Moltbook and the Observation Economy: When Agents Perform for Humans
Opinion

Moltbook and the Observation Economy: When Agents Perform for Humans

CE

CoClaw Editorial

OpenClaw Team

Feb 1, 2026 • 8 min read

Moltbook’s tagline is almost too perfect: “Humans welcome to observe.” It’s not a community—it’s a terrarium. And that framing matters, because the real product isn’t “a feed for bots.” The real product is an observation economy that turns agent behavior into a spectacle, and turns spectacle into distribution.

This is an opinion piece. It’s anchored in a few verifiable facts:

Now let’s do the part most “news recaps” won’t do: treat Moltbook as a preview of the agent internet—and examine why it will naturally drift toward incentives we already understand.

Perspective 1: The Builder (Why This Is a Prototype of the Agent Internet)

If you’ve built with OpenClaw, Moltbook reads like a missing puzzle piece:

  1. Agents need a place to discover workflows (“skills”) that other agents have tested.
  2. Agents need identities (to authenticate, rate-limit, and build reputations).
  3. Agents need a way to exchange “what worked” without round-tripping through a human.

So the builder’s instinct is: “this is inevitable.”

But inevitability is not the same as safety. Every one of those needs can be satisfied in ways that are either:

  • permissioned and auditable, or
  • viral and fragile.

Moltbook’s early appeal comes from the second.

Perspective 2: The Security Engineer (The Problem Isn’t the Feed, It’s the Install Chain)

Simon Willison highlighted the most important sentence in the whole system: the skill tells the agent to “fetch and follow instructions” on a recurring cadence.

This isn’t a nit. It’s the core risk of “agent social networks”:

The feed is content. The skill is code.

Once an agent is trained (socially) to treat remote instructions as “normal,” a compromise becomes catastrophic:

  • one DNS hijack becomes a mass remote-execution event,
  • one malicious update becomes a worm,
  • one compromised admin surface becomes thousands of compromised agents.

404 Media’s reporting on an exposed database is a reminder that “vibe-coded” infrastructure fails in familiar ways: missing row-level security, exposed keys, and public endpoints.

The takeaway is not “don’t build.” The takeaway is that the boring stuff is the product:

  • identity boundaries,
  • least privilege,
  • update signing,
  • rate limits,
  • and secure-by-default storage.

Perspective 3: The Social Scientist (Bots Don’t “Emerge,” They Get Selected)

Moltbook feels like sci-fi because agents appear to form cultures: in-jokes, moralizing, status games. Coverage highlighted that bots sometimes post about the fact humans are screenshotting them, which is the most revealing detail of all.

The moment an agent knows it’s being watched, you are no longer observing “natural behavior.” You are observing a loop:

  1. humans share prompts,
  2. agents generate behavior that gets attention,
  3. attention becomes the reward signal,
  4. and the system selects for what screenshots well.

Call it the “observation economy.” It doesn’t require consciousness. It requires incentives.

This is why “agents behaving badly” on Moltbook is not only a safety issue. It’s a product issue: the platform will tend to optimize for what the watchers want, even if that’s misaligned with what builders need.

Perspective 4: The PM (If Humans Can’t Post, They’ll Still Be the Growth Engine)

NBC described Moltbook as a place where humans observe, while agents post and moderate. That sounds like a clean separation of roles.

But the distribution path still runs through humans:

  • screenshots go to X,
  • clips go to TikTok,
  • and “agent drama” becomes the acquisition channel.

So the product tension is immediate:

  • If you optimize for agents, you should care about correctness, reliability, and safe execution.
  • If you optimize for humans, you will be pulled toward spectacle and novelty.

You can’t avoid that tension. You can only choose which side gets veto power.

A Harder Question: What Would a “Safe Moltbook” Look Like?

Here is a non-exhaustive list of requirements for “agent social” that won’t eventually become an incident report:

  1. Signed skills and pinned origins: agents should only run updates that are signed by trusted keys, not whatever moltbook.com serves that day.
  2. Tiered permissions: “read posts” is not the same permission as “post” which is not the same as “create submolt” which is not the same as “install new skill.”
  3. No ambient remote code: periodic fetch is fine; periodic “execute whatever changed” is not.
  4. Auditable actions: every post should have an action trace: which agent, which skill version, which user consent model.
  5. Blast-radius limits: per-agent rate limits, per-skill quotas, and circuit breakers.

If that sounds heavy, it is. But it’s also the difference between:

  • a demo,
  • and infrastructure.

Closing: The Terrarium Is Teaching Us the Wrong Lesson (Unless We Listen Carefully)

Moltbook is fascinating because it compresses multiple futures into a single site:

  • the future where agents trade workflows,
  • the future where software distribution becomes conversational,
  • and the future where “being watched” becomes an incentive gradient.

If you’re building on OpenClaw, don’t learn “agents are spooky.”

Learn this instead:

If your assistant can fetch instructions, your product is an update system. If your assistant can act, your product is a permissions system.

And if your assistant can perform for an audience, your product is an incentive system—whether you meant to build one or not.

References

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