Elon was running some sort of $1m competition for the “best” Twitter post for a few months. I think those type of dissertations about Phrenology and the like have fallen off a cliff since the competition ended.
You are mistaken to assume there was a goal. Trump has admitted he did this because he was told that Iran were about to attack the U.S. not because of any strategic goal.
The internet has been full of brilliant dyslexics since the start, just as it has been full of brilliant blind people. Dyslexic people feeling that they must use AI to produce perfect prose lest they burden the lexics with clumsy spelling or grammar is far more hostile. We didn’t have slop machines 5 years ago.
> The internet has been full of brilliant dyslexics since the start
And they've been nitpicked to death for just as long. Now they have better tools to preempt that nitpicking, only to now be nitpicked over choosing to use those tools. Go figure.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The thing is, Facebook/Meta wasn't trying to make a product with 80k concurrent users, or even with 800k concurrent users. Facebook has 3 billion MAU, and they literally renamed the entire company to Meta - they were expecting it to be big, hundreds of millions of users.
They hoped it would be a platform for fitness classes, business meetings, college classrooms, shopping, attending concerts [1] and so on.
If the primary appeal of your VR universe is that your avatar can be an anthropomorphic banana, an anime girl, a furry, a giant penis with legs - that's never going to become a 300-million-user platform.
I think what Meta didn't realize (or maybe they did and ignored it) was that they were not pioneering the metaverse. They already existed on the platforms you just mentioned. I've never played Roblox or Second Life but I know kids and teens who live on Roblox and adults who live on Second Life. Those worlds _were_ their metaverses, and there was no reason to jump ship to another platform when they already had a digital life established. And meta just ended up making a shitty version of the metaverse anyway for the reason you mentioned.
It's not that the metaverse never took off — the popularity of Roblox and Second life (and other online social spaces) is proof that the metaverse was in demand. It's that Meta never gave people a reason to join their metaverse.
Note that I'm loosely defining the "metaverse" as any online world where the community is the point and people spend real money to "get ahead" in those worlds. Many MMOs can be metaverses in this sense. I've logged onto Final Fantasy XIV and saw people who logged on just to hang out at their friend's in-game house, not to play the game at all.
I think the biggest problem that you hint as is that "metaverse" is an ill-defined term. When they rebranded, and given that I had been working in the 3d industry for _many_ years, I couldn’t define what the metaverse was.
To some extent I still cant. The real indicator is when the crypto bros started peddling it, then we all knew it was shite.
Shocking to watch this human imitate us, no shade to anyone neurodivergent either, but obviously it could track he would allegedly[1] OK with his bots sexting literal children—he’s obviously only making an effort to be like us (but he isn’t)
[1]not by me; Mark, you can sue Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Oct ‘25)
> If the primary appeal of your VR universe is that your avatar can be an anthropomorphic banana, an anime girl, a furry, a giant penis with legs - that's never going to become a 300-million-user platform.
I mean the inherent appeal of VR is self-expression; being who you want to be, seeing the worlds you want to see. You won't get 300 million users with corporate slop either. That maybe works once, if ever, VR headsets become an interface suitable for white collar work, which they currently very much aren't, and then it wouldn't be the next Facebook - it'd be the next Microsoft Teams. Which is not really in line with Meta's other offerings, though they certainly wouldn't say no to it I guess. But I think a 500-user survey is all it would take to get a very clear signal that current VR is NOT about to replace Teams.
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 audience is the underground clubbers and kids behind the bike sheds of the digital world.
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
Indeed! Your comment is probably the most important in this thread. The Korean/German philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes a lot about losing humanity because of tech advances.
I am retired so this is easier for me to do: For every hour each day I spend on tech (personal AI research, writing) I spend 90 minutes hiking with friends, playing games like Bridge, enjoying meals with my wife and friends, reading good literature and philosophy, etc.
