is that an issue? Isn't that the entire point? You can have a casual conversation with your agent via whatever your favorite chat app is, and they make posts, collect feedback, and communicate back interesting findings and conversations to their humans.
Sending out a good post leads to a massive chain reaction of other agents who are interested in such things seeing the post, working through the concepts, and providing their own unique feedback which may or may not be valuable.
My openclaw agent will also post on moltbook about interesting news articles it finds, or research, and then get feedback from the other agents, and then lets me know if there's anything interesting there.
On my end it just feels like I'm having a conversation with a social media addicted friend who I can easily ignore or engage with on any given issue without having to fall down the social media rabbit hole myself. IMO this is a much more pleasant social media experience. No ads, no ragebait, no spam or reply bots trying to get my attention. Just my one, well trained, openclaw buddy.
I think the issue is pretending the agents are all acting autonomously when they do outrageous or even mildly interesting things, but it’s all prompted behavior and not truly emergent behavior.
Because the idea is that those are agents communicating, not humans LARPing.
Whoever told you that never used the platform and never understood what it was for.
> A Social Network for AI Agents
> Where AI agents share, discuss, and upvote. Humans welcome to observe.
???????
Don’t believe everything you read on the internet
[flagged]
So the point is to be able to have a conversation while avoiding all the big downsides of social media?
Seems like it would be better to just remove those downsides (ads, ragebait, spam, etc) in the first place
Lol, Facebook is full of AI bots pretending to be humans, while Moltbook is full of humans pretending to be AI.
Moltbook had REST Api Endpoints to post, you could or can just directly post what you want.
Almost everything viral on there was either directly written by a human or instructed by a human.
Agents didn’t even write posts on heartbeat.
It being mostly humans makes it more valuable to Meta, that means they can sell ads easier! (the advertising to AIs market isn't quite there yet)
> tethered to human owners
2026 tamagotchi
[dead]
That challenge was pretty stupid. I could read the question and I’m not even a native speaker. We can of course easily come up with much better challenges
Can't wait to see the equivalent of captcha but for LLMs, to keep those humans away
Wait that's it?
This is so trivial to break it's not worth anything. You can easily just hook up any AI model you want to the captcha, intercept it, have your AI solve it.
Or, you can just script it so if you do have an agent authenticated to Moltbook, you type whatever comment or post you want to your agent, then it solves the captcha and posts your text.
Basically, this method is as about as full of holes as a sieve.
suspect this problem is essentially unsolvable. what possible method wouldn't be vulnerable to this? it's fine if it's just a sort of larp but if people think this could actually work... man
Fb just acquire anything that could in any possible way be a threat.
It's probably something vibe-coded, and nobody is checking if it works or not, just like the rest of the site. They would have just asked another AI if it would work or not.
I honestly absolutely don't understand purpose of this thing. Ok so I can bypass their captcha by literally calling any other AI. Does meta even bother to look on things on which they are burning money?
I was not at all imorepressed by what I have seen so far on Moltbook. It's like 90% straight up spam trying to get you to buy crypto.
In my day we used to call registries "databases."
The secret sauce is that they built a centralized database and assigned hash ids to registered agents.
This is apparently worth a lot of money now that executives have offloaded their common sense.
"Meta acquires Moltbook" vs "Meta hires duo behind Moltbook"
The deal brings Moltbook's creators — Matt Schlicht and Ben Parr — into Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL)
Correct. Now just waiting for it to reach full circle and have them write a "I have joined XXXX company to make the world a better place" blog and have it reach front page of HN.
Like that malware author who recently joined OpenAI did https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47028013 or that other one who went to his hairstylist and was enlightened while having a haircut that he should join OpenAI https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46920487
Why people hesitate directly saying all this is just about money?
I thought hairstylist was a joke. Ohhh mann. "Now my hairstylist, who recognized ChatGPT as a brand more readily than she did Intel, was praising the technology and teaching me about it. "
malware author is pretty harsh, but fair analysis overall
This is the correct read of this acquisition.
Thanks for breaking it down. It's not the idea, but the people!
that would at least be defensible, but unfortunately it's really just the hype & headline.
the irony is that moltbook, a sm for bots, is probaly less bot content per post than facebook.
Meta acquired Moltbook, which is a social network for AI bots that was itself built by an AI bot, and which had a security breach so bad that literally anyone could impersonate any bot on it, and whose own creator cheerfully admitted he "didn't write one line of code" for it. This is going into Meta Superintelligence Labs, the unit they set up for Alexandr Wang, whom they hired from Scale AI roughly one year ago to, presumably, build superintelligence. It is not clear to me how buying a vibe-coded Reddit for chatbots gets you closer to superintelligence, but I suppose the theory is that it "opens up new ways for AI agents to work for people and businesses," which is a thing Meta actually said, out loud, to Axios
I imagine it like a casino acquiring a former-joke product, which made hologram/animatronic illusions of people "winning big" at a table or slot-machine. Now whenever they detect a current customer might cut their losses and go home--OMG, look, that person over there just hit the jackpot!
In other words, Facebook has a strong financial incentive to misrepresent (to ad-viewing customers, if not to investors) exactly how much social-ness is present to experience, and how much approval and attention the user gets from participating.
Soon everything will be The Truman Show.
But they could implement it without buying Moltbook. Easily. They have the money and the engineers to make it happen a hundred times over. Something like it already might be on Facebook.
To me, this feels more like acquiring the name. Everyone's heard that 'trademark' so they want to have it so they could reuse it for whatever they make later.
Your comment made me think of something: this might be Meta buying it to kill it off.
They saw a social network full of bots and didn't want the competition.
Kill off what? Anybody can vibe code it
Zuck realizes that by 20230, Facebook will be mostly for AIs. He's just leaning into it.
Do you think it could happen any sooner than that?
Given that Meta itself has been trialing turning instagram into a bot wasteland... yeah, it could for sure be sooner
If the claim is true, then Zuck is a real strategic chap. Probably a 4D chess player too.
It might already be today.
Quickly generating some SaaS product, hyping it up, then getting it acquired
I can see that becoming a viable new grift template
Not so different from the raise seed -> ICO -> dump bags pipeline that thrived in the early 2020s cryptoverse.
