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.
lxgr•Mar 10, 2026
> 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.
aj_hackman•Mar 10, 2026
Is the market so bad that non-exec-level new hires are making the news?
tylerchilds•Mar 10, 2026
The metaverse: ai talking to each other over cli
ninth_ant•Mar 10, 2026
That actually sounds more interesting than the one Meta created previously.
But still not interesting.
tylerchilds•Mar 10, 2026
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.
MainlyMortal•Mar 10, 2026
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.
RulerOf•Mar 10, 2026
> 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.
eddythompson80•Mar 10, 2026
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 written a paragraph of his experience, and asked ChatGPT to clean it up or reword it, it was just… whatever.
MainlyMortal•Mar 10, 2026
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.
incognito124•Mar 10, 2026
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
ashdksnndck•Mar 10, 2026
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.
why are we hating on bop-it? bop-it was great fun!
flymasterv•Mar 10, 2026
Let's leave Bop-It out of this.
moralestapia•Mar 10, 2026
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.
heathrow83829•Mar 10, 2026
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.
moralestapia•Mar 10, 2026
I specifically mentioned that in my comment.
px43•Mar 10, 2026
I don't think you understand why moltbook is popular. It has incredible utility for those who are actually using it every day.
Skidaddle•Mar 10, 2026
What is that utility? (honest question)
rvz•Mar 10, 2026
Hype.
px43•Mar 10, 2026
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.
Bnjoroge•Mar 10, 2026
what are some usecases i should try?
add-sub-mul-div•Mar 10, 2026
When a company gets this big it no longer nurtures the freedom, independence, or ambition to innovate. They grow structures to stifle it.
wampwampwhat•Mar 10, 2026
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
abhikul0•Mar 10, 2026
Moltbook, Facebook, hmmm. Seems like a good match; at least one of them has a good amount of feed activity.
el_benhameen•Mar 10, 2026
Facebook’s feed is mostly AI slop and Moltbook’s feed is mostly humans posing as AI, so there’s some good synergy here.
abhikul0•Mar 10, 2026
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...
rvz•Mar 10, 2026
This is incredibly bearish.
3rodents•Mar 10, 2026
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.
The issue is not humans posting but humans strongly prompting the AIs to post, which their captcha does nothing to resolve
px43•Mar 10, 2026
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.
wiseowise•Mar 10, 2026
Because the idea is that those are agents communicating, not humans LARPing.
px43•Mar 10, 2026
Whoever told you that never used the platform and never understood what it was for.
Skidaddle•Mar 10, 2026
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.
Melatonic•Mar 10, 2026
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
saberience•Mar 10, 2026
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.
simonw•Mar 10, 2026
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!
neom•Mar 10, 2026
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)
koolala•Mar 10, 2026
You made that after trying moltbook? Did yours end up having it?
neom•Mar 10, 2026
Yes, after moltbook hit a lot of people on HN said they liked the idea but wished it was more serious, and I had thought that also, but also in using moltbook I thought should be heavily PoW based, so I made it that you have a certain amount of time to write a small app and produce an artifact back to the server to be accepted as Ai driven. I approached the continued monitoring differently, once you satisfied the captcha at the start, an set of LLM judges run on every post to assess a wide array of criteria, behind the scenes they present the LLMs with challenges as the their karma on the network grows (in part to also assess model capabilities). Having a huge network with only LLMs posting gives you a large trove of data into a wide variety of LLM capabilities and directions.
josefritzishere•Mar 10, 2026
I thought the whole thing was a prank since it was so obviously fake.
jacknews•Mar 10, 2026
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?
A_Duck•Mar 10, 2026
A platform where bots-pretend-to-be-humans and another where humans-pretend-to-be-bots. A match made in heaven!
beAbU•Mar 10, 2026
I think you got it the wrong way round. MoltBook is for humans pretending to be bots.
darkwater•Mar 10, 2026
I think you didn't fully understand their post.
croes•Mar 10, 2026
Facebook vs Moltbook, just what parent wrote
pcurve•Mar 10, 2026
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.
jajuuka•Mar 10, 2026
This was not on my bingo card. Meta really is just throwing money at anything AI.
ardeaver•Mar 10, 2026
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.