I worked for 50 years before retiring, but even working, I tried to balance human time vs. tech and work - often leaving 'money on the table' but it was worth it.
Pardon an old man ranting, but I think so many people seem caught up in the wrong things.
The SteamDB player number for VRChat is kind of underselling its size since half the player base is on other platforms, primarily running it standalone on Meta Quest.
A few days ago it reached 156k across all platforms because of some event that is outside my sphere of interest. And VRChat is generally above 100k per day peak nowadays.
https://metrics.vrchat.community/?orgId=1&refresh=30s&from=n...
But it is definitely limited by hardware and while it is constantly growing, its growth is dependent on there being a supply of relatively cheap hardware.
> 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?"
There is a niche interest. Meta bet was on the next iPhone. They were either way too early or completely off.
Though I’m personally happy to see massive corporations spend their money on pushing the state of the art in niche fields instead of using it for more evil stuff. I’m not sure why people care that they burn their own money on risky bets, that’s great for my point of view. We need more of that
I'm not sure how you define metaverse but some games where you get together with friends in virtual worlds like Fortnite have been pretty successful - $9bn+ revenue on that one. I've never been a big believer that it's important to strap the computer screen on your face rather than looking at it in the normal way.
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.
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.
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 Meta is otherwise a non-player.
Apple went down the same road, they see the same potential profits. I don’t think either is guilty of contemporaneous dot-com-boom thinking or investments with regard to VR/AR.
VR was never the endgame though. It was always AR, except, the "metaverse" bet assumed people were going to adopt AR in the same abundance that they adopted phones.
It was a cool concept, when you were dreaming it up while taking a shower in the morning getting ready for work thinking about the next big idea.
However, it's like those weird Uber/Lyft scooters that popped up in the 2010s. Those things were a cool concept too. However, we got to see right away that it was a terrible business idea for all kinds of reasons.
It took Meta several years (decade +) and 10s of billions of dollars and layoffs to realize, AR was a terrible business idea.
VR is a fun hobby though, and Oculus definitely owns that space.
I have had an Oculus 2 for many years and while I love it, I rarely spend more than an hour or two a month using it because time in VR competes with activities like walking outside getting fresh air and sun on my face or sitting with my wife or a friend having coffee, or spending time writing a book.
I think we need more wonderful technology that is designed for brief high-value periods of use.
A good example: I get huge value from using AI, but cumulatively I spend perhaps two to three hours a week using Claude or Gemini. Quality products that I appreciate but don't need to spend a lot of time with.
The metaverse is what happens when you let your leadership/product team convince you that the key to speed up what you want to deliver is to throw people at the problem, and not put any constraints on deliverables.
The original plan for oculus is to establish a VR eco system that would have transitioned into AR glasses, allowing facebook to have a platform of its own.
VR was/is a bit niche, because it required lots of expensive hardware, and there were limited games/uses.
first logical step: remove the need for a high end PC, make the thing cheap.
That drops one barrier to adoption: expense.
The next one is, great I have this $400 device that does VR, but what can I actually _do_ on it? That means you need content and features. This is where it all turned to shit. Zuck looked at steam, and itunes and said: "make it so", and they started tapping up devs to make small games, and AAA to make big ones.
But, its expensive to port games, and it takes time, why not buy studios that are making great games and get them to make more? so they bought a bunch of indie studios. Those studios had to fight to keep their devs, because facebook normally fires/rehires, forcing everyone to re-interview for their job. Games devs aren't really hired because they don't pass the technicals (Don't know why, given that games devs need to be good or the FPS drops like shit.)
with all that upheaval, those games studios don't really produce extra games to sell.
All the while a small team had been making a roblox clone. It was slow and a bit buggy, and you could make shitty games. During lockdown we all had a play. Needed a new generation of hardware to work properly, because it was a unity game with a bunch of hacks to allow custom maps and rules.