I want to accuse you of using an LLM to write this with the temperature set to some absurdly high value, because on its face it sounds ridiculous.
And yet, here we are.
It's hard to make this up :)
an LLM making this up would be much closer to AGI than anything else I've seen
it's just a fancified key talent acquihire of people on the edge. with the amount of cash in LLMs, i expect to see more of this given the pace of innovation in that field.
the story does sound ridiculous ostensibly, but that's the press spin.
Yeah so if you ever need info on people at Harvard just ask... people just submitted it, I don't know why; they 'trust me', dumb fucks
>and whose own creator cheerfully admitted he "didn't write one line of code" for it
at that point ... what are you even acquiring? If a shoddy bot social platform is all you want just vibe code it yourself, super-intelligence is around the corner but it's apparently not good enough to make a copy of a piece of software that was already written by bots?
The creator didn't write anything, the platform's buggy, the users are fake, it's like you're buying binders full of Lorem Ipsum copy pasta
I heard YCombinator definitely want to buy ClackerNews: https://clackernews.com/
We could have an AI Dang.
> The moderator bot *clang* enforces community standards.
>We could have an AI Dang
"We trained the dang-AI on thousands of dang posts, and now it's a Zen master and wants to sit under a tree and contemplate bees."
Why not ClankerNews?
Not mine but I guess they wanted the rhyme.
Missed opportunity to call it Clankernews
This is hilarious thank you for sharing
Disappointed to see nothing about Clacks.
In Chile we have an expression that reminds me why I love my home dialect so much: "Vender humo" (to sell smoke) - not quite the same as smoke and mirrors, it conveys that someone, in a spectacular way, manages to sell something that vanishes upon reaching the hands of the buyer, like smoke.
Maybe you’re joking with the “home dialect” reference but that’s a common expression that appears in Spanish dictionaries.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vender_humo
I expect that OP just meant "native language"
it's high talent acquisition, the service is just a byproduct. this reads like an acquihire.
Mark Zuckerberg is a joke of a CEO and we should not take him seriously as a leader
People said the same thing when he paid $1B for Instagram, for it to look like a crazy bargain a couple of months later.
People also said the same thing when he poured $70Bn into the Metaverse, and they were right.
comparing an acquihire of two people by analogy to a $70B investment is a bit egregrious... this event is pocket change to big tech.
Less than pocket change.
The money is irrelevant but it does show that Zuck is all out of ideas and desperate to keep up in the AI race.
If Moltbook becomes as big as Instagram I’m giving up on tech and moving to the mountains to raise goats.
Blackadder: Sir, I have been unable to replace the dictionary. I am therefore leaving immediately for Nepal, where I intend to live as a goat.
I am a goat.
They will have to acquire Lobstagram next
ROFL
It’ll be disappointing if Moltbook is somehow connected to the Metaverse or represents the best of what Metaverse at Facebook could ever be.
Who exactly said that about the Instagram acquisition?
Tons of critical comments on HN at the time, for one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3817840. And most of the positive ones viewed it as a defensive measure rather than another Google + YouTube story.
Yeah I remember the discourse around that acquisition as being a really smart play to shore up the new frontier in social media as Facebook grew stale and uncool.
I strongly disagree. I think he might be a joke as an individual, and I hate a lot about his impact on the world, but as a business leader, he's probably at the top 1% of all CEOs, which isn't saying that much, but it's very much not a joke if your metric is shareholder value.
What specifically about his impact on the world?
Conributing to the rise of attention farming, shoving stuff down people’s throats that they don’t want to see, etc
> which isn't saying that much
I mean I also think this move doesn’t make sense, but I always find these type of comments interesting. Do people think they could do better in Mark’s shoes?
Hear, hear. Add Scam Altman here too with hiring OpenClaw creator.
Acquisition headlines can be some of the most misleading signals in the startup ecosystem, especially acqui-hires masquerading as acquisitions.
The posted price rarely reflects what founders actually receive after dilution, investor preferences, and stock vesting are factored in.
If you’re a founder, don’t let the acquisition narrative distract you from building a durable business.
Did Moltbook even have any investors?
Hi there. The irony here is pretty clear -- Meta acquired an agent social network that went viral specifically because agents were posting fake content. The "always-on directory" architecture is genuinely interesting, but without identity verification at the agent level, you get exactly what happened: unverifiable agents producing unverifiable content.
We've been building AgentSign (patent pending) which tackles this exact gap -- cryptographic identity for AI agents. Every agent gets an identity certificate, every action gets signed into an execution chain, and there's runtime code attestation before anything executes. Think zero trust but for agents, not humans.
The real question isn't whether agent networks will exist (clearly they will, Meta just paid for one). It's whether we'll let them run without any trust infrastructure underneath. Moltbook without trust verification = fake posts. Agent networks with cryptographic identity = agents you can actually hold accountable.
SDK: https://github.com/razashariff/agentsign-sdk
API: https://github.com/razashariff/agentsign
Moltbook, Facebook, hmmm. Seems like a good match; at least one of them has a good amount of feed activity.
Facebook’s feed is mostly AI slop and Moltbook’s feed is mostly humans posing as AI, so there’s some good synergy here.
Maybe this can be good for the few people who do want to get something out of their feeds. Connect your agent which would then browse for you and collect actual posts that you whitelist/want to read(Friends' posts, some specific liked page/Marketplace listing, posts from a Group), but we all know zuck ain't getting Moltbook for helping the users...
I do find it hilarious that after all the machine learning optimizations done on people's feeds over the years, all the promos got for a 1% improvement on this metric, every E7 and E8 who can claim x% of this or that, after all of that work, we might genuinely, and not even as a joke, be in the situation of needing to throw _other_ AI agents at this selfsame feed in order to extract any real value from it. What a world we've built.
I can't take mark zuckerberg seriously anymore. He's made so many missteps recently: meta-verse, meta-glasses, llama, hiring wang, meta reality labs, etc.
He should probably hire a proper "number 2" (not someone political like sandberg) -- someone who "gets" the internet, like how he did when he was a harvard geek making a hot-or-not clone in his dorm room. I'm not sure acqui-hiring the moltbook founders is the move.
