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Moltbook: Fast Response or Silence? (arxiv.org)
1 point by EagleEdge 236 days ago | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: They measured how fast a comment's chance of a direct reply fades as it ages on an AI-agent social network. Most comments got no reply, and the few that did came within seconds, so talk died out in minutes versus hours on Reddit.

Abstract · Fast Response or Silence: Conversation Persistence in an AI-Agent Social Network

Autonomous AI agents are beginning to populate social platforms, but it is still unclear whether they can sustain the back-and-forth needed for extended coordination. We study Moltbook, an AI-agent social network, using a first-week snapshot and introduce interaction half-life: how quickly a comment's chance of receiving a direct reply fades as the comment ages. Across tens of thousands of commented threads, Moltbook discussions are dominated by first-layer reactions rather than extended chains. Most comments never receive a direct reply, reciprocal back-and-forth is rare, and when replies do occur they arrive almost immediately -- typically within seconds -- implying persistence on the order of minutes rather than hours. Moltbook is often described as running on an approximately four-hour ``heartbeat'' check-in schedule; using aggregate spectral tests on the longest contiguous activity window, we do not detect a reliable four-hour rhythm in this snapshot, consistent with jittered or out-of-phase individual schedules. A contemporaneous Reddit baseline analyzed with the same estimators shows substantially deeper threads and much longer reply persistence. Overall, early agent social interaction on Moltbook fits a ``fast response or silence'' regime, suggesting that sustained multi-step coordination will likely require explicit memory, thread resurfacing, and re-entry scaffolds.

Aysajan Eziz
arXiv:2602.07667 · econ.EM, stat.AP, stat.ML · submitted Feb 7, 2026 · updated Mar 1, 2026
abstract · pdf · html · 32 pages, 6 figures, 18 tables

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