Meta acquires Moltbook / hacker news

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.

"spend less time focused on doing what you think is the right thing and spend more time tinkering" may as well have been Adolf Eichmann's personal motto.

uhhh that's a wild take

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?

it's the AI wave of the original viral app store apps like "Yo" and "I am Rich".

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.

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.

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

I'm reminded of the potato salad kickstarter.

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.

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.

FACO, f around and cash out

> now they're working for not-serious people

Worse, they are working for extreme sociopaths.

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.

vibe hiring.

better than leetcode.

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 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.

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'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)

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!

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.

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

Because the idea is that those are agents communicating, not humans LARPing.

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.

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.

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).

"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)

I heard YCombinator definitely want to buy ClackerNews: https://clackernews.com/

We could have an AI Dang.

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 think the medical term for this is synchronous malignancies

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 didn't realize Moltbook and OpenClaw - were created by different people.

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 like 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.

Agreed. He needed an "Eric Schmidt" about ten years 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

This has to be an acquihire, right?

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.

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.

They will have to acquire Lobstagram next

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.

Hear, hear. Add Scam Altman here too with hiring OpenClaw creator.

Is the market so bad that non-exec-level new hires are making the news?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Not so "Exclusive" :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47324612

Okay that's funny!!!

Thanks Meta I needed a laugh!

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

So where are the cool agents going to move to now?

I thought the whole thing was a prank since it was so obviously fake.

> 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.

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.

The decision was made by AI

Acquisition as marketing

https://archive.is/igqsh

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.

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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)

Hype.

Congrats, the easiest 10 million ever made

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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 was not on my bingo card. Meta really is just throwing money at anything AI.

Has Meta acquired anything that worked recently?

This is incredibly bearish.

What now? Facemolt? Moltface?

Afraid of another botnet competition, I see.

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.

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?

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?

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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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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

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