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Meta acquires Moltbook

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Re: Meta acquires Moltbook

#141

Post by brentm »

ryandrake wrote: post #134
cimi_ wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It feels like the clowns have been winning my entire career.

Clowns get the attention and the attention usually makes for winners.

Re: Meta acquires Moltbook

#142

Post by samiv »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #133
cimi_ wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

Re: Meta acquires Moltbook

#143

Post by kubb »

oldestofsports wrote: post #102
igleria wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

Re: Meta acquires Moltbook

#144

Post by alex1138 »

dabedee wrote: post #80

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,…

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

Re: Meta acquires Moltbook

#146

Post by zooweemama »

tartoran wrote: post #76
RajT88 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Meta acquires Moltbook

#147

Post by armchairhacker »

ardeaver wrote: post #43

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.

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).

Re: Meta acquires Moltbook

#148

Post by px43 »

Skidaddle wrote: post #62
px43 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Meta acquires Moltbook

#149

Post by MainlyMortal »

eddythompson80 wrote: post #129
RulerOf wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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…

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.
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