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Meta acquires Moltbook

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Re: Meta acquires Moltbook

#31

Post by saberience »

3rodents wrote: post #24

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 ve…

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.

Re: Meta acquires Moltbook

#32

Post by [deleted] »

zvqcMMV6Zcr wrote: post #29
june-jule wrote: post #15

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?

[deleted]

Re: Meta acquires Moltbook

#33

Post by dang »

june-jule wrote: post #15

WHy are we just posting paid context? and the worst viral product since bop-it?

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

Re: Meta acquires Moltbook

#34

Post by heathrow83829 »

moralestapia wrote: post #17

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.

Re: Meta acquires Moltbook

#35

Post by moralestapia »

heathrow83829 wrote: post #34
moralestapia wrote: post #17

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.

Re: Meta acquires Moltbook

#36

Post by jacknews »

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?

Re: Meta acquires Moltbook

#37

Post by simonw »

3rodents wrote: post #24

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 ve…

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!

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