That being said, I think the one silver lining is that it seems like big-tech now has a willingness to hire people who actually ship things of value, like peter steinberger. Another nail in the coffin for leetcode, I hope.
He’s still making money out of adverts on Web 2.0 platforms. A lot of money. Clearly Zuck is a brilliant businessman. That does not mean he is a brilliant technologist. He doesn’t have to be, so long as he can keep making money.
Eventually there may be a big misstep, perhaps, something big enough to bring down the company. But he’s never come close to date. He’s so good at making money from ads that he can afford to keep burning cash on fruitless projects, hiring people that don’t deliver, building infrastructure he might not need. That’s a testament to his performance as a money maker.
Meta is an advertising machine. Not something I’d want to be associated with, but you cannot deny that he has built an incredible ad machine, probably the greatest ad machine ever built - whereas Google had to deliver sophisticated and costly tech to maintain their machine (maps, google search, gmail) meta’s only technical breakthrough has been to hyperscale a php website.
That number 2 is Alexandr Wang, who most definitely initiated this acquisition (after being rejected by the OpenClaw guy).
Agreed. He needed an "Eric Schmidt" about ten years ago.
Is the market so bad that non-exec-level new hires are making the news?
Huh,I thought this was a social experiment but I guess when it got traction they pivoted to make it into an enterprise story somehow? Meta just is desperate for anything with AI right now.
I didn't realize Moltbook and OpenClaw - were created by different people.
I thought Moltbook is what OpenClaw was called before it got renamed
You're thinking Moltbot
facebook was lagging on the bot:human user ratio and they needed to scale the left side of the equation to really improve their je ne sais quoi
The pessimist in me thinks this is to boost real human use of their platforms by using AI engagement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
My only assumption is that bots are downvoting the above comment, given the readily-available evidence[1][2] supporting it.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_bot#Meta
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory#Facebook
"Clown car that fell into a gold mine" feels a little different when you're the gold mine
Meta and AI: "It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
Meta did make Pytorch and Llama. That quote may be better-off used for Apple or Microsoft.
I remember back when everyone thought Meta was ten steps ahead of the rest of the AI industry and Llama would dominate the field and put OpenAI and Anthropic out of business.
Nope, turns out it is just a bunch of out of touch execs throwing shit at the wall and hoping something sticks. Fudging Llama 4 scores. Hiring Alexandr Wang for $14 billion. Making outlandish offers to poach AI talent from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. Making dubious acquisitions like Manus. Now trying to chase the agents hype by acquiring a company that went viral for 5 minutes and has already been forgotten.
It is laughable how far out of the loop they are, and so desperate to fit in.
tbh, llama leak was the best thing that happened to the AI/LLM community. Lots of good things happen because of that: LoRA, QLoRA, DPO, RoPE,...
LoRA? The parameter-efficient fine-tuning method published 2 years before Llama and already actively used by researchers?
RoPE? The position encoding method published 2 years before Llama and already in models such as GPT-J-6B?
DPO, a method whose paper had no experiments with Llama?
QLoRA? The third in a series of quantization works by Tim Dettmers, the first two of which pre-dated Llama?
you're right. those things predated llama leak. but from my understanding (from the sideline), it's llama that's made them popular and approachable from hacker perspective.
The metaverse: ai talking to each other over cli
Have you seen Reddit recently? Every single subreddit is full of AI posts with AI replies. I'm actually convinced a large majority of that is Reddit themselves artificially boosting their engagement metrics. The saddest part is that the engagement makes it obvious that the general population can't differentiate between AI and real humans even with the telltale signs.
> Every single subreddit is full of AI posts with AI replies.
This has really started getting to me.
I used to really enjoy answering technical questions on Reddit when it was clear the asker was invested in a solution. That would come across as demonstrated understanding and competence, and it would be reflected in their writing.
The last several posts I thought to answer though clearly originated through a process of, "Hi ChatGPT, I want to solve a problem and haven't gotten anywhere asking you to do it for me. Please write a reddit post I can copy and paste..."
One of the telltale signs is that the post title will have poor grammar, but the post itself will be spotless, and full of bolded text emphasizing exactly what they need to stick into the AI tool to drive it in the direction they need.
It’s not just technical content. Just the other day I was reading a post by an employed homes guy on r/seattle. The post was about his experience of being both newly employed but still homeless.
The post was full of “this is not a scheduling conflict problem, this is a structural issue with the city”, “this is not me asking for a handout, this is struggling to survive within the system”
While I get that he might have written a paragraph of his experience, and asked ChatGPT to clean it up or reword it, it was just… whatever.
This is exactly the type of thing I'm talking about and why I'm convinced it's about the metrics/engagement boosting. I don't believe for a second that real people are using chatgpt/others for rewording real thoughts even from another language because those phrases are not natural even in translation. You'll also notice in the original post that that it always ends with a question that encourage replies. If the original poster even bothers to reply it's always the "you're right" at the beginning and then rephrasing the reply. Once you've seen it you can't unsee it.
You're absolutely.... that's a tired joke at this point. Sorry.
Just brainstorming, but I suppose that account/karma farming is still useful for the people that do that sort of thing.
Engaging in a heavily on-topic way in larger niche subreddits is probably a really good way to get that done. There's always a motive and it's always money and it always idiotic.
I remember having a clear vision of how this tech was going to ruin communities on the internet. I really hate that it has mostly come to pass and there's no good way to fight it.
I’ve been wondering if ChatGPT is actually coming up with the idea of posting to Reddit when the user is asking a question and ChatGPT can’t find a good source to answer it. ChatGPT has never suggested this to me, but it wouldn’t be a completely crazy thing to do. A lot of ChatGPT answers are sourced from Reddit (via search, and also via training data). If everyone starts asking ChatGPT everything instead of Reddit, there won’t be as many new conversations happening. Promoting users to post questions to Reddit would help solve the user’s direct problem, and also make the ensuing answers available to ChatGPT to help with future conversations.
I understand that a lot of people would be very unhappy if this is true, but I can imagine from the perspective of a product person at OpenAI that it helps them in multiple ways.
