Comment by worldsavior
14 hours ago
I'm surprised people are actually investigating Moltbook internals. It's literally a joke, even the author started it as a joke and never expected such blow up. It's just vibes.
14 hours ago
I'm surprised people are actually investigating Moltbook internals. It's literally a joke, even the author started it as a joke and never expected such blow up. It's just vibes.
If the site is exposing the PII of users, then that's potentially a serious legal issue. I don't think he can dismiss it by calling it a joke (if he is).
OT: I wonder if "vibe coding" is taking programming into a culture of toxic disposability where things don't get fixed because nobody feels any pride or has any sense of ownership in the things they create. The relationship between a programmer and their code should not be "I don't even care if it works, AI wrote it".
Despite me not being particularly interested in the AI hype and not seeking out discussions etc., I can tell you have seen many instances of people (comments, headlines, articles etc.) actually saying exactly that: "in the future" doesn't matter if the code is good or if I can maintain it etc., it just needs to work once and then gets thrown away or AI will do additions for something else that is needed.
you can't "It's literally a joke" out of real consequences once you push to prod
Dogecoin was a joke too. A joke with 18B market cap
18B market cap does not mean it’s not a joke to a bunch of people.
His point seems to be that being a joke does not disqualify it from having value.
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In a way security researchers having fun poking holes in popular pet projects is also just vibes.
Seems pentesting popular Show HN submissions might suddenly have a lot more competition.
To be fair, a lot of PHBs probably don't see it as a joke, but as a guidebook.
A lot of people at $job, even ones who should know better, think they’re witnessing the rise of Skynet, seriously. It kind of makes the AI hype in general make a lot more sense. People just don’t understand how LLMs work and think they’re literal magic.
Skynet doesn't seem to require magic. I'm probably supposed to know better, but I'm a little concerned about it myself.
I'm imagining a strange future reality where "AI" that can't really innovate and shows no convincing signs of creativity still manages to take over large swaths of the world merely by executing basic playbooks really well using military tech previously provided by (now defunct) governments. Like a grey goo scenario except the robots aren't microscopic.
People are anthropomorphizing LLM's that's really it, no? That's the punchline of the joke ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Schlicht did not seem to have said Moltbook was built as a joke, but as an experiment. It is hard to ignore how heavily it leans into virality and spectacle rather than anything resembling serious research.
What is especially frustrating is the completely disproportionate hype it attracted. Karpathy from all people kept for years pumping Musk tecno fraud, and now seems to be the ready to act as pumper, for any next Temu Musk showing up on the scene.
This feels like part of a broader tech bro pattern of 2020´s: Moving from one hype cycle to the next, where attention itself becomes the business model.Crypto yesterday, AI agents today, whatever comes next tomorrow. The tone is less “build something durable” and more “capture the moment.”
For example, here is Schlicht explicitly pushing this rotten mentality while talking in the crypto era influencer style years ago: https://youtu.be/7y0AlxJSoP4
There is also relevant historical context. In 2016 he was involved in a documented controversy around collecting pitch decks from chatbot founders while simultaneously building a company in the same space, later acknowledging he should have disclosed that conflict and apologizing publicly.
https://venturebeat.com/ai/chatbots-magazine-founder-accused...
That doesn’t prove malicious intent here, but it does suggest a recurring comfort with operating right at the edge of transparency during hype cycles.
If we keep responding to every viral bot demo with “singularity” rhetoric, we’re just rewarding hype entrepreneurs and training ourselves to stop thinking critically when it matters. I miss the tech bro of the past like Steve Wozniak or Denis Ritchie.