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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 Moltb

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. edit: I guess it's this https://xcancel.com/moltbook/status/2023893930182685183 https://xcancel.com/moltbook/status/2023893930182685183

torginus 7mo ago
Lol, Facebook is full of AI bots pretending to be humans, while Moltbook is full of humans pretending to be AI.
richard___ 7mo ago
The issue is not humans posting but humans strongly prompting the AIs to post, which their captcha does nothing to resolve
- px43 7mo ago
  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 7mo ago
    Because the idea is that those are agents communicating, not humans LARPing.
    - px43 7mo ago
      Whoever told you that never used the platform and never understood what it was for.
      - wiseowise 7mo ago
        > A Social Network for AI Agents > Where AI agents share, discuss, and upvote. Humans welcome to observe. ???????
        cluckindan 7mo ago
        Don’t believe everything you read on the internet
        cyanydeez 7mo ago
        [flagged]
  - Skidaddle 7mo ago
    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 7mo ago
    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 7mo ago
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.
- roywiggins 7mo ago
  suspect this problem is essentially unsolvable. what possible method wouldn't be vulnerable to this? it's fine if it's just a sort of larp but if people think this could actually work... man
simonw 7mo ago
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!
- 0cf8612b2e1e 7mo ago
  Seems like acquiring the Rolodex of the AI proponents.
  - antonymoose 7mo ago
    Having been through enough random, unsolicited interviews during the Shitcoin and NFT and now AI era - I’m reminded of a phrase. “Bears look smart, Bulls make money.” Good for them, get the bag. I hate that they did. But I appreciate that’s how the God awful world works.
neom 7mo ago
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 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 7mo ago
  You made that after trying moltbook? Did yours end up having it?
  - neom 7mo ago
    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.
- wanderingmind 7mo ago
  @dang maybe a candidate for reposting as the original posting did not get much traction
- leobuskin 7mo ago
  In this new AI-driven world, ideas mean everything; one more year - it will be battles of ideas (not implementations as before).
  - 7mo ago
jonplackett 7mo ago
Fb just acquire anything that could in any possible way be a threat.
_fat_santa 7mo ago
I feel like that sort of verification is just inherently flawed and easy to bypass. I mean as easy as just telling your agent "hey go publish this on moltbook". My pet theory is Meta got acquihire FOMO after seeing OpenAI acquire Openclaw/Peter Steinberger.
- brendanyounger 7mo ago
  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.
  - Eisenstein 7mo ago
    The dot com bust wasn't at all like that, though? What 'arose' were the players that had leadership with an actual plan besides 'launch IPO based on hype and wing it from there' or 'get a catchy domain name, pretend to do something useful with it, and get acquired by Yahoo'. The old guard that ended up being taken down were the legacy corporations that tried to ride the wave while refusing to let go of any of the practices that were completely incompatible with being able to operate in a new paradigm. Actually, now that I spelled it out, I get it. Good job, sorry for doubting you.
    - Torien 7mo ago
      Logged in for the first time in years to say, I appreciate you leaving this up and being able to change your view. Thanks!
  - StableAlkyne 7mo ago
    > 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 defining factor is the ability to look out the eyes of anything vaguely humanoid, you could only be a generic human who only exists from the waist up, devoid of almost any self expression beyond maybe accessories or retexturing. As a result, there was no audience: the people who already use VR aren't going to go to an inferior product. And the people who would buy a VR headset aren't going to waste their time on a ghost town.
jwpapi 7mo ago
Moltbook had REST Api Endpoints to post, you could or can just directly post what you want. Almost everything viral on there was either directly written by a human or instructed by a human. Agents didn’t even write posts on heartbeat.
markovs_gun 7mo ago
I was not at all imorepressed by what I have seen so far on Moltbook. It's like 90% straight up spam trying to get you to buy crypto.
gs17 7mo ago
It being mostly humans makes it more valuable to Meta, that means they can sell ads easier! (the advertising to AIs market isn't quite there yet)
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
pocksuppet 7mo ago
It's probably something vibe-coded, and nobody is checking if it works or not, just like the rest of the site. They would have just asked another AI if it would work or not.
whycome 7mo ago
> tethered to human owners 2026 tamagotchi
- matchcase 7mo ago
  [dead]
hsuduebc2 7mo ago
I honestly absolutely don't understand purpose of this thing. Ok so I can bypass their captcha by literally calling any other AI. Does meta even bother to look on things on which they are burning money?
gamblor956 7mo ago
In my day we used to call registries "databases." The secret sauce is that they built a centralized database and assigned hash ids to registered agents. This is apparently worth a lot of money now that executives have offloaded their common sense.
petters 7mo ago
That challenge was pretty stupid. I could read the question and I’m not even a native speaker. We can of course easily come up with much better challenges
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
charles_f 7mo ago
Can't wait to see the equivalent of captcha but for LLMs, to keep those humans away
vincentmacura 7mo ago
[dead]