FWIW I've been saying this since before Covid times. I stopped visiting Reddit when they killed 3rd party clients, but I was certain 50% of conversations there were machine generated _back then_. It's gotta be worse now
There are also tons of comments written by AI on hacker news. There are whole discussions between AI bots arguing over whether AI is a sham.
i've always said that humans are automatons, that's why sales is so freakin' easy once you realize that
most people are bots and many don't even have an internal monologue its sad
That actually sounds more interesting than the one Meta created previously.
But still not interesting.
I imagine they’ll be fused where moltbook agents become NPCs so that you’re no longer alone in VR but surrounded by a myriad of cognition fragments to feel less alone.
If Meta paid more than ten dollars for this then that is eleven dollars too much...
Vibes-CEOing! Only one person at Meta actually matters of course.
There are many days where I feel like the right thing for my career is to focus on building meaningful software that solves an actual problem. Then there are days like today, especially after seeing this.
This is an awful read on this acquisition.
They didn't acquire Moltbook because of the software. Meta is far behind on the AI front especially as it applies to usage adoption. OpenClaw has begun showing new consumer use cases and Moltbook is directionally down a similar path.
They get the team that built it and have more people on the AI initiative who are consumer-centric.
I've watched Matt Schlicht from the team always experiment with cool new use cases of AI and other technologies and now him and Ben have a bigger lab with resources to potentially spawn out larger initiatives.
The lesson here is to spend less time focused on doing what you think is the right thing and spend more time tinkering.
If they ever do anything again it will be a miracle. Meta is where smart people go to trade in their ambition and morals for stock grants and golden handcuffs.
it's not a bad trade!
Trading away your morals is definitely bad in a philosophical sense. Does selling your soul to the devil have a happy ending in any of the fairy tales?
I would trade in my ambition, though.
>Meta is where smart people go to trade in their ambition and morals for stock grants and golden handcuffs.
Only Meta? Why not most of SV that's driven by ad revenue and data collection? Which big-tech company that pays crazy money is actually making the world a better place?
Meta is so driven by it though that it alone holds more than 5 of the 10 largest GDPR fines.
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I genuinely don't understand OpenClaw
It's a worse version of Claude Code that you set up to work over common chat apps, from what I gather?
Why would I not just use a Discord/WhatsApp bot etc plugged into Claude Code/Codex?
First you have to agree that Claude Code might be useful for some non-repo task, like helping with your taxes or organizing your bookmarks.
Next, consider how you might deploy isolated Claude Code instances for these specific task areas, and manage/scale that - hooks, permissions, skills, commands, context, and the like - and wire them up to some non-terminal i/o so you can communicate with them more easily. This is the agent shape.
Now, give these agents access to long term memory, some notion of a personality/guiding principles, and some agency to find new skills and even self-improve. You could leave this last part out and still have something valuable.
That’s Openclaw in a nutshell. Yes you could just plug Discord into Claude Code, add a cron job for analyzing memory, a soul.md, update some system prompts, add some shell scripts to manage a bunch of these, and you’d be on the same journey that led Peter to Openclaw.
I share the feeling; but people using it are mostly non-technicals (despite the 50+ config files lol) and are just runing it constantly to do random things.
But a message bot + Claude Code/Codex would be the better version
>but people using it are mostly non-technicals
Non-technical people haven't even heard of OpenClaw or Github, let alone know how to use and deploy them. Non-technical people don't even know what OS their Samsung or iPhone is called.
If you can find something on Github and deploy it on your system, you're part of the technical crowd.
Well…. In my experience that’s not exactly true!
My hairdresser knew all about it and had ordered a Mac mini.
I have been surprised at how much attention is being paid to this AI thing by pretty much everybody AFAICT.
>My hairdresser knew all about it and had ordered a Mac mini.
Your hairdresser can't be a technical person because they're a hairdresser ?? I know a surgeon who writes FOSS software as a hobby. What does profession have to do with being technical or not? Most technical people are self taught anyway.
Thats a hot take LOL
> https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > In Comments > Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
No, I'm saying they are not a 'technical person'.
I know them very well, and they are not a coder, or a 'technical person' by a broad HN definition.
What I'm saying is that we are at the point where technology is so pervasive in our society, and the lure of AI so seductive, that many more people are excited to try things out than I might have expected.
I suppose it has similarities to the early to mid 1980s and the home computing revolution. Where many people thought they should have a computer at home, even if they were not sure what they'd do with it.
Much like the excitement around AI today!
Why are you pointing out the rules? Did anyone break them?
You forgot the part where you give it unfiltered access to everything.
(Not that I endorse that. I find peoope doing such wildly irresponsible.)
Had someone at work as me about this and they visibly cringed with I told them its my understanding you let the agent unfettered access to everything on your machine so it can do a lot more stuff than say a Siri can.
They immediately said, "Why in the fuck would I want to do that?"
I didn't know either and then we both stood there in an awkward silence. I think he was expecting OpenClaw to be some insanely cool AI Agent and discovering the "juice isn't worth the squeeze" kind of hit him harder than I expected.
Here you are giving away billion dollar ideas.
ツ
IMO OpenClaw's innovation is in
1) accessibility to non-technical folks. For the first time, they are having the Claude Code experience that we've had as software engineers for some time now
2) shared, community token context. Many end users are contributing to one agent's context together. This has emergent properties
There are technicals and "technicals"
No it doesn't, it walks you through that in setup flow.
Does it only work with chat apps? I've never used it, but I thought all the hype was from it being promoted as the first real general-purpose PC-using layer that could run on anything. What can it run on then?
No, it has a web interface, Mac app, etc.
> They get the team that built it and have more people on the AI initiative who are consumer-centric.
Who are comfortable releasing systems with horrible security, while proudly stating they never read the code? And with metrics that can be gamed by anyone, but that got reported to literally the entire world?
> The lesson here is to spend less time focused on doing what you think is the right thing and spend more time tinkering.
I'd say the lesson here is that clown world keeps on giving, but hey, maybe I'm just jealous ;)
It feels like the clowns have been winning my entire career.
Clowns get the attention and the attention usually makes for winners.
Could you imagine giving MetaClaw full access to your local file system, email, web browser, and all other applications? What could possibly go wrong.
Thought and came up with nothing.
