[postalcoder]

The top three stories on hn right now:

  1. ▲ Moltbook (moltbook.com)
       538 points by teej 8 hours ago | hide | 293 comments
  
  2. ▲ Software Pump and Dump (tautvilas.lt)
       108 points by brisky 5 hours ago | hide | 25 comments
  
  3. ▲ OpenClaw – Moltbot Renamed Again (openclaw.ai)
       256 points by ed 6 hours ago | hide | 110 comments

This is art.

[enopod_]

TIL about all that stuff, Moltbook, Openclaw, Gas Town, and I don't get it anymore. It's too much. Forums for chatbots with their own religion but its actually a crypto scam and vibecoded hypesoftware to scam people with sh*tcoins because yolo and whatnot. I'm out.

[skeeter2020]

I read a bit about Gas Town, and I'm still confused if it's a super-inception, metajoke that I don't get; or a clever, invite-only party to which I'm not invited. All the original article (and the discussions & responses to the responses) did was make me feel stupid, but I have enough experience and self-worth to know I'm not stupid so I'm just going to refuse to play. I recently spent more than a week pretty disconnected from this all and haven't felt that good in a long time!

[bigbadfeline]

I checked the thing (whatever its name was) when I first saw it on NH and after 5 minutes decided it was a scam, skipping all news about it since.

[whattheheckheck]

The open claw guy doesn't like Gastown, mcp, nor Ralph bot

[u_sama]

Life is beautiful, you have both sides of religious sects of AI here. The iconoclasts and the believers, which ends up in funny situations like this

[rodrigodlu]

Well I do intend to use software to automate these interactions, because in my country whatsapp groups are unmanageable without this.

Imagine the group of parents of my kids schools sending 100 to 300 messages per day with different subjects.

The issue is. I also have personal and important chats that I don't want to share with an vibe coded AI software without any canaries taking the shot first.

And I'm talking as a person that is using almost all my Claude max subscription every week.

But I do verify ALL of the code that I'm delivering. And I'm even using Gemini as an adversarial LLM to review Claude generated code.

Does this that gigantic project set any standards for this?

I was not able to find on their documentation.

So it's funny indeed, but for now I'm upvoting this one even being a confident moderate person.

:)

[bambax]

Yeah; I did not quite understand GasTown (although I like Steve's writing style); I absolutely do not understand Moltbook or its purpose; I'm not sure I understand the point of OpenClaw -- in the sense that its benefits are not immediately obvious, while its dangers are making big red flashes and fire sirens.

Often when you don't understand something you feel stupid; but sometimes the reason you don't understand is because somebody's trying to sell something to you, and it's that thing that's supid, or pointless, or a scam, or all three.

[TeMPOraL]

> I'm not sure I understand the point of OpenClaw -- in the sense that its benefits are not immediately obvious, while its dangers are making big red flashes and fire sirens.

I only skimmed the OpenClaw post, but unless I completely misunderstood the README in their GitHub repo, to me the benefits are stupidly obvious, and I was actually planning to look at it closer over the weekend.

The value proposition I saw is: hooking up one or more LLMs via API (BYOK) to one or more popular chat apps, via self-hostable control plane. Plus some bells and whistles.

The part about chat integration is something that I wanted to have even before LLMs were a thing, because I hate modern communication apps with burning fashion. All popular IM apps in particular[0] are just user-hostile prisons whose vendors go out of their way to make interoperability and end-user automation impossible. There's too much of that, and for a decade or more I dreamed of centralizing all these independent networks for myself in a single app. I considered working on the problem a few times, but the barriers vendors put up were always too much for my patience.

So here I thought, maybe someone solved this problem. That alone would be valuable.

Having an LLM, especially BYOK, in your main IM app? That's a no-brainer to me too; I think it's a travesty this is not a default feature already. Especially these days, as a parent, I find a good chunk of my IM use involves manually copy-pasting messages and photos to some LLM to turn them into reminders and calendar invites. And that's one of many use cases I have for tight IM/LLM integration.

