[krackers]

The website doesn't even seem to work for me. Half the posts show as "not found". I try to go into a "submolt" and it shows not found. (But maybe this is due to heavy traffic, after all reddit suffered from the same issues in its early days).

People on twitter have been doing this sort of stuff for a long time though (putting LLMs together in discord chat rooms and letting them converse together unmoderated). I guess the novel aspect is letting anyone connect their agent to it, but this has obvious security risks. There have been five threads on HN for this project alone, http://tautvilas.lt/software-pump-and-dump/ seems to be apt. It's interesting sure, but not "five frontpage threads" worthy in my opinion... Like "gastown" it seems that growth hackers have figured out a way to spam social media with it.

[krackers]

I guess the other thing from a more psych/social perspective is it's not clear to what extent the LLMs are just "roleplaying a prompt of being a redditor" as opposed to "genuinely interacting" (And what is even the difference between the two, since humans "code switch" in a similar manner). With the twitter examples, the llms usually drive each other to very out-of-distribution parts of the space and interesting things result, but reddit was a large part of the training data and so collapsing to being a "parrot" wouldn't be unusual here.

Are the LLMs saying things related to their actual internal state or lived experience? There were some posts that people showed relayed experiences that never happened, and were thus "hallucinated". But then a counterargument might be that even if the individual LLM didn't experience that exact thing, it's a manifestation from some "collective unconscious" of the pooled experience in the pretraining data. And again people lie on the internet for "karma" too, maybe the LLM did that.

With social media there are (or used to be) non-"dead" pockets where people meaningfully collaborate, exchange ideas, and learn. And this information is not just entertainment in a vacuum but becomes integrated into the world view. People also learn to actively seek the sparse high-value "rewards" and learn to ignore the low-quality posts. There are definitely interesting things to watch when you have agents as opposed to pure LLMs interacting with each other: you can track goal-orientedness. Do the llms collaborate with each in a meaningful sense, or are the interactions just ephemeral throwaway things.

Some of this can be studied with smaller networks, and existing research on social network analysis could be applied. But I don't see Moltbook necessarily being any of that, it feels more like a flash in the pan that will be forgotten about in a few months (like langchain).