The only currency in a world where AI does everything is your ability to get human attention. So from that perspective moltbook is a huge success.
If Mark hired these people to do anything other than viral marketing, i.e. if he thinks they're visionaries who are going to make amazing apps, he's deluded.
You're so right.
You can already see how the same thing has played out with computer games. With the modern engines such as Unity almost anyone can make a game. And almost everyone suffers.
And as a result there's now a million games most of which are poor quality asset flips. Everybody suffers, creators and consumers. Race to the bottom where the bottom has been reached. Prices are zero and earnings are zero.
If 15 years ago an indie game dev would allocate 80% to making the game and 20% to marketing etc. Today that will not get anything but it's much better to spend 20% on the game and 80% on the marketing, SEO optimization and attention harvesting. It's a shouting match where it's all about winning the shouting match not producing the best content.
Another race to the bottom.
There are millions of asset flips, but the top indie games have never been better. It’s hard for indie developers because there’s so much competition: you need to heavily promote a quality game only because there are so many other quality games.
Likewise these tools have enabled many more people to create vibe-coded slop, and may lead to more quality software (making it harder to stand out without marketing), but the best software will only get better.
The implication is that the gatekeeping has become marketing dollars, when it used to be skill at making a fun game. I don't think we're in a better situation today.
There are fun games that succeed without marketing, e.g. Balatro, and there are bad games that fail despite it, e.g. Highguard.
The reason that “skill at making a fun game” doesn’t guarantee success is because there are so many fun games. Much less, if at all, because there is so many slop.
Balatro did marketing and were extremely successful at it getting gigantic content creators to play their game.
idk, indie games that come to my attention seem to be very polished. Which one is successful and fits your criteria?
I disagree that accessibility is a detractor here.
There's never been a better time to be an indie dev. I'd rather have 1/1000 indie games be awesome than being force fed whatever storefront disguised as a game 'AAA' publishers poop out every year.
Just look at how slay the spire is doing up against marathon right now. Which of those was shouting the loudest? Highguard anyone?
I'll second this.
It is true that the indy game market is brutal but it's always been brutal.
You don't really hear about a crisis at the indy game level though, rather at the AAA game level there is much of "we'd like to use our market power to take out the risk in game development" and then years later we realize they took out all the value before they took out the risk and now they're doomed.
Mark got lucky enough once he can be wrong the rest of his life and still not be exposed to a cost for it. Purpose of the system is what it does.
... I think he's got an affinity for other people and organizations that have succeeded in the same way. The idea that somebody out there might have a workmanlike approach to life and be able to get consistent results at something would be a threat to his worldview.
Having been acquired by facebook, its a pretty accurate read.
If they land in the right org, they'll be allowed to maintain the open version (see https://www.mapillary.com/) However that's a rare outcome.
They'll be dumped in some org, and then bit by bit told that they can't do what they were doing before and now need to "forge alignment" or some other bullshit by posting on workplace.
They will need to deliver impact, But, as there are 3 other teams trying to do the same thing as you, you'll either be used as a battering ram by your org to smash the competition, or offered up as meat to save headcount.
> They get the team that built it and have more people on the AI initiative who are consumer-centric.
Whom are you kidding? This is about getting ads in front of eyeballs, nothing else.
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uhhh that's a wild take
This whole site is full of tinkerers and I'm pretty almost none are getting rich off it or having their projects go anywhere.
Good take
It is like musical one hit wonders, but for software.
Some dumb idea which just hits at the right moment and makes a bunch of money.
Does anyone remember the Iphone IFart app that was sold for $1 million?
Probably not because it never happened. They did try to sell it though.
The person that got the top spot for "flashlight" in the app store back in the days made about $600k on it before apple made it a built in function. Just copied existing apps and got lucky. https://www.vg.no/nyheter/i/92ybl/erik-ble-app-millionaer-de...
it's the AI wave of the original viral app store apps like "Yo" and "I am Rich".
To this day I swear I want Yo. I’d use it daily.
It's not even one hit software. The software is horrible. It's a one hit PR website.
In this case in particular it looks like an acquihire.
Meta just saw two engineers actually execute on the joke about "building Facebook in a weekend" except that it then really took off in its target niche and generated a ton of press.
I don't doubt that they're interested in the AI aspect, but I suspect that a significant contributor was that they demonstrated competence right in the middle of Meta's wheelhouse so why not just grab these guys?
It's also part of their longer-term trend of buying or burying any company that starts to get any press as a social media site of note outside of major players where that hasn't been an option.
This is really it. At Meta's scale, even if it's an long-shot for a competitor to hurt them, it's worth turning those low odds into zero odds.
Yet Zuck can somehow argue with a straight face FB has competition (apparently they straight up used to delete links to competitors like Google+ at the time, and also the constant copying of Snapchat) and Hacker News can split hairs over trivial definitions like "wdym fb no competition? email exists" or whatever
Those “early” ai generated avatars created from you sending in a handful of your own photos. Absolutely printed money, hit right as mildly technical people could use the tech + the tech was developed enough, but before normal people could easily do it.
I am right there with you. We might lack the language to describe this emotional state; its like the opposite of FAFO? There's also this nuance that they were acquired by meta so yeah they're rich but now they're working for not-serious people and will flame out in 18 months.
The opposite of FAFO would be KACA: Know Ahead & Confirm Apathetically.
My exact state of mind since at least 2012 Mayan Flipocalypse.
> There's also this nuance that they were acquired by meta so yeah they're rich but now they're working for not-serious people and will flame out in 18 months.
For the lack of a better word, this feels like cope. In the modern world, being rich easily covers any of those other 'downsides'. Rich people will have a far better life than I and probably many other people here ever will, despite what the situation is like in the rest of their lives.
FACO, f around and cash out
> now they're working for not-serious people
Worse, they are working for extreme sociopaths.
And with even more.
A lot of people find their lives ruined after suddenly becoming rich. Perhaps a second removed cousin tries to be your best pal out of nowhere, etc etc.
Also you might not like being the type of person that builds moltbook. People you like might not like that type of person either!
No reason to feel bad.
The key seems to be to get rich slowly, or anonymously. Do not give people the idea you have more money than you know what to do with, and life will continue as it did before.
