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Meta acquires Moltbook

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Re: Meta acquires Moltbook

#341

Post by chris_money202 »

bonesss wrote: post #333
brendanyounger wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 M…

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

Re: Meta acquires Moltbook

#342

Post by m4rtink »

StableAlkyne wrote: post #315
brendanyounger wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 de…

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.

Re: Meta acquires Moltbook

#343

Post by kakacik »

Duralias wrote: post #323
georgefrowny wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 au…

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

Re: Meta acquires Moltbook

#344

Post by torginus »

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…

Lol, Facebook is full of AI bots pretending to be humans, while Moltbook is full of humans pretending to be AI.

Re: Meta acquires Moltbook

#345

Post by joe_mamba »

firecall wrote: post #258
joe_mamba wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 th…

Why are you pointing out the rules? Did anyone break them?

Re: Meta acquires Moltbook

#346

Post by Pamar »

latentsea wrote: post #319
groby_b wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

So basically like Excel since the 80s?

Re: Meta acquires Moltbook

#347

Post by kgwgk »

phaser wrote: post #54

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

Re: Meta acquires Moltbook

#348

Post by mbel »

leobuskin wrote: post #280
neom wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wa…

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.

Re: Meta acquires Moltbook

#349

Post by Barrin92 »

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,…

>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

Re: Meta acquires Moltbook

#350

Post by ben_w »

StableAlkyne wrote: post #315
brendanyounger wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 de…

> 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

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