Live data from Hacker News

Meta acquires Moltbook

axios.com

181–190 of 406 posts

Re: Meta acquires Moltbook

#181

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.

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.

Re: Meta acquires Moltbook

#182
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 al…

> 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 tim…

Could you imagine giving MetaClaw full access to your local file system, email, web browser, and all other applications? What could possibly go wrong.

Re: Meta acquires Moltbook

#183

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.

Re: Meta acquires Moltbook

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Re: Meta acquires Moltbook

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Meta acquires Moltbook

#187

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 al…

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?

Re: Meta acquires Moltbook

#188
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.

Re: Meta acquires Moltbook

#189
> "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.

Post reply on HN