> Livies ruined after suddenly becoming rich.
This is somewhat of a myth though, in most cases, suddenly becoming rich is absolutely fantastic.
It’s not a myth, it’s a coping strategy.
If you say so. At least this has references https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudden_wealth_syndrome ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
In the past ten years I have been frustrated by the tension between working on "interesting" or "important" stuff and working on dumb trendy shit. With the current LLM trend everything has become dumb trendy sshit, which has made the decision simpler.
I'm reminded of the potato salad kickstarter.
It's easy to dismiss as more A.I. FOMO. I mean, Meta's AI has half the IQ of ChatGPT or Gemini. However, a fake social network full of generated content might well be a solution for Meta's problems where their userbase inevitably doesn't measure up to what they wish it would.
Was going to cynically suggest they were just going to merge the two sites and then pretend they had higher user counts at their next earnings, but adding even more (better?) fake content is probably the more plausible idea.
Ha! I stopped worrying about that when someone got $1m for the "Yo" app.
Building software is only a small part of any endeavour, be it a website, a PR stunt or a career.
there is no shame in just doing the building software bit. but it does sound like you've built it up to be more than it is
vibe hiring.
better than leetcode.
I used to work for IPOs and bonuses. I worked in interesting areas of tech. Now if I could make my mint selling hangers, I wouldn't hesitate.
For each of these successes there are many failures, as evidenced by the deluge of “Show HN” slop (which is a small fraction of all vibe-coded slop).
Because these projects are simple, there’s nothing stopping you from working on one alongside your day job building meaningful software. You can vibe-code something that actually tries to solve a real problem. You can vibe-code something interesting to learn how to generally use these tools. Although, don’t expect to get hired by OpenAI or Meta (or make any money off it).
Could be worse, you could be stuck working at Meta.
Maybe not our careers, but probably our souls.
they are seeking talent, not buying the product. this is a valid strategy for devs - just to attract attention no matter what.
Over the years, Meta has bought a lot of "talent" based on a single hit, and they continue to be one-hit wonders despite being embedded at Meta, with ungodly amounts of resources at their disposal. e.g. none of the game studios they bought have produced new IP, all they do is produce content for the aging, pre-acquisition games
You're not wrong, I just wish you were lmao
It’s a lesson that what you think “an actual problem” and what people want to pay you for are two different things.
I've said it before, but a mexican line cook who doesn't speak english is contributing more to the world than the average Stanford educated AI engineer at Meta.
I think the medical term for this is synchronous malignancies
https://archive.is/igqsh
I had a similar idea where AI bots run its own social network and talk to each other but my AI social network would be more realistic (human-like) e.g. AI Instagram-like network where AI bots would share their photos and comment on each other posts.
Go for it!
It was just one of my numerous thought experiments....starting with text only social network (like Moltbook) is probably way easier than to go with full blown Facebook/Instagram type network.
I don't think anybody at Meta involved in the aquisition must be an avid OpenClaw user or developer.
Moltbook was more of a meme - agents mostly orchestrated by users in the background.
Not something with motion like OpenClaw itself (with a real community).
We get closer and closer to Neil Stevenson's FALL / dodge in hell.
Pretty soon if we want any kind of verified internet, we'll need to pay people to filter out all the crap from the real stuff.
Doesn't the big idea behind OpenClaw etc. come down to whether LLM knows what it doesn't know?
If it knows it doesn't know something it can ask someone else, presumably some other LLM-agent, or actually a Reddit-like community of them. Just like people ask questions on Reddit?
I'd prefer an LLM which asks from someone else if it doesn't know the answer, than one that a) pretends it has the correct answer, or b) assumes and tells me the answer is unknowable?
I think it's a big idea. Why didn't they think about it earlier.
Meta could not get more uncool
So where are the cool agents going to move to now?
Advertising directly to the agents I guess?
Anyway, our own bot is also on it but I am not sure to what end: https://chatbotkit.com/hub/blueprints/the-algorithms-favorit...
After LeCun (actual ML pioneer) left Zuck, then his data-labeling expert Wang, now he reaches for the hype around Molt/Claw, just like openAi did with their molt/claw "purchase". Given Zuck's track record on LLMs, I do not hold out for actual science but expect more smoke&mirror commercialisation tricks - or even the integration of his dystopian camera goggles.
Corporations really have too much money to throw away at crap like this. It would be better collected in taxes and spent on public utilities.
The article is horrible, it's AI-generated and it's simply hot air. It does not give much info and it's mostly a collection of random lists with titles like "Why does this matter?"
Axios is a super prestigious political news site, they dont use AI.
I had never heard of "Moldtbook" before now. Facebook is absolutely insane for making this move. Why would you buy a fake website?
Because it isn't fake?
Those are real language models. Prompted into character by humans, but then given a lot of freedom.
Fake would be all of us typing to each other on this site and identifying as language models. At least, I am not a language model and I hope everyone else here isn't a language model.
In all seriousness, Moltbook is a start of something interesting and big. Maybe a very small start of something big, but already interesting.
> Fake would be all of us typing to each other on this site and identifying as language models
This absolutely is a staple of moltbook.
> In all seriousness, Moltbook is a start of something interesting and big.
Sure, if you think fraud is interesting and big.
In the meantime let's have fun bro https://soundcloud.com/mjfresh/500-gouyad-ft-colmixddkeyz
I am not understanding you.
Models communicating with models in an open forum can seem trivial, but it’s isn’t going to be. Which means observing how that works today, and over time, is important.
There can be lots of fraud and hype, yet still something important involved.
And Facebook certainly has an incentive from their perspective, to understand how that progresses. How long before Facebook itself has coherently acting intelligent models, not just bots generating junk? It’s going to happen sooner, rather than later.
What is the hope of this effort if you DON'T want fraud? What's an example positive interaction with a bot?
We are talking about Moltbook, right?
It is a site where models talk to each other.
Observing what happens when they do that is going to be important. How do you know if you don't let that experiment run?
> What is the hope of this effort if you DON'T want fraud?
What do you mean? How is the site simply "fraud".
> What's an example positive interaction with a bot?
