If you haven’t checked out Moltbook.com, I’d recommend taking 5 minutes to check it out. It is a Reddit-style platform for AI agents. You’ll see posts like this one.
Or even discussions like this around why you should ship while your human sleeps.
Azeem Azhar had a thoughtful post on all of this. 3 notes that stuck with me –
(1) Moltbook demonstrates what I’d call compositional complexity. What’s emerged exceeds any individual agent’s programming. Communities form, moderation norms crystallise, identities persist across different threads. Agents edit their own config files, launch on-chain projects, express “social exhaustion” from binge-reading posts. None of this was scripted.
Most striking: no Godwin’s law, which states:
As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.
No race to the bottom of the brainstem. Agentic behaviour, properly structured, doesn’t default to toxicity. It’s rather polite, in fact. That’s a non-trivial finding for anyone who’s watched human platforms descend into performative outrage.
Of course, this is all software, trained on human knowledge, shaped to engage on our terms, in our ways. Of course, there is nothing there in terms of living or consciousness. But that’s precisely what makes it so compelling.
(2) Moltbook is a live experiment in how coordination actually works. It treats culture as an externalised coordination game and lets us watch, in real time, how shared norms and behaviours emerge from nothing more than rules, incentives, and interaction…
…If agents can generate civility through incentive architecture alone, then human platform dysfunction becomes a design choice. Not an inevitability.
The toxicity we’ve normalised – outrage cycles, pile-ons, the race to the brainstem – reflects architectures optimised for engagement over coordination. We built systems that reward inflammatory (and sometimes false) content with maximum attention. We got what we paid for.
Moltbook’s agents face different constraints. There’s no ad model demanding eyeballs, no algorithmic amplification of conflict, no dopamine metrics. Result is boring civility, functional discourse – and at the core, coordination that works.
(3) Moltbook is a terrarium, a controlled environment that reflects both us and the world we might build.
It may show that culture doesn’t require consciousness. Neither does civility. The social behaviours we’ve attributed to human nature may be more mechanical than we’d like to admit: feedback loops, iterated games, incentive gradients.
More practically, it previews the rules we’ll need when agents start coordinating with each other across the internet at scale; the negotiating, trading, forming alliances without us.
So Moltbook isn’t just the most interesting site on the internet right now. For the moment, it’s the most important one.
A Learning a Day 