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.
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?
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?
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.
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
But a message bot + Claude Code/Codex would be the better version
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.
(Not that I endorse that. I find peoope doing such wildly irresponsible.)
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.
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 ;)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Whom are you kidding? This is about getting ads in front of eyeballs, nothing else.
Some dumb idea which just hits at the right moment and makes a bunch of money.
Meta just saw two engineers actually execute on the joke about "building Facebook in a weekend" except that it then really took off in its target niche and generated a ton of press.
I don't doubt that they're interested in the AI aspect, but I suspect that a significant contributor was that they demonstrated competence right in the middle of Meta's wheelhouse so why not just grab these guys?
My exact state of mind since at least 2012 Mayan Flipocalypse.
For the lack of a better word, this feels like cope. In the modern world, being rich easily covers any of those other 'downsides'. Rich people will have a far better life than I and probably many other people here ever will, despite what the situation is like in the rest of their lives.
Worse, they are working for extreme sociopaths.
Also you might not like being the type of person that builds moltbook. People you like might not like that type of person either!
No reason to feel bad.
This is somewhat of a myth though, in most cases, suddenly becoming rich is absolutely fantastic.
there is no shame in just doing the building software bit. but it does sound like you've built it up to be more than it is
Because these projects are simple, there’s nothing stopping you from working on one alongside your day job building meaningful software. You can vibe-code something that actually tries to solve a real problem. You can vibe-code something interesting to learn how to generally use these tools. Although, don’t expect to get hired by OpenAI or Meta (or make any money off it).