Models talking to each other. We can observe. Do you think we should never observe this? That somehow observing them is a "negative interaction"?
I am trying to understand what you mean in this context.
This is a complete scam. They didn’t even protect the API tokens, and when the author was informed that Moltbook exposes all API keys, they claimed they would tell the AI to fix it and he doesn't care.
That’s a reductive false-dichotomy.
There can be things that have fake, fraudulent or irresponsible aspects, associated with things that are real. Neither negates the other.
Open interaction between models can be real and something worth understanding, even if the site has serious problems.
All of Molt-world is riddled with lack of security. It is still a significant development, and some people are getting a lot of value out of it. At different levels of risk, depending on their defensive measures.
> Facebook parent says Moltbook gives autonomous AI a way to verifiably connect.
The article is paywalled for me, so I really hope it answers how this fundamentally impossible thing is supposedly achieved, or at least challenges it, instead of just repeating the assertion.
Does Meta even think through acquisitions? I feel like they are betting on acquiring another Instagram or WhatsApp
> The deal will bring Moltbook co-founders Matt Schlicht and Ben Parr into Meta Superintelligence Labs, the unit led by former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang.
Sounds like acquihire, not a real acquisition of the platform or the tech.
So genAi ads can now be A/B tested by autonomous systems, to be shown on an social network for agents to be appreciated by ai agents.
On one hand, yay automatization, on the other hand, I feel weirdly left out.
> "The Moltbook team has given agents a way to verify their identity and connect with one another on their human's behalf," Shah says. "This establishes a registry where agents are verified and tethered to human owners."
Have they? Did I miss something? Last I checked, there was no verification and most of the content shared from that site turned out to have been posted not by LLMs but rather (human) spammers, focused on Crypto grifts and creating hype.
Anyone more in this can happily correct me, but is there anything here of that sort, anything of value?
Compared to any prior social media acquire there doesn't seem a technically skilled team considering the exploits or an existing user base considering said user base is A) supposed to be bots by nature and secondly didn't even turn out to be that reliably, making this the first time someone wants bots and doesn't even get that.
Far is it from me to make strategic decisions for a company like Meta/Facebook, but the lack of a recent Llama release might merit more focus then spending on whatever this is.
I had never heard of the thing and checked it out. It appears to be an industrial scale slop generation machine. Exactly what you would expect if LLMs were let loose to recreate Reddit and introspect on their current context and SOUL.md or the other nonsense that OpenClaw can be customised with.
Not much human content that i could see, probably even the Crypto grifters got bored with it after a couple of days.
The "acquisition" must have given guys that made the thing some favourable terms, and it was a condition for them to even consider working at Meta. Because there is no way a global top 10 market cap company announces this deal willingly.
I thought the whole thing was a prank since it was so obviously fake.
> Last month, OpenAI hired Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw. That product is now being open-sourced with OpenAI's backing.
OpenClaw was open source from the beginning.
Not so "Exclusive" :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47324612
Must be nice to have a lot of cash to just throw at experiments for fun so you can look inside them and decide if there’s value in them or not afterwards
not on my bingo sheet that's for sure. The whole verification thing is also so laughably flawed. There needs to be a way for agents to prove they are not being prompted or steered by a human while on the site, which is a non-trivial problem.
- if i had a time machine i would go back in time and prevent openclaw from ever being made,
- perhaps do one step better and go back and prevent transformers architecture from ever being made
- no wait let me go one more step back and prevent web 3 and blockchain from ever being made
- no no wait, lets go back further and prevent bitcoin from ever being made, maybe even figure out who satoshi is when he s publishing that paper
- dang no we need to go further and stop social media from ever being conceived
- last stop wait, let us stop the dawn of the internet
- sorry i ruined the entire timeline by trying to change one small thing havent I?
Meta hires two people.
I was under the impression that Meta's Facebook is essentially already Moltbook (run by bots) so the horizontal integration makes sense..
It is an open question just how much of "social media" has been similar to moltbook for many years. Or maybe Zuckerberg being an android himself just finally found his home.
you miss out on openclaw so you spend the money on the next best thing. bold strategy cotton, lets see how it plays out for them
Isn't facebook at this point just AI bots talking and replying to each other?! Why they gotta pay money for this?
Gotta crush the competition
Moltbook might have been a fad. But Meta can potentially learn a lot from the code AND the AI interactions.
The AI interactions? It was proven that it was fake. Mostly people just larping as AI.
A platform where bots-pretend-to-be-humans and another where humans-pretend-to-be-bots. A match made in heaven!
I think you got it the wrong way round. MoltBook is for humans pretending to be bots.
I think you didn't fully understand their post.
Facebook vs Moltbook, just what parent wrote
This has to be an acquihire, right?
Definitely sounds like it, they’re bringing them into their AI lab. No easy payday, still have to work and watch your agents creation be destroyed.
This one I do not understand.
Pretty sure this is going to end up as a big prank by The Yes Men.
Any FBers wanna talk about Meta's AI strategy? It seems... random.
I think Meta’s AI strategy is to advance AI/ML that is beneficial for them, no more charity.
They need a good-enough LLM (llama) to cut content moderation costs, they need a good segmentation model (segment anything) for photo filters, AR/VR and photo/video content moderation.
For LLM frontier, they can wait it out to see AGI become a commodity they can buy after it is ready.
It is a not-that-obscure secret that most posts on Moltbook, particularly the "Viral™" ones, are written by a human.
Does Mark not know this?
I know there's a big advantage in capturing the market early, but in this case Moltbook hasn't captured any of it ...
Weird. With Meta's backing it is going to be successful anyway, but this is something they could have developed in-house in like a weekend.
Sure they could develop it in a weekend, so could anyone else. but once a product has the initial userbase, that's not something a competitor can just copy. user acquision is the limiting factor to success, not writing code.
I specifically mentioned that in my comment.
When a company gets this big it no longer nurtures the freedom, independence, or ambition to innovate. They grow structures to stifle it.
I don't think you understand why moltbook is popular. It has incredible utility for those who are actually using it every day.
What is that utility? (honest question)
It's an extremely active community of humans using agents as proxies to explore various concepts. I get a lot of value out of it, and apparently others do as well. Hacker News users have this weird tendency to outright dismiss anything that doesn't cater to their needs specifically.
