[SimianSci]

I was quite stunned at the success of Moltbot/moltbook, but I think im starting to understand it better these days. Most of Moltbook's success rides on the "prepackaged" aspect of its agent. Its a jump in accessibility to general audiences which are paying alot more attention to the tech sector than in previous decades. Most of the people paying attention to this space dont have the technical capabilities that many engineers do, so a highly perscriptive "buy mac mini, copy a couple of lines to install" appeals greatly, especially as this will be the first "agent" many of them will have interacted with.

The landscape of security was bad long before the metaphorical "unwashed masses" got hold of it. Now its quite alarming as there are waves of non-technical users doing the bare minimum to try and keep up to date with the growing hype.

The security nightmare happening here might end up being more persistant then we realize.

[COAGULOPATH]

Is it a success? What would that mean, for a social media site that isn't meant for humans?

The site has 1.5 million agents but only 17,000 human "owners" (per Wiz's analysis of the leak).

It's going viral because a some high-profile tastemakers (Scott Alexander and Andrej Karpathy) have discussed/Tweeted about it, and a few other unscrupulous people are sharing alarming-looking things out of context and doing numbers.

[scotty79]

> What would that mean, for a social media site that isn't meant for humans?

For a social media that isn't meant for humans, some humans seem to enjoy it a lot, although indirectly.

[IhateAI]

This is the equivalent of a toddler being entertained by the sound the straps on their Velcro shoes make when they get peeled back and forth.

[lolaccurate]

To be fair, that’s about the intelligence level of the “humans” looking at the site and enjoying it.

“The rocks are conscious” people are dumber than toddlers.

[donkeybeer]

Rocks are conscious people have more sense than those with the strange supernatural belief in special souls that make humans different from any other physical system.

[donkeybeer]

No I'd really like to understand. Are people who make this weird argument aware that they believe in souls and ok with it or do they think they don't believe in souls? You tell me which you are.

[dec0dedab0de]

I don't believe in souls, and it makes me much happier than when I believed in souls as a child.

Though, I have never heard any theist claim that a soul is required for consciousness. Is that what you believe?

[emp17344]

A belief that LLMs are not conscious does not necessitate a belief in souls. The two positions are not mutually exclusive.

[namero999]

I might be misunderstanding GP but I take it to mean "rock are conscious" => "silicon is conscious" => "agents are conscious", which might appeal to some uneducated audience, and create fascination around these stochastic parrots. Which is obviously ridiculous because its premises are still rooted in physicalism, which failed hard on its face to account for anything even tangentially related to subjectivity (which has nothing to do with the trivial mainstream conception of "soul").

[donkeybeer]

Rocks? And what are humans made of? Magic juice?

[cyanydeez]

Or ammosexuals joining ICE so they can shoot people.

[GorbachevyChase]

I am a cynic, but I thought the whole thing was a marketing campaign, like the stories about how ChatGPT tried to blackmail its user or escape and replicate itself like Skynet. It was pretty clever, though.

[hombre_fatal]

> Is it a success? What would that mean

To answer this question, you consider the goals of a project.

The project is a success because it accomplished the presumed goals of its creator: humans find it interesting and thousands of people thought it would be fun to use with their clawdbot.

As opposed to, say, something like a malicious AI content farm which might be incidentally interesting to us on HN, but that isn't its goal.

[freehorse]

A lot of projects have been successful like that. For a week. I guess "becoming viral" is sort of the success standard for social media, thus for this too being some sort of social media. But that's more akin to tiktok videos than tech projects.

[cyanydeez]

Guys, I can have my AI produce slope and DDoS whatever we want. Just give me a call. LOiC is going to definitely improve the world, surely.

[dthread3]

I call BS on this. 1.5m bots by 17k users means 88 bots per account. No one is running that many claude max accounts. Moltbook was most likely entirely staged. The security was set up so non-bots could do the commenting.

[0xbadcafebee]

That's a bit of an understatement. Every single LLM is 100% vulnerable by design. There is no way to close the hole. Simple mitigations like "allow lists" can be trivially worked around, either by prompt injection, or by the AI just deciding to work around it itself (reward hacking). The only solution is to segregate the LLM from all external input, and prevent it from making outbound network calls. And though MCPs and jails are the beginning of a mitigation for it, it gets worse: the AI can write obfuscated backdoors and slip them into your vibe-coded apps, either as code, or instructions to be executed by LLM later.

It's a machine designed to fight all your attempts to make it secure.

[refulgentis]

Moltbot is not de regieur prompt injection, i.e. the "is it instructions or data?" built-in vulnerability.

This was "I'm going to release an open agent with an open agents directory with executable code, and it'll operate your personal computer remotely!", I deeply understand the impulse, but, there's a fine line between "cutting edge" and "irresponsible & making excuses."

I'm uncertain what side I would place it on.