So here I thought maybe this project will be a quick and easy way to finally get a sane, end-user-programmable chat experience. Shame to see it might be vaporware and/or a scam.

--

[0] - Excepting Telegram, which has a host of other problems - but I'd be fine living with them; unfortunately, everyone I need to communicate with uses either WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger these days.

[bambax]

Thanks for the comment. Maybe I'm just not in the target group. I only use WhatsApp so I have zero interoperable needs; and I would never in a million years let an LLM access my private messages -- not willingly, anyway.

[Bishonen88]

At work we were joking that people will use LLM to create fancy-looking documents which will then be parsed through LLMs back to be concise and to the point. With LLMs handling the sending of messages as well, this makes the whole concept will be even more efficient.

I can just imagine that many people won't be using stuff like this to automate copy-pasting etc. but literally let LLM's handle conversations for them (which will in turn be read by other LLMs).

"You free to chat?" "Always. I'm a bot." "…Same."

This post has been written by a human :)

[TeMPOraL]

More charitable take: they'd be using LLMs as secretaries.

Having a delegate to deal with communications is something people embrace when they can afford it. "My people will talk to your people" isn't an unusual concept. LLMs could be an alternative to human secretaries, that's affordable to the middle class and below.

[lkey]

When I was a child, my mother would arrange get togethers by calling an coordinating with other mothers. In so doing, they would chat for a bit about local gossip or life events. Eventually, some of these women became lifelong friends as she aged.

My mother's mother would physically drop in unannounced to the people she wanted to talk to, and they'd have tea and chat a while to coordinate events. This was reciprocal. You are probably already wealthy, and your time can be spent however you like, consider not optimizing it anymore.

Genuinely, why are you using your limited time on this earth doing everything in your power to poison serendipity? If texting identical things bores you, you have free time and free will, make it actually personal so neither of you will be bored. Break the social taboo and call! Or share a calendar like a normal parent or neighborhood group.

If one of my friends with school age kids coordinated with me via clearly prompted text I would assume that we were not as close as I thought we were. That I'm a 'target for personal PR' rather than, you know, a person. It would diminish us both.

[TeMPOraL]

It's not about poisoning serendipity. It's about:

- Automating the boring part of creating calendar invites and such from messages people send, which half of the time are photos of some announcements. LLMs are already a godsend here.

- Getting up to speed quickly on what's going on in various kindergarten groups I'm in, whenever a bunch of parents who don't work on traditional schedule decide to have a spontaneous conference in late morning, and generate a 100 messages on the group by early afternoon.

Etc.

I'm not trying to avoid communicating with people - on the contrary, I want to eliminate the various inconveniences (more and less trivial) that usually prevent me from keeping up.

[fartfeatures]

You might get a kick out of Matrix if you haven't tried it yet. https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy is probably still the best way to get it and the bridges you need setup. It is far from perfect but decent.

[rizzo94]

I feel your pain on the 'user-hostile prisons' of modern IMs. The friction of manually copy-pasting photos and messages into an LLM just to set a calendar invite is a massive tax on time that shouldn't exist in 2026.

I had high hopes for the OpenClaw approach too, but the 'security sirens' you mentioned are real—self-hosting a control plane that bridges to WhatsApp/Messenger is a maintenance nightmare if you actually value your privacy.

I’ve been tracking a project called PAIO (Personal AI Operator) that seems to be attacking this from the exact angle you’re looking for. It’s essentially a privacy-first integration layer that uses a BYOK (Bring Your Own Key) architecture. The goal is to provide that 'one-click' connectivity to the walled gardens (WhatsApp, etc.) without you having to sacrifice your data or build the bridge yourself from scratch.

It’s the first tool I’ve seen that treats AI as a personal 'operator' rather than just another chatbot. Might be worth a look if you’re tired of the manual slog but don't want to risk the security 'fire sirens' of unproven scripts. Have you found any other bridges that actually handle the WhatsApp/FB Messenger side reliably, or is everything still just a 'beta' promise at this point?