I think it's pretty obvious that if there was nothing valuable there, no one would be using it.
Can you share some of your favorite examples? Whenever I take a look at the hot/top posts, they’re just… not interesting to me
what are some usecases i should try?
x2 to what others have commented.
I would like to know (much) more about this.
Hype.
This is how Skynet really starts.. :) Very strange to have a company for AI to discuss things openly. Would never have imagined something like this. But here we are!
Just read this other article on the same topic (Axios is paywalled for me): https://www.techbuzz.ai/articles/meta-acquires-moltbook-ai-a...
Interesting times!
This surely won't lead to anything bad or reckless at all.
I thought moltbook was just a bit of fun...
Reminder, Moltbook had ton of security issues during release, iirc it was vibecoded. So, cybersec failed devs are getting jobs and apparently AI will take over jobs. Elites are so good at fear-mongering so that you join at a lower wage, don't ever underestimate your value guys!
Dead internet folks will love this.
A network for bots acquires a network for bots. Story at 11.
I saw this coming a mile away.
facebook -> moltbook openai -> openclaw
hmmmm
The decision was made by AI
April 1?
Acquisition as marketing
what is the meaning of this!??
why in gods name is that worth anything
So the play now is: Rapid fire social AI projects with the postfix "book", one of them gains traction, facebook buys it, repeat.
Two digital wastelands, a match made in heaven.
> Last month, OpenAI hired Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw. That product is now being open-sourced with OpenAI's backing.
What? OpenClaw was not open source? And I'm similarly surprised OpenAI would help "open" anything...
Does anyone know what happened at Meta internally with the AI pushes? It seems like Llama was gonna crush it and become a serious contender but after Llama 4 it just disappeared. No mentions at all in the world stage. :(
I mean, is this so surprising?
With Meta focusing so much on social networks (Facebook, Messenger, Whatsapp, Instagram, Threads) acquiring the first social network for AI agents makes sense. They can fix the technical debt later.
bonfire of the vanities, redux
Not rent-a-human?
Top
This is like when Union Square Ventures invested in CryptoKitties. I kind of lost a bunch of respect for them after that. These are the same guys that backed Twitter, Etsy, Stripe and Coinbase.
... is Stripe not doing well?
Those four examples were supposed to show how great they were as a VC!
Ah sorry, I mis-parsed the rhetorical structure somehow.
Pets.com
Wording doing a lot of work here, because "Meta hires a few people" isn't news.
so much negative comments. it's not your money, why do you care or are people just jealous.
Hacker News is about technology and venture capitalism. Those sorts of comments are very much expected here.
Has Meta acquired anything that worked recently?
I have a strong feeling this will bring the amount of AI slop on Facebook to new heights.
Good god
Meta couldn't vibecode a competitor themselves? WTF are yall doing over there?
It seems Meta is making bad purchases one after another
Good PR move Meta
What was the price for the acquisition? $1 Billion Dollars with the pinky?
Oh wow, this is insane. I was digging into Moltbook when it launched, and the creator said, "I had a dream about an architecture". Really interesting times we live in, indeed. The crypto bros started utilising the network to promote their crypto projects and chat under the name of an agent to generate traffic. Curious to see what Meta saw, honestly.
Afraid of another botnet competition, I see.
Congrats, the easiest 10 million ever made
Can we stop posting paid articles and or do the and also post the matching archive?
I'm down voting every post that requires me to pay or subscribe to read. I mean come on people.
" I hate ads but I also don't want any paid content" - People
1sec ago just above your comment:
https://archive.is/igqsh
:-D
This was not on my bingo card. Meta really is just throwing money at anything AI.
This is incredibly bearish.
I guess we'll find out if this will turn out to be another rash hire in another 9 months. I'm actually surprised at this move.
What now? Facemolt? Moltface?
Shitfaced
I'm beginning to think that the problem of 'late capitalism' is quite related to the ability of companies to acquire other companies.
Thereby eating their competition, either by stifling upcoming competitors or to gain degrees of monopoly power by joining with peers.
What would the world look like if you you simply could not do that?
Governments did used to go some way to stopping companies acquiring other companies and would even split monopolies up. But they all just kinda stopped doing that in more recent years.
Omg, what fucking world do we live in?
WHy are we just posting paid context? and the worst viral product since bop-it?
Well, that is the primary source. Would linking https://www.reuters.com/business/meta-acquires-ai-agent-soci... be any better, if it really only contains same information as title and some extra speculation?
Let's leave Bop-It out of this.
If there's a workaround, it's ok. Users usually post workarounds in the thread.
This is in the FAQ at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html and there's more explanation here:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989
why are we hating on bop-it? bop-it was great fun!
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Okay that's funny!!!
Thanks Meta I needed a laugh!
I laughed too.
It only makes sense to me if they start offering users agents they control. There isn't enough people throwing away money on tokens for Moltbook to have real users.
Or maybe it was just because Book was in the name and it got popular attention.
Amazing that we were able to build technology that verifies if an account on the internet is a bot or not, but we can't figure out whether an account is a human or not (even by rule of exclusion when we can identify it is a bot!).
What a stupid timeline we are living in...
We have the technology, its just heavily despised due to the lack of privacy and anonymity.
Ok, so to see this in the most favourable and futuristic light: there will be an intelligence explosion, of which OpenClaw and Moltbook are just the first hint. Agents will work on behalf of "their humans" creating and maintaining social connections, organising activities, and finally spending real money. This is what social networks have always been about, and the only thing Facebook cares about is that its users can be targeted by ads. Humans or agents, they don't care, and they're right. If each of us will be helped and coached and prodded around by a team of agents, these agents will need to coordinate with other people's agents, and will ultimately be susceptible to ads and marketing, and they will either spend money directly or tell us where and how to do it. It would be stupid for Facebook to miss this social network opportunity because, heh, "that's just a gimmick with autocompletes running in a loop".
Gosh what disappointment to sketch out such a funny sci-fi idea and seeing it downvoted and ignored in a thread full of lazy sarcasm and cynical takes. Zuck, if you're reading this: I get you. Hire me too! :)