Re:Meta acquires Moltbook
by entropicdrifter on Tuesday March 10, 2026 @01:16PM
(#47326122)
It's also part of their longer-term trend of buying or burying any company that starts to get any press as a social media site of note outside of major players where that hasn't been an option.
This is really it. At Meta's scale, even if it's an long-shot for a competitor to hurt them, it's worth turning those low odds into zero odds.
Yet Zuck can somehow argue with a straight face FB has competition (apparently they straight up used to delete links to competitors like Google+ at the time, and also the constant copying of Snapchat) and Hacker News can split hairs over trivial definitions like "wdym fb no competition? email exists" or whatever
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?