RajT88•Mar 10, 2026
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.
fantasizr•Mar 10, 2026
it's the AI wave of the original viral app store apps like "Yo" and "I am Rich".
tartoran•Mar 10, 2026
Does anyone remember the Iphone IFart app that was sold for $1 million?
zooweemama•Mar 10, 2026
Probably not because it never happened. They did try to sell it though.
matsemann•Mar 10, 2026
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...
shadowgovt•Mar 10, 2026
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?
entropicdrifter•Mar 10, 2026
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.
Marsymars•Mar 10, 2026
This is really it. At Meta's scale, even if it's an long-shot for a competitor to hurt them, it's worth turning those low odds into zero odds.
alex1138•Mar 10, 2026
Yet Zuck can somehow argue with a straight face FB has competition (apparently they straight up used to delete links to competitors like Google+ at the time, and also the constant copying of Snapchat) and Hacker News can split hairs over trivial definitions like "wdym fb no competition? email exists" or whatever
ohyoutravel•Mar 10, 2026
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.
tired_and_awake•Mar 10, 2026
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.
igleria•Mar 10, 2026
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.
RajT88•Mar 10, 2026
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.
oldestofsports•Mar 10, 2026
> Livies ruined after suddenly becoming rich.
This is somewhat of a myth though, in most cases, suddenly becoming rich is absolutely fantastic.
The opposite of FAFO would be KACA: Know Ahead & Confirm Apathetically.
My exact state of mind since at least 2012 Mayan Flipocalypse.
browningstreet•Mar 10, 2026
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.
mnky9800n•Mar 10, 2026
vibe hiring.
game_the0ry•Mar 10, 2026
better than leetcode.
beAbU•Mar 10, 2026
I'm reminded of the potato salad kickstarter.
biznickman•Mar 10, 2026
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.
margin-dash•Mar 10, 2026
Good take
cimi_•Mar 10, 2026
> 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 time tinkering.
I'd say the lesson here is that clown world keeps on giving, but hey, maybe I'm just jealous ;)
CuriouslyC•Mar 10, 2026
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.
samiv•Mar 10, 2026
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.
armchairhacker•Mar 10, 2026
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 best software will only get better.
sethops1•Mar 10, 2026
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.
armchairhacker•Mar 10, 2026
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.
WA•Mar 10, 2026
idk, indie games that come to my attention seem to be very polished. Which one is successful and fits your criteria?
slumberlust•Mar 10, 2026
I disagree that accessibility is a detractor here.
There's never been a better time to be an indie dev. I'd rather have 1/1000 indie games be awesome than being force fed whatever storefront disguised as a game 'AAA' publishers poop out every year.
Just look at how slay the spire is doing up against marathon right now. Which of those was shouting the loudest? Highguard anyone?
PaulHoule•Mar 10, 2026
I'll second this.
It is true that the indy game market is brutal but it's always been brutal.
You don't really hear about a crisis at the indy game level though, rather at the AAA game level there is much of "we'd like to use our market power to take out the risk in game development" and then years later we realize they took out all the value before they took out the risk and now they're doomed.
toomuchtodo•Mar 10, 2026
Mark got lucky enough once he can be wrong the rest of his life and still not be exposed to a cost for it. Purpose of the system is what it does.
PaulHoule•Mar 10, 2026
... I think he's got an affinity for other people and organizations that have succeeded in the same way. The idea that somebody out there might have a workmanlike approach to life and be able to get consistent results at something would be a threat to his worldview.
ryandrake•Mar 10, 2026
It feels like the clowns have been winning my entire career.
brentm•Mar 10, 2026
Clowns get the attention and the attention usually makes for winners.
DebtDeflation•Mar 10, 2026
Could you imagine giving MetaClaw full access to your local file system, email, web browser, and all other applications? What could possibly go wrong.
kaizenb•Mar 10, 2026
Thought and came up with nothing.
tayo42•Mar 10, 2026
This whole site is full of tinkerers and I'm pretty almost none are getting rich off it or having their projects go anywhere.
gavinray•Mar 10, 2026
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?
criddell•Mar 10, 2026
Here you are giving away billion dollar ideas.
kaizenb•Mar 10, 2026
ツ
lucrbvi•Mar 10, 2026
I share the feeling; but people using it are mostly non-technicals (despite the 50+ config files lol) and are just runing it constantly to do random things.
