Comment by revicon
21 days ago
It is amazing how much they’re gaming the twitter algorithm, everything in my feed is claw/molt/whatever for the last week.
It’s a masterclass in spammy marketing, I wonder if it’s actually converting into actual users.
I think Karpathy[1] summarized why he thinks this is the case quite well (as described he was himself hyping it up a bit much, but there are some foundational reasons why it's a very interesting experiment).
[1] https://x.com/karpathy/status/2017442712388309406
"it's nothing new and it's a lot of scams and garbage, but it's just bigger than before, but I still think there will be something transformative there eventually"
Seems like a Rorschach test. If you think this sort of thing is gonna change the world in a good way: here's evidence of it getting to scale. If you think it's gonna be scams, garbage, and destruction: here's evidence of that.
Agents are many things but they are definitely not "scams" - if you think this you've probably stubbornly avoided using Claude Code etc.
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Karpathy is one of the biggest tech grifters of our time, so finding out that he's jumped on this grift train as well comes as no surprise.
Actually, hang on... yep, to absolutely nobody's surprise, Simon Willison has also hyped this up on his blog just yesterday. The entire grift gang is here, folks.
As a noob here I assumed these are legitimate folks with good intentions. Am I wrong?
Maybe it has always been this way but it seems like these days it's only a matter of time before anyone "authentic" (or at least seems authentic at first) turns into some type of grifter. If you have a big enough following there is too much money to be made not to grift.
How exactly has Simon been grifting?
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In this case it's only about payout from views/engagement of posts.
There is no commercial interest from the developer of OpenClaw. He doesn't make any money from it. He made enough from selling his startup a few years back.
So when we suspected some companies to game the Twitter algorithm to make money, maybe they were not responsible for it at all.
He made “enough” you say? That’s adorable, but there is no such thing.
For most people it works like that. Only a tiny minority keeps pushing after that point.
I just can't see an angle to OpenClaw that could provide a substantial financial gain for the creator. It's clearly a passion project. Like Ghostty from Mitchell Hashimoto.
It will be really funny if that's Apple's marketing team bumping up the sale of Mac minis