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".

Dogecoin was a joke too. A joke with 18B market cap

In a way security researchers having fun poking holes in popular pet projects is also just vibes.

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.