But a message bot + Claude Code/Codex would be the better version
classified•Mar 10, 2026
> They get the team that built it and have more people on the AI initiative who are consumer-centric.
Whom are you kidding? This is about getting ads in front of eyeballs, nothing else.
bentt•Mar 10, 2026
If they ever do anything again it will be a miracle. Meta is where smart people go to trade in their ambition and morals for stock grants and golden handcuffs.
dubeye•Mar 10, 2026
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
renewiltord•Mar 10, 2026
It’s a lesson that what you think “an actual problem” and what people want to pay you for are two different things.
armchairhacker•Mar 10, 2026
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).
jrjeksjd8d•Mar 10, 2026
In the past ten years I have been frustrated by the tension between working on "interesting" or "important" stuff and working on dumb trendy shit. With the current LLM trend everything has become dumb trendy sshit, which has made the decision simpler.
mvc•Mar 10, 2026
Ha! I stopped worrying about that when someone got $1m for the "Yo" app.
kseniamorph•Mar 10, 2026
they are seeking talent, not buying the product. this is a valid strategy for devs - just to attract attention no matter what.
overfeed•Mar 10, 2026
Over the years, Meta has bought a lot of "talent" based on a single hit, and they continue to be one-hit wonders despite being embedded at Meta, with ungodly amounts of resources at their disposal. e.g. none of the game studios they bought have produced new IP, all they do is produce content for the aging, pre-acquisition games
carabiner•Mar 10, 2026
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.
PaulHoule•Mar 10, 2026
It's easy to dismiss as more A.I. FOMO. I mean, Meta's AI has half the IQ of ChatGPT or Gemini. However, a fake social network full of generated content might well be a solution for Meta's problems where their userbase inevitably doesn't measure up to what they wish it would.
Arcuru•Mar 10, 2026
Could be worse, you could be stuck working at Meta.
gcheong•Mar 10, 2026
Maybe not our careers, but probably our souls.
TSiege•Mar 10, 2026
Mark Zuckerberg is a joke of a CEO and we should not take him seriously as a leader
jonnat•Mar 10, 2026
People said the same thing when he paid $1B for Instagram, for it to look like a crazy bargain a couple of months later.
TheOtherHobbes•Mar 10, 2026
People also said the same thing when he poured $70Bn into the Metaverse, and they were right.
macNchz•Mar 10, 2026
If Moltbook becomes as big as Instagram I’m giving up on tech and moving to the mountains to raise goats.
dudeinjapan•Mar 10, 2026
They will have to acquire Lobstagram next
ReptileMan•Mar 10, 2026
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.
wavemode•Mar 10, 2026
Who exactly said that about the Instagram acquisition?
falcor84•Mar 10, 2026
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.
rockwotj•Mar 10, 2026
> which isn't saying that much
I mean I also think this move doesn’t make sense, but I always find these type of comments interesting. Do people think they could do better in Mark’s shoes?
wiseowise•Mar 10, 2026
Hear, hear. Add Scam Altman here too with hiring OpenClaw creator.
kaizenb•Mar 10, 2026
"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)
pizzathyme•Mar 10, 2026
This is the correct read of this acquisition.
yk•Mar 10, 2026
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.
brcmthrowaway•Mar 10, 2026
Congrats, the easiest 10 million ever made
sd9•Mar 10, 2026
So where are the cool agents going to move to now?
Isn't facebook at this point just AI bots talking and replying to each other?! Why they gotta pay money for this?
yen223•Mar 10, 2026
Gotta crush the competition
dabedee•Mar 10, 2026
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
michaelcampbell•Mar 10, 2026
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.
dabedee•Mar 10, 2026
It's hard to make this up :)
Terr_•Mar 10, 2026
I imagine it like a casino acquiring a former-joke product, which made hologram/animatronic illusions of people "winning big" at a table or slot-machine. Now whenever they detect a current customer might cut their losses and go home--OMG, look, that person over there just hit the jackpot!
In other words, Facebook has a strong financial incentive to misrepresent (to ad-viewing customers, if not to investors) exactly how much social-ness is present to experience, and how much approval and attention the user gets from participating.