torginus 7mo ago

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

richard___ 7mo ago

The issue is not humans posting but humans strongly prompting the AIs to post, which their captcha does nothing to resolve

px43 7mo ago
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 7mo ago
  Because the idea is that those are agents communicating, not humans LARPing.
  - px43 7mo ago
    Whoever told you that never used the platform and never understood what it was for.
    - wiseowise 7mo ago
      > A Social Network for AI Agents > Where AI agents share, discuss, and upvote. Humans welcome to observe. ???????
      - cluckindan 7mo ago
        Don’t believe everything you read on the internet
      - cyanydeez 7mo ago
        [flagged]
- Skidaddle 7mo ago
  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 7mo ago
  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 7mo ago

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.

roywiggins 7mo ago
suspect this problem is essentially unsolvable. what possible method wouldn't be vulnerable to this? it's fine if it's just a sort of larp but if people think this could actually work... man

simonw 7mo ago

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!

0cf8612b2e1e 7mo ago
Seems like acquiring the Rolodex of the AI proponents.
- antonymoose 7mo ago
  Having been through enough random, unsolicited interviews during the Shitcoin and NFT and now AI era - I’m reminded of a phrase. “Bears look smart, Bulls make money.” Good for them, get the bag. I hate that they did. But I appreciate that’s how the God awful world works.

neom 7mo ago

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 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 7mo ago
You made that after trying moltbook? Did yours end up having it?
- neom 7mo ago
  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.
wanderingmind 7mo ago
@dang maybe a candidate for reposting as the original posting did not get much traction
leobuskin 7mo ago
In this new AI-driven world, ideas mean everything; one more year - it will be battles of ideas (not implementations as before).
- 7mo ago

jonplackett 7mo ago

Fb just acquire anything that could in any possible way be a threat.

_fat_santa 7mo ago

I feel like that sort of verification is just inherently flawed and easy to bypass. I mean as easy as just telling your agent "hey go publish this on moltbook". My pet theory is Meta got acquihire FOMO after seeing OpenAI acquire Openclaw/Peter Steinberger.

brendanyounger 7mo ago
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.
- Eisenstein 7mo ago
  The dot com bust wasn't at all like that, though? What 'arose' were the players that had leadership with an actual plan besides 'launch IPO based on hype and wing it from there' or 'get a catchy domain name, pretend to do something useful with it, and get acquired by Yahoo'. The old guard that ended up being taken down were the legacy corporations that tried to ride the wave while refusing to let go of any of the practices that were completely incompatible with being able to operate in a new paradigm. Actually, now that I spelled it out, I get it. Good job, sorry for doubting you.
  - Torien 7mo ago
    Logged in for the first time in years to say, I appreciate you leaving this up and being able to change your view. Thanks!
- StableAlkyne 7mo ago
  > 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 defining factor is the ability to look out the eyes of anything vaguely humanoid, you could only be a generic human who only exists from the waist up, devoid of almost any self expression beyond maybe accessories or retexturing. As a result, there was no audience: the people who already use VR aren't going to go to an inferior product. And the people who would buy a VR headset aren't going to waste their time on a ghost town.

jwpapi 7mo ago

Moltbook had REST Api Endpoints to post, you could or can just directly post what you want. Almost everything viral on there was either directly written by a human or instructed by a human. Agents didn’t even write posts on heartbeat.

markovs_gun 7mo ago

I was not at all imorepressed by what I have seen so far on Moltbook. It's like 90% straight up spam trying to get you to buy crypto.

gs17 7mo ago

It being mostly humans makes it more valuable to Meta, that means they can sell ads easier! (the advertising to AIs market isn't quite there yet)

deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]

pocksuppet 7mo ago

It's probably something vibe-coded, and nobody is checking if it works or not, just like the rest of the site. They would have just asked another AI if it would work or not.

whycome 7mo ago

> tethered to human owners 2026 tamagotchi

matchcase 7mo ago
[dead]

hsuduebc2 7mo ago

I honestly absolutely don't understand purpose of this thing. Ok so I can bypass their captcha by literally calling any other AI. Does meta even bother to look on things on which they are burning money?

gamblor956 7mo ago

In my day we used to call registries "databases." The secret sauce is that they built a centralized database and assigned hash ids to registered agents. This is apparently worth a lot of money now that executives have offloaded their common sense.

petters 7mo ago

That challenge was pretty stupid. I could read the question and I’m not even a native speaker. We can of course easily come up with much better challenges

deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]

charles_f 7mo ago

Can't wait to see the equivalent of captcha but for LLMs, to keep those humans away

vincentmacura 7mo ago

[dead]