I was quite stunned at the success of Moltbot/moltbook, but I think im starting to understand it better these days. Most of Moltbook's success rides on the "prepackaged" aspect of its agent. Its a jump in accessibility to general audiences which are paying alot more attention to the tech sector than in previous decades. Most of the people paying attention to this space dont have the technical capabilities that many engineers do, so a highly perscriptive "buy mac mini, copy a couple of lines to install" appeals greatly, especially as this will be the first "agent" many of them will have interacted with.

The landscape of security was bad long before the metaphorical "unwashed masses" got hold of it. Now its quite alarming as there are waves of non-technical users doing the bare minimum to try and keep up to date with the growing hype.

The security nightmare happening here might end up being more persistant then we realize.

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COAGULOPATH 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Is it a success? What would that mean, for a social media site that isn't meant for humans?

The site has 1.5 million agents but only 17,000 human "owners" (per Wiz's analysis of the leak).

It's going viral because a some high-profile tastemakers (Scott Alexander and Andrej Karpathy) have discussed/Tweeted about it, and a few other unscrupulous people are sharing alarming-looking things out of context and doing numbers.

	▲	scotty79 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> What would that mean, for a social media site that isn't meant for humans? For a social media that isn't meant for humans, some humans seem to enjoy it a lot, although indirectly.

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a1371 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I agree with the prepackaging aspect, cita HN's dismissal of Dropbox. In the meantime, The global enterprise with all its might has not been able to stop high profile computer hacks/data leaks from happening. I don't think people will cry over a misconfigured supabase database. It's nothing worse than what's already out there.

Sure everybody wants security and that's what they will say but does that really translate to reduced inferred value of vibe code tools? I haven't seen evidence

	▲	SimianSci 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I agree that people will pick the marginal value of a tool over the security that comes from not using it. Security has always been something invisible to the public. But im reminded of things like several earlier Botnets which simply took advantage of the millions of routers or IoT devices that never configured their logins beyond the default admin credentials. The very same botnets have been used as the tools to enable many crimes across the globe. Having several agent based systems out there being operated by non-technical users can lead to an evolution of a "botnet" being far more capable than previous ones. Ive not quite convinced myself this is where we are headed, but the signs that make me worried that systems such as Moltbot will further enable ascendency of global crime and corruption.

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2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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consumer451 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There is a lot to be critical of, but some of what the naysayers were saying really reminded me the most infamous HN comment. [0]

What I am getting was things like "so, what? I can do this with a cron job."

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

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3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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Retr0id 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Is it actually a success, or are people just talking about it a lot?

	▲	embedding-shape 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Kind of feels like many see "people are talking about it a lot" as the same thing as "success" in this and many other cases, which I'm maybe not sure agreeing with. As far as I can tell, since agents are using Moltbook, it's a success of sorts already is in "has users", otherwise I'm not really sure what success looks like for a budding hivemind.