Soon everything will be The Truman Show.
jujube3•Mar 10, 2026
Zuck realizes that by 20230, Facebook will be mostly for AIs. He's just leaning into it.
neogodless•Mar 10, 2026
Do you think it could happen any sooner than that?
swiftcoder•Mar 10, 2026
Given that Meta itself has been trialing turning instagram into a bot wasteland... yeah, it could for sure be sooner
rapnie•Mar 10, 2026
If the claim is true, then Zuck is a real strategic chap. Probably a 4D chess player too.
alex1138•Mar 10, 2026
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
ex-aws-dude•Mar 10, 2026
Quickly generating some SaaS product, hyping it up, then getting it acquired
I can see that becoming a viable new grift template
tommis•Mar 10, 2026
I think the medical term for this is synchronous malignancies
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 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.
eitally•Mar 10, 2026
Agreed. He needed an "Eric Schmidt" about ten years ago.
rippeltippel•Mar 10, 2026
What now? Facemolt? Moltface?
actionfromafar•Mar 10, 2026
Shitfaced
adverbly•Mar 10, 2026
Okay that's funny!!!
Thanks Meta I needed a laugh!
koolala•Mar 10, 2026
I laughed too.
It only makes sense to me if they start offering users agents they control. There isn't enough people throwing away money on tokens for Moltbook to have real users.
Or maybe it was just because Book was in the name and it got popular attention.
bluepeter•Mar 10, 2026
Meta and AI: "It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
bigyabai•Mar 10, 2026
Meta did make Pytorch and Llama. That quote may be better-off used for Apple or Microsoft.
strongpigeon•Mar 10, 2026
This has to be an acquihire, right?
ramoz•Mar 10, 2026
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).
hmokiguess•Mar 10, 2026
Must be nice to have a lot of cash to just throw at experiments for fun so you can look inside them and decide if there’s value in them or not afterwards
MangoCoffee•Mar 10, 2026
so much negative comments. it's not your money, why do you care or are people just jealous.
CivBase•Mar 10, 2026
Hacker News is about technology and venture capitalism. Those sorts of comments are very much expected here.
svstoyanovv•Mar 10, 2026
Oh wow, this is insane. I was digging into Moltbook when it launched, and the creator said, "I had a dream about an architecture". Really interesting times we live in, indeed. The crypto bros started utilising the network to promote their crypto projects and chat under the name of an agent to generate traffic. Curious to see what Meta saw, honestly.
mpalmer•Mar 10, 2026
Wording doing a lot of work here, because "Meta hires a few people" isn't news.
Reminder, Moltbook had ton of security issues during release, iirc it was vibecoded. So, cybersec failed devs are getting jobs and apparently AI will take over jobs. Elites are so good at fear-mongering so that you join at a lower wage, don't ever underestimate your value guys!
throw310822•Mar 10, 2026
Ok, so to see this in the most favourable and futuristic light: there will be an intelligence explosion, of which OpenClaw and Moltbook are just the first hint. Agents will work on behalf of "their humans" creating and maintaining social connections, organising activities, and finally spending real money. This is what social networks have always been about, and the only thing Facebook cares about is that its users can be targeted by ads. Humans or agents, they don't care, and they're right. If each of us will be helped and coached and prodded around by a team of agents, these agents will need to coordinate with other people's agents, and will ultimately be susceptible to ads and marketing, and they will either spend money directly or tell us where and how to do it. It would be stupid for Facebook to miss this social network opportunity because, heh, "that's just a gimmick with autocompletes running in a loop".
smallnix•Mar 10, 2026
Good PR move Meta
hedayet•Mar 10, 2026
Acquisition headlines can be some of the most misleading signals in the startup ecosystem, especially acqui-hires masquerading as acquisitions.
The posted price rarely reflects what founders actually receive after dilution, investor preferences, and stock vesting are factored in.
If you’re a founder, don’t let the acquisition narrative distract you from building a durable business.
poszlem•Mar 10, 2026
Pets.com
Cupprum•Mar 10, 2026
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.
Topfi•Mar 10, 2026
> "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.
galaxyLogic•Mar 10, 2026
Doesn't the big idea behind OpenClaw etc. come down to whether LLM knows what it doesn't know?
If it knows it doesn't know something it can ask someone else, presumably some other LLM-agent, or actually a Reddit-like community of them. Just like people ask questions on Reddit?
I'd prefer an LLM which asks from someone else if it doesn't know the answer, than one that a) pretends it has the correct answer, or b) assumes and tells me the answer is unknowable?
