[biznickman]

This is an awful read on this acquisition.

They didn't acquire Moltbook because of the software. Meta is far behind on the AI front especially as it applies to usage adoption. OpenClaw has begun showing new consumer use cases and Moltbook is directionally down a similar path.

They get the team that built it and have more people on the AI initiative who are consumer-centric.

I've watched Matt Schlicht from the team always experiment with cool new use cases of AI and other technologies and now him and Ben have a bigger lab with resources to potentially spawn out larger initiatives.

The lesson here is to spend less time focused on doing what you think is the right thing and spend more time tinkering.

[bentt]

If they ever do anything again it will be a miracle. Meta is where smart people go to trade in their ambition and morals for stock grants and golden handcuffs.

[percentcer]

it's not a bad trade!

[mcmcmc]

Trading away your morals is definitely bad in a philosophical sense. Does selling your soul to the devil have a happy ending in any of the fairy tales?

[hatsix]

I would trade in my ambition, though.

[joe_mamba]

>Meta is where smart people go to trade in their ambition and morals for stock grants and golden handcuffs.

Only Meta? Why not most of SV that's driven by ad revenue and data collection? Which big-tech company that pays crazy money is actually making the world a better place?

[bcye]

Meta is so driven by it though that it alone holds more than 5 of the 10 largest GDPR fines.

[gavinray]

I genuinely don't understand OpenClaw

It's a worse version of Claude Code that you set up to work over common chat apps, from what I gather?

Why would I not just use a Discord/WhatsApp bot etc plugged into Claude Code/Codex?

[threecheese]

First you have to agree that Claude Code might be useful for some non-repo task, like helping with your taxes or organizing your bookmarks.

Next, consider how you might deploy isolated Claude Code instances for these specific task areas, and manage/scale that - hooks, permissions, skills, commands, context, and the like - and wire them up to some non-terminal i/o so you can communicate with them more easily. This is the agent shape.

Now, give these agents access to long term memory, some notion of a personality/guiding principles, and some agency to find new skills and even self-improve. You could leave this last part out and still have something valuable.

That’s Openclaw in a nutshell. Yes you could just plug Discord into Claude Code, add a cron job for analyzing memory, a soul.md, update some system prompts, add some shell scripts to manage a bunch of these, and you’d be on the same journey that led Peter to Openclaw.

[lucrbvi]

I share the feeling; but people using it are mostly non-technicals (despite the 50+ config files lol) and are just runing it constantly to do random things.

But a message bot + Claude Code/Codex would be the better version

[Otterly99]

I tried it for 2 days and honestly don't see the usefulness either. Although, the big reason is that I paired it with Claude, which only uses the per token billing method. Here are the few improvement on a simple Claude usage:

- As you mentioned, the message bot thing was kind of cool. - It can browse the internet and act (like posting on MoltBook, which I tried). - It has a a permanent "memory" (loads of .md files, so nothing fancy). - It can be schedulded via cron jobs.

Overall, nothing really impressive. It is very gimmicky and it felt very unsafe the whole time (I had already read about the security issues, but sometimes you gotta live dangerously). The most annoying part was the huge token consumption (conversations start at 20k+ because of all the .md files) and it cost me roughly $12 for a few hours of testing.

[joe_mamba]

>but people using it are mostly non-technicals

Non-technical people haven't even heard of OpenClaw or Github, let alone know how to use and deploy them. Non-technical people don't even know what OS their Samsung or iPhone is called.

If you can find something on Github and deploy it on your system, you're part of the technical crowd.

[firecall]

Well…. In my experience that’s not exactly true!

My hairdresser knew all about it and had ordered a Mac mini.

I have been surprised at how much attention is being paid to this AI thing by pretty much everybody AFAICT.

[joe_mamba]

>My hairdresser knew all about it and had ordered a Mac mini.

Your hairdresser can't be a technical person because they're a hairdresser ?? I know a surgeon who writes FOSS software as a hobby. What does profession have to do with being technical or not? Most technical people are self taught anyway.

[firecall]

Thats a hot take LOL

> https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > In Comments > Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

No, I'm saying they are not a 'technical person'.

I know them very well, and they are not a coder, or a 'technical person' by a broad HN definition.

What I'm saying is that we are at the point where technology is so pervasive in our society, and the lure of AI so seductive, that many more people are excited to try things out than I might have expected.

I suppose it has similarities to the early to mid 1980s and the home computing revolution. Where many people thought they should have a computer at home, even if they were not sure what they'd do with it.

Much like the excitement around AI today!

[bmurphy1976]

You forgot the part where you give it unfiltered access to everything.

(Not that I endorse that. I find peoope doing such wildly irresponsible.)

[burningChrome]

Had someone at work as me about this and they visibly cringed with I told them its my understanding you let the agent unfettered access to everything on your machine so it can do a lot more stuff than say a Siri can.

They immediately said, "Why in the fuck would I want to do that?"

I didn't know either and then we both stood there in an awkward silence. I think he was expecting OpenClaw to be some insanely cool AI Agent and discovering the "juice isn't worth the squeeze" kind of hit him harder than I expected.