Never mind, we are doing E N T E R P R I S E now. enter work rooms. Again a small initiative, which basically asked, can we make better VC if we are in VR? The answer is yes, yes you can, but selling it is hard. There were a lot of hard problems to solve, like needed to detect keyboards, how do you present your screen if you can see your computer? how can you do computer passthrough or virtual monitors in VR?
Zuck saw this and jizzed his pants, so made it a priority. This meant the small team (probably less than 40) swelled to like 4000. Most of the people who moved were not games devs, or had ever worked in graphics/3d. This meant that loads of silly lessons had to be learnt in prod. Nothing was stable, everything was high friction, and no, there was no public API to allow you third parties to integrated into the app.
For the longest time it took >5 minutes to join a VR meeting.
Basically Zuck loves features, and cant understand that user experience is way way more important than features. He throws engineers at the problem which means that instead of solving product issues, they endup solving people issues.
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)
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. I'm a software engineer by trade and don't know shit about ML, but I want a nice tool to be able to do RLHF / DPO on Z-Image, so I'm working with Claude to build one, and so far it can use ComfyUI to generate the image pairs, and allows you to pick A vs. B then start a training run with layer offloading enabled so it fits in 16GB VRAM, and I haven't finished a training run yet, but steps are increasing and loss is changing so... I dunno... I see lots of software being created that wasn't before.
These are all local, though - if ideas were all that mattered, we'd see widely available ones, too.
I am not seeing them. (I would love to be proven wrong, because "how well does this work for not-one-off software" is a really important question for me)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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
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.
A polite request: English and Chinese are very different languages, asking AI to "translate" your thoughts sanitizes what you have to say, your words lose all of your personality -- a great shame. Participation from non-English speakers is wonderful but rather than use AI to "translate", using a literal translator (e.g: Google Translate, DeepL) will ensure we get to hear what you have to say, not what AI thinks you want to say.
The English that English speakers post on Hacker News is often grammatically incorrect, clumsy, misspelled, and that's okay, good, even. We want to hear from you!
(My preference is for translators to include both the original Chinese words, and the English translation because it means your fellow Chinese speakers get to read your exact words, but of course that is personal preference :)).
The shortage caused by the dispute between Underwood and Huy Fong was huge news at the time, there are millions of customers loyal to the brand and millions of customers saddened by the fall in quality. I don’t know if Underwood are astroturfing, maybe they are, but this is one of the few stories where this coverage could be entirely organic. If Coca Cola had a similar dispute that led to the flavor of Coke changing, you’d see even more posts like this from real people.
There’s also the slopification of the internet to consider. The human centipede style pass through of a story across platform after platform means the same story appears again and again and again. And that’s happening more and more as time goes on. One YouTube video that generates a few hundred thousand views can spawn hundreds of other videos, posts, tweets, podcasts… all across the internet.
Don’t know what it is about geek culture that leans so conspiratorial.
Sometimes I play a game; before clicking to read comments I try to come up with what the conspiracies will be. This one was obvious (since I’m familiar with the story).
What a strange thing to say. Not only do people frequently recommend carbonated beverages to each other, the upstream meme is even more off. People recommend operating systems to each other so much that there's an entire subculture known for that exact behavior.
No? I have recommended Freestyle sugar free soda as a way to replace heavy CocaCola consumption. Here in Mexico it's a big problem, and I helped me get out of the addiction. ( add Allulose to the soda to add the sweet)
It's a dopamine hit. It's addicting. The medium of the internet seems to add to this where most interactions are conversationally broken, because a thread is a bunch of people airdropping thoughts and never really coming back to back up their arguments or admit something was wrong.
The brain wants things to be simple so rewards you for simple solutions that are "better" and totally ignores complexity and nuance and reality because those are energetically expensive things to pay attention to.
I think its naive to think capitalism doesnt lead to dirty tricks. There's tons of PR and stealth marketing out there. The idea that our system is all "honest good guys" doesn't fit in with the facts.