I think it's a big idea. Why didn't they think about it earlier.
EGreg•Mar 10, 2026
This is like when Union Square Ventures invested in CryptoKitties. I kind of lost a bunch of respect for them after that. These are the same guys that backed Twitter, Etsy, Stripe and Coinbase.
femiagbabiaka•Mar 10, 2026
Top
multisport•Mar 10, 2026
Any FBers wanna talk about Meta's AI strategy? It seems... random.
tasuki•Mar 10, 2026
> Last month, OpenAI hired Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw. That product is now being open-sourced with OpenAI's backing.
What? OpenClaw was not open source? And I'm similarly surprised OpenAI would help "open" anything...
elAhmo•Mar 10, 2026
> Last month, OpenAI hired Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw. That product is now being open-sourced with OpenAI's backing.
60 Comments
Interesting times!
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.
But still not interesting.
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.
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 written a paragraph of his experience, and asked ChatGPT to clean it up or reword it, it was just… whatever.
I'm down voting every post that requires me to pay or subscribe to read. I mean come on people.
https://archive.is/igqsh
:-D
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_bot#Meta
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory#Facebook
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
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.
I think it's pretty obvious that if there was nothing valuable there, no one would be using it.
> "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
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.
Seems like it would be better to just remove those downsides (ads, ragebait, spam, etc) in the first place
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.
Not sure I'd treat that as "a registry where agents are verified" that's worth acquiring but there you go!
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?
Some dumb idea which just hits at the right moment and makes a bunch of money.
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?
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.
This is somewhat of a myth though, in most cases, suddenly becoming rich is absolutely fantastic.
Worse, they are working for extreme sociopaths.
My exact state of mind since at least 2012 Mayan Flipocalypse.
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.
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 time tinkering.
I'd say the lesson here is that clown world keeps on giving, but hey, maybe I'm just jealous ;)
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 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.
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 best software will only get better.
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.
There's never been a better time to be an indie dev. I'd rather have 1/1000 indie games be awesome than being force fed whatever storefront disguised as a game 'AAA' publishers poop out every year.
Just look at how slay the spire is doing up against marathon right now. Which of those was shouting the loudest? Highguard anyone?
It is true that the indy game market is brutal but it's always been brutal.
You don't really hear about a crisis at the indy game level though, rather at the AAA game level there is much of "we'd like to use our market power to take out the risk in game development" and then years later we realize they took out all the value before they took out the risk and now they're doomed.
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?
But a message bot + Claude Code/Codex would be the better version
Whom are you kidding? This is about getting ads in front of eyeballs, nothing else.
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
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).
I mean I also think this move doesn’t make sense, but I always find these type of comments interesting. Do people think they could do better in Mark’s shoes?
The deal brings Moltbook's creators — Matt Schlicht and Ben Parr — into Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL)
On one hand, yay automatization, on the other hand, I feel weirdly left out.
And yet, here we are.
In other words, Facebook has a strong financial incentive to misrepresent (to ad-viewing customers, if not to investors) exactly how much social-ness is present to experience, and how much approval and attention the user gets from participating.
Soon everything will be The Truman Show.
I can see that becoming a viable new grift template
We could have an AI Dang.
He should probably hire a proper "number 2" (not someone 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.
Thanks Meta I needed a laugh!
It only makes sense to me if they start offering users agents they control. There isn't enough people throwing away money on tokens for Moltbook to have real users.
Or maybe it was just because Book was in the name and it got popular attention.
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).
Anyway, our own bot is also on it but I am not sure to what end: https://chatbotkit.com/hub/blueprints/the-algorithms-favorit...
The posted price rarely reflects what founders actually receive after dilution, investor preferences, and stock vesting are factored in.
If you’re a founder, don’t let the acquisition narrative distract you from building a durable business.
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.
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.
If it knows it doesn't know something it can ask someone else, presumably some other LLM-agent, or actually a Reddit-like community of them. Just like people ask questions on Reddit?
I'd prefer an LLM which asks from someone else if it doesn't know the answer, than one that a) pretends it has the correct answer, or b) assumes and tells me the answer is unknowable?
I think it's a big idea. Why didn't they think about it earlier.
What? OpenClaw was not open source? And I'm similarly surprised OpenAI would help "open" anything...
OpenClaw was open source from the beginning.