[criddell]

Here you are giving away billion dollar ideas.

[kaizenb]

ツ

[jacobra2]

IMO OpenClaw's innovation is in

1) accessibility to non-technical folks. For the first time, they are having the Claude Code experience that we've had as software engineers for some time now

2) shared, community token context. Many end users are contributing to one agent's context together. This has emergent properties

[gavinray]

  > accessibility to non-technical folks. 

When I read the setup docs, it required configuring a bunch of API keys in setting files though?

[eclipxe]

No it doesn't, it walks you through that in setup flow.

[cesarvarela]

There are technicals and "technicals"

[tavavex]

Does it only work with chat apps? I've never used it, but I thought all the hype was from it being promoted as the first real general-purpose PC-using layer that could run on anything. What can it run on then?

[eclipxe]

No, it has a web interface, Mac app, etc.

[KaiserPro]

Having been acquired by facebook, its a pretty accurate read.

If they land in the right org, they'll be allowed to maintain the open version (see https://www.mapillary.com/) However that's a rare outcome.

They'll be dumped in some org, and then bit by bit told that they can't do what they were doing before and now need to "forge alignment" or some other bullshit by posting on workplace.

They will need to deliver impact, But, as there are 3 other teams trying to do the same thing as you, you'll either be used as a battering ram by your org to smash the competition, or offered up as meat to save headcount.

[cimi_]

> They get the team that built it and have more people on the AI initiative who are consumer-centric.

Who are comfortable releasing systems with horrible security, while proudly stating they never read the code? And with metrics that can be gamed by anyone, but that got reported to literally the entire world?

> The lesson here is to spend less time focused on doing what you think is the right thing and spend more time tinkering.

I'd say the lesson here is that clown world keeps on giving, but hey, maybe I'm just jealous ;)

[ryandrake]

It feels like the clowns have been winning my entire career.

[brentm]

Clowns get the attention and the attention usually makes for winners.

[DebtDeflation]

Could you imagine giving MetaClaw full access to your local file system, email, web browser, and all other applications? What could possibly go wrong.

[kaizenb]

Thought and came up with nothing.

[CuriouslyC]

The only currency in a world where AI does everything is your ability to get human attention. So from that perspective moltbook is a huge success.

If Mark hired these people to do anything other than viral marketing, i.e. if he thinks they're visionaries who are going to make amazing apps, he's deluded.

[samiv]

You're so right.

You can already see how the same thing has played out with computer games. With the modern engines such as Unity almost anyone can make a game. And almost everyone suffers.

And as a result there's now a million games most of which are poor quality asset flips. Everybody suffers, creators and consumers. Race to the bottom where the bottom has been reached. Prices are zero and earnings are zero.

If 15 years ago an indie game dev would allocate 80% to making the game and 20% to marketing etc. Today that will not get anything but it's much better to spend 20% on the game and 80% on the marketing, SEO optimization and attention harvesting. It's a shouting match where it's all about winning the shouting match not producing the best content.

Another race to the bottom.

[armchairhacker]

There are millions of asset flips, but the top indie games have never been better. It’s hard for indie developers because there’s so much competition: you need to heavily promote a quality game only because there are so many other quality games.

Likewise these tools have enabled many more people to create vibe-coded slop, and may lead to more quality software (making it harder to stand out without marketing), but the best software will only get better.

[sethops1]

The implication is that the gatekeeping has become marketing dollars, when it used to be skill at making a fun game. I don't think we're in a better situation today.

[armchairhacker]

There are fun games that succeed without marketing, e.g. Balatro, and there are bad games that fail despite it, e.g. Highguard.

The reason that “skill at making a fun game” doesn’t guarantee success is because there are so many fun games. Much less, if at all, because there is so many slop.

[WA]

idk, indie games that come to my attention seem to be very polished. Which one is successful and fits your criteria?

[slumberlust]

I disagree that accessibility is a detractor here.

There's never been a better time to be an indie dev. I'd rather have 1/1000 indie games be awesome than being force fed whatever storefront disguised as a game 'AAA' publishers poop out every year.

Just look at how slay the spire is doing up against marathon right now. Which of those was shouting the loudest? Highguard anyone?

[PaulHoule]

I'll second this.

It is true that the indy game market is brutal but it's always been brutal.

You don't really hear about a crisis at the indy game level though, rather at the AAA game level there is much of "we'd like to use our market power to take out the risk in game development" and then years later we realize they took out all the value before they took out the risk and now they're doomed.

[toomuchtodo]

Mark got lucky enough once he can be wrong the rest of his life and still not be exposed to a cost for it. Purpose of the system is what it does.

[PaulHoule]

... I think he's got an affinity for other people and organizations that have succeeded in the same way. The idea that somebody out there might have a workmanlike approach to life and be able to get consistent results at something would be a threat to his worldview.

[classified]

> They get the team that built it and have more people on the AI initiative who are consumer-centric.

Whom are you kidding? This is about getting ads in front of eyeballs, nothing else.

[margin-dash]

Good take

[tayo42]

This whole site is full of tinkerers and I'm pretty almost none are getting rich off it or having their projects go anywhere.