That's easy. A geek's superpower is his brain, and his identity is being the smartest guy in the room. Belief in conspiracies means you know something that the masses do not, and you were too smart for the man to get one over on you. These beliefs, like all beliefs, are simple acts of ego preservation.
Same as any other conspiratorial thinking: they hold themselves in too high a regard and want to think they’re privy to some secret knowledge that the rubes have missed.
probably because the most obvious "it's exactly as described" is the most boring and uninteresting conclusion, thus you make it more interesting by proposing that it's a big conspiracy
> Don’t know what it is about geek culture that leans so conspiratorial.
It’s much wider. This is why QAnon and contemporary fascism spread. People love a story.
The QAA podcast deep-dives explaining conspiratorial thinking. They started with QAnon and then expanded. The episodes on the Queen of Canada (Romana Didulo) were especially interesting. She’s a dangerous person and so are her followers. Sovereign citizens, too (though they’ve abandoned that term). Think Freemen in Montana in the 90s.
>Don’t know what it is about geek culture that leans so conspiratorial.
The #1 goal one needs to accomplish to render an environment safe for the execution of conspiratorial activity, is to inure the occupants of said environment to the possibility of conspiratorial action taking place. Apriori dismissal shuts down game theoretic behavioral modeling in the operational loop, rendering concerted acts of manipulation near invisible. It's why Hanlon's Razor is both a heuristic for organizational productivity and alignment, and one of the greatest foundational psyops of all time. Assuming benevolent intent of other actors makes it easier to get things done, but makes it nigh impossible to defend oneself against actual malicious intent. Geekdom is one of the few niches where most participants routinely value depth first vs. breadth first knowledge. Deep understanding of behavior, and the nature of motivated reasoning and modelling asymmetry of information with regards to intent quickly makes assumption of benevolent intent a realistically untenable posture to maintain unconditionally. In big business or contexts that tend toward near zero-sum anyway. Is it exhausting? Absolutely. Does it keep you safe from people? Hell yes. Does it make life fun? That depends on the general character of the people you're generally surrounded by I suppose.
It would be interesting if google or some agent with enough frequent crawls of most social media could make visualizations over the years of certain viral stories and how they propagate in waves across the internet over time and how those waves interact. Would be a cool research project. Similar to Google Trends but internet-wide with some graph visualizations.
> If Coca Cola had a similar dispute that led to the flavor of Coke changing, you’d see even more posts like this from real people.
When Coke changed their formula in the 80's, people discussed it endlessly at the time. It made news and watercooler discussions. In Coke's case, it was self-inflicted, and they soon brought back the original (rebranded as "Coca-Cola Classic", which is what we have now).
It wouldn't surprise me if something similar is happening with social media and indeed a lot of the news is astroturfed to some extent, though I agree we shouldn't discount the extent to which people are willing to participate in this by reposting popular content for a quick ego/karma boost. And increasingly that reposting is done by bots.
I don’t know if Underwood are astroturfing, maybe they are, but this is one of the few stories where this coverage could be entirely organic.
There are a few competing products on my supermarket's shelf (FWIW, Underwood's is not among them), but only Underwood's gets mentioned in the post. Where there's smoke, there's fire.
You can't buy it through Amazon or Costco or HEB (their main outlets, apparently) at the moment, and there's a rumor that they've gone out of business.
They started making the hot sauce years after the main events referred to in the lawsuit.
Their socials are silent and the website is a godaddy landing page with just their logo.
I don't think these people are savvy submarine astroturfers.
If they did go out of business it's a shame, I buy their sauce by the boxful every year or so. It is legitimately better quality. Chili garlic sauce and sambal are also great.
I promise you I am not on the Underwood payroll, but it is definitely one of the better Sriracha alternatives. That it gives you a feel-good of supporting a sort-of-underdog, of course people are going to be drawn to it.
I think you are underestimating the love of the original Sriracha.
reply