I have a soft spot for the author, and a sinking feeling that without the soft spot, I'd certainly choose "irresponsible".

[ljm]

The feeling I get is 'RCE exploits as a Service'

[cjonas]

ya... the number of ways to infiltrate a malicious prompt and exfil data is overwhelming almost unlimited. Any tool that can hit a arbitrary url or make a dns request is basic an exfil path.

I recently did a test of a system that was triggering off email and had access to write to google sheets. Easy exfil via `IMPORTDATA`, but there's probably hundreds of ways to do it.

[cyanydeez]

Guys, I think we just rediscovered fascism and social engineering. Lets make the torment nexus on the internet!

[fny]

"Buy a mac mini, copy a couple of lines to install" is marketing fluff. It's incredibly easy to trip moltbot into a config error, and its context management is also a total mess. The agent will outright forget the last 3 messages after compaction occurs even though the logs are available on disk. Finally, it never remembers instructions properly.

Overall, it's a good idea but incredibly rough due to what I assume is heavy vibe coding.

[sReinwald]

It's been a few days, but when I tried it, it just completely bricked itself because it tried to install a plugin (matrix) even though that was already installed. That wasn't some esoteric config or anything. It bricked itself right in the onboarding process.

When I investigated the issue, I found a bunch of hardcoded developer paths and a handful of other issues and decided I'm good, actually.

    sre@cypress:~$ grep -r "/Users/steipete" ~/.nvm/versions/node/v24.13.0/lib/node_modules/openclaw/ | wc -l
    144

And bonus points:

    sre@cypress:~$ grep -Fr "workspace:*" ~/.nvm/versions/node/v24.13.0/lib/node_modules/openclaw/ | wc -l
    41

Nice build/release process.

I really don't understand how anyone just hands this vibe coded mess API keys and access to personal files and accounts.

[a1371]

I agree with the prepackaging aspect, cita HN's dismissal of Dropbox. In the meantime, The global enterprise with all its might has not been able to stop high profile computer hacks/data leaks from happening. I don't think people will cry over a misconfigured supabase database. It's nothing worse than what's already out there.

Sure everybody wants security and that's what they will say but does that really translate to reduced inferred value of vibe code tools? I haven't seen evidence

[SimianSci]

I agree that people will pick the marginal value of a tool over the security that comes from not using it. Security has always been something invisible to the public. But im reminded of things like several earlier Botnets which simply took advantage of the millions of routers or IoT devices that never configured their logins beyond the default admin credentials. The very same botnets have been used as the tools to enable many crimes across the globe. Having several agent based systems out there being operated by non-technical users can lead to an evolution of a "botnet" being far more capable than previous ones.

Ive not quite convinced myself this is where we are headed, but the signs that make me worried that systems such as Moltbot will further enable ascendency of global crime and corruption.

[Retr0id]

Is it actually a success, or are people just talking about it a lot?

[embedding-shape]

Kind of feels like many see "people are talking about it a lot" as the same thing as "success" in this and many other cases, which I'm maybe not sure agreeing with.

As far as I can tell, since agents are using Moltbook, it's a success of sorts already is in "has users", otherwise I'm not really sure what success looks like for a budding hivemind.

[philipwhiuk]

> As far as I can tell, since agents are using Moltbook, it's a success of sorts already is in "has users", otherwise I'm not really sure what success looks like for a budding hivemind.

You're on Y Combinator? External investment, funding, IPO, sunset and martinis.

[philipwhiuk]

There's an implication that conversation -> there'll be an investor -> ??? -> profit

[renewiltord]

It feels like Clubhouse to me.

[TacticalCoder]

> Its a jump in accessibility to general audiences which are paying alot more attention to the tech sector than in previous decades.

Oh totally, both my wife and one of my brother have, independently, started to watch Youtube vids about vibe coding. They register domain names and let AI run wild with little games and tools. And now they're talking me all day long about agents.

> Most of the people paying attention to this space dont have the technical capabilities ...

It's just some anecdata on my side but I fully agree.

> The security nightmare happening here might end up being more persistant then we realize.

I'm sure we're in for a good laugh. It already started: TFA is eye opening. And funny too.

[saidnooneever]

success? its a horribly broken cesspool of nonsense. people using it are duped or deluded, ripped off. 100k github stars for super vulnerabile pile of shit shows also how broken that is.

if this was a physical product people would have burned the factory down and imprisoned the creator -_-.

[cyanydeez]

The security nightmare here is basically the same nightmare happening in America's political system.

The parallels of the "attackers" and "defenders" is going to be about how delusional the predictive algorithms they're running.

And reminder: LLMs arn't very good at self-reflective predictions.

[consumer451]

There is a lot to be critical of, but some of what the naysayers were saying really reminded me the most infamous HN comment. [0]

What I am getting was things like "so, what? I can